Not Just One Scotland

Almost every day for the past month, I have walked up and down the same two major streets of Edinburgh. South Clerk Street has my flat building and the grocery store and connects me to the university buildings, and Cowgate is where many of my friends live and where many of the pubs are. Occasionally, I venture off of these two streets if I want to go shopping or go to a museum, but my interaction with Edinburgh has been pretty limited to these two streets. Sometimes, I even find myself thinking that there is nothing more to Edinburgh—and Scotland, even—than this 15-minute block of ancient buildings.

Every time I leave this small square of the University of Edinburgh and its surroundings, though, I realize that there is so much more to Edinburgh than South Clerk Street and Cowgate, just like there is so much more to Scotland than just Edinburgh. In the past week, I’ve made an especially conscious effort to break out of this bubble, so I think now is a perfect time to reflect on the fact that it’s impossible to really know Edinburgh or Scotland based on just one part of it.

I’ll start with Edinburgh. Last weekend, I took a “World Heritage” hop-on hop-off bus tour of the city, because I had yet to get a comprehensive overview of it. For the majority of the tour, I was in parts of the city I’ve already been to, like the Royal Mile (which connects the ancient Edinburgh Castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where the queen spends part of every summer). Still, seeing them from a literal new perspective—the top of a double-decker bus instead of from the sidewalk (my Americanness is showing—I mean pavement) already seemed like a different experience. Combined with our guide’s stories about how whisky, kilts, and bagpipes, the most stereotypically Scottish things of all time, are apparently originally Irish, I felt like I was seeing a totally different side of the city I’ve been living in for a month. When the bus wasn’t in these parts, it was in residential parts of Edinburgh I didn’t even know existed but are only about a four-minute walk from the Royal Mile.

The same thing happened when I visited the Edinburgh Zoo last week. The bus to get there took me through more new parts of the city, mostly suburbs, where I realized that Edinburgh is not just ancient stone buildings and dark winding streets. In those outer parts, Edinburgh actually looks a lot more like suburban areas I’m used to from the US. And, of course, the penguin parade at the zoo, featuring the knighted penguin of the Norwegian Royal Guard, is something I never experience on my way to class.

If you continue along the road to the zoo for about an hour and 15 minutes, Edinburgh turns into something even more radically different than South Clerk Street—the city of Glasgow. The one day I spent there last weekend consisted of visiting the house lived in and designed by the architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the early 1900s, touring the working art school he designed around that time, and walking through the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum that features his work and the work of other Glasgow artists. This modern and artistic slant is something Edinburgh does not have hardly at all. Although we do have the Scottish National Gallery, it is not Edinburgh’s main attraction—I have yet to visit. The most modern attraction seems to be the Writer’s Museum, devoted to 19^th century Edinburgh literary geniuses and housed in a 16^th century mansion, and the Edinburgh Castle has been around since at least 600 AD.

In keeping with this theme, Glasgow is also known for its good shopping and working industries, not solely tourism, like in Edinburgh. Both cities do have amazing views if you climb high enough, as in Glasgow’s massive Necropolis cemetery, but even from there Glasgow looks more industrial. Unfortunately, though, Glasgow is also known for its notorious prison and for being a bit rougher than Edinburgh, so we were sure to leave before sunset, but the cultural experience was worth it. I suppose part of the difference between these two cities is exaggerated by their rivalry—I was told the only good thing to come out of Edinburgh is the train to Glasgow—but it was still fascinating to see how different Scotland is in just these two cities.

St. Andrews, which I briefly mentioned in a previous blog post, is also an entirely different place from either Edinburgh or Glasgow. For one thing, it has about 500,000 less people than Edinburgh and the entire town takes about fifteen minutes to walk through, and its main attractions are its golf course and the small university. It is much more in line with Stirling, for example, which is also about an hour from Edinburgh and seems also to only have an ancient castle (which is much different than Edinburgh’s) and a university, but even then St. Andrews is much more quaint. Linlithgow, the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots, is different still—it’s situated next to a loch, has a canal running through it, and its farmers’ market reminded me of a quaint New England neighborhood, rather than the posh town of St. Andrews where the likes of Prince William attend school.

The important point to all of this, of course, is that studying abroad isn’t just about visiting Rome, Prague, and everything other city for which I consistently am Googling flights. Of course, this is important, too, just like I mentioned in my post about Paris last week. But really, Scotland is just as amazing of a place—modern cities, cute towns, and beautiful countryside is all within reach. I could spend four months just traveling around this island and I would still learn as much, if not more, about new cultures and people, so long as I leave South Clerk Street and Cowgate.