scotland, reprised (for a.stride)

Scotland was my last stop in a month of backpacking around Western Europe in the summer of 2004. I felt inspired to go through some of my photos from that trip after reading a.'s entry. I think of Scotland as one of my favorite places in the world. My memories of the country are all colored green and gray... brilliant green hills, gray stones in rain.


That summer, I'd been traveling through Europe with a friend who had been my high school boyfriend four years prior- a situation which, as it turned out, brought up dynamics that I/we didn't know how to navigate. To keep our friendship intact (which, in spite of the previous three weeks, seemed worth doing), we agreed to part ways for the last week of our travels. He headed to Dublin to drink a lot of Guinness; I headed to Edinburgh to see where I'd go from there.

I passed my first day in Edinburgh with the mentality of someone who knows how to spend time alone- I bought a skirt, reported a lost ATM card (a lot of swearing was involved as I tried to figure out how to call a 1-800 U.S. number from a Scottish pay phone), walked to Greyfriar Bobby's Kirk and wandered the tombstones under the trees. A light rain started to fall. My Let's Go guidebook recommended the Elephant Cafe as a place made famous by J.K. Rowling, who apparently first began writing Harry Potter on a napkin there. The cafe was right around the corner from the kirk, so I went in to get out of the rain.

As I took a seat at a corner table with a pot of tea, I was fully hit with how alone I felt- shaking off rain in a city where no one knew my name, with no destination in mind and nowhere to go back to. A guy came up and asked if he could share my table. I glanced up and said that I didn't mind. I went back to occupying myself with the Let's Go guide, which I didn't actually need to read, but I had no other reading material at hand and had nothing else to do to look busy. He left his bag and went to the counter for pie, came back. I gave him a brief stranger's smile. We read. He looked over at me, after ten minutes of silence, and asked if I was reading a Lonely Planet.

No, I said, it's Let's Go. I've been calling it my Bible. Where are you from?
I'm from California.
Really? Where in California?
Oakland...?
Are you kidding me? I live in Berkeley!

We put aside our books with sudden interest, joined by the miracle of meeting a fellow Bay Area dweller in an Edinburgh cafe. I would have mistaken him for a Brit; he didn't carry himself or talk like a tourist. I asked him what he was reading. He held up Immortality by Milan Kundera and asked me if I'd ever read The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I hadn't. He told me that it was about love- about the desire for one's actions to be free of consequence but, at the same time, the conflictual desire to feel the weight of a lover's body on top of one's own, the beauty of that weight and consequence.

I felt myself letting go of my defenses to meet him in conversation. He became not just a stranger with whom to make small talk, but a person who used words in a way I'd never heard before, who could make me fall in love with a book I'd never read. We talked sociology, travels, misadventures, our own future plans. A couple of hours later, as the crowd in the cafe thinned out, he asked me if I wanted to go on a walk. Here was someone I didn't know how to say no or yes to, so I tried a Sure. I had laundry to do at my hostel and a bus to Inverness in the morning, but for the suspended moment I liked that we could be two travelers keeping each other company in the rain.