03/09/08

Last night I had an interesting dream. I wasn't going to bring it up at all, but I can't help feeling that maybe later in the journey it could be significant. I dreamt that I never finished this journey, and I had returned home exaclty as I was. I tried to look different for all my friends back home, and I tried to act like I'd been places, but I wasn't fooling anyone. Throughout the whole dream I felt like I had crossed the world, and somehow missed it. I hadn't achieved anything, and everyone knew it. It's a strange thing to bring up and talk about during this time here, but it's the first dream I can remember since I've been away from home.

I got out of bed this morning and couldn't find my gloves. It didn't phase me a whole lot at first because I remembered that I usually put my gloves in the inner pocket of my jacket. But checking that pocket and every other pocket in my jacket I realized they weren't there. I checked under the bed, and in the covers and all through my backpack and still couldn't find them anywhere. I thought of everywhere I could have left them and couldn't think of a single place I could have put them down where I didn't specifically remember picking them up again. I got dressed and headed down to breakfast (which wasn't really much of a breakfast), and asked the bartender if she'd seen any gloves left down here last night. She said she had cleaned the place up herself last night and hadn't picked up anything like that, but assured me she's keep looking around for them. I had a couple pieces of toast, and continued to retrace my steps and search everywhere I had been the prievious night to no avail. I loved those gloves, but I couldn't figure out where they could have gone to. I finally gave up the search and figured I'd have to go find some other gloves before the weather turned cold again. I walked for hours covering most of the city looking through all the little shops looking for gloves like the ones I had, but I had a much harder time than I thought I would. I was told by most of the clerks that it was getting to be summer soon, so most places wouldn't be selling gloves. Everytime I heard this I thought to myself, "It's Scotland, when here do you not need gloves?" I did find some gloves in some places, but most of the gloves I found were wool gloves, not soft leather like the ones I had. I tried to explain to some people what my gloves looked like, but it was as if no one knew what I was talking about. I walked all over the city searching until Ryan came into Waverly Station at 2:30.

I met Ryan at the train terminal, and we both looked so mangy and haggardly that we walked right by without even recognizing eachother at first. The first thing we did when we met up after his train ride was look for something to eat. We had barely eaten all day. He had had a muffin or something before leaving London, and I had had like two pieces of toast and that was it. So, we walked for a while, and I showed him a couple places I'd seen where we might get something to eat (most places around this city are either pubs, american chains, or Italian resturants for some reason) so we chose a pizza place that Ryan said was really good here in the UK. As we talked, Ryan was teaching me how to speak, and order more like someone from the UK rather than in the American way I was accustomed to. I don't know if I mentioned before, but as I've been here I've started to lose some of my American accent. Hearing people speak in different accents 24-7 has made me very aware of my harsh American speech, so I've tried to soften it a little, blending in with whatever country I'm at. Over time I've not had to try so hard, and now it's beginning to be uncomfortable to use an American accent. Ryan does this as well when he's over here, so between the two of us, without even thinking we go through a wide variety of different accents, very seldomly using the one we grew up with. At the moment my accent seems to be a little mixture of Irish and Scottish with still a little American mixed in. The American "A" sound and "ER" sound is really a lot more uncomfortable than I realized. It's much more natural for the jaw to pronounce in the way the Scottish and Irish do it. I'm not at all opposed to me loosing my American accent a little though, It'll only help me in the countries to come, and I really like the Irish accent. At this point in time, I'm niether here nor there and people are generally confused as to where I'm from, but very few people guess American at first anymore.

After lunch/dinner our plan was to go down to the bus station and see if we could catch a bus to Stirling for the rest of the day, but it was already getting pretty late, and almost dark now. So we figured it'd be a better idea to spend time looking for a place to stay for the night and instead to to Stirling in the morning. We first went back to the hostel I stayed at the night before just to see if they'd had any cancellations that we might take advantage of, but we had no such luck. So, I checked on my phone for hostels in Edinburgh, and we went down the list starting with the cheapest, but everywhere was booked full. We couldn't believe that every hostel in the city would be booked completely full, but we were told that the reason for it was that there was a big rugby game that night (England vs. Scotland) which was a HUGE deal to everyone in the UK, so everyone had booked every hostel for this night like a year in advance. So it began to be nightfall and we still had nowhere to stay. If it had been just me I was going to just go to the bus station, or sneak into the hostel's lounge room and sleep there for the night, but I knew Ryan would not be up for that. So the only other option was to try some of the Hotels in the area, and see if they had anything open at all. Perhaps the hotels, being a little more expensive and having more rooms would be bound to have some room somewhere. out of all the hotels we could find, most of them were booked, but there was one hotel with a twin room for 180 pounds, and another twin smoking room for 150 pounds, so we took the lesser of two evils and went with the 150 pound room.

There were some advantages of course to staying at the Royal British Hotel in Edinburgh, however there were disadvanteges, mainly the cost. Ryan charged the room to his credit card, and told me that he only needed me to pay the cost of what I'd pay staying at the other hostel for a night (about 17 pounds) of which I just gave him a 20 pound note, and then we called his mom trying to pursuade her into covering at least most of the remaining cost, which she did (Thank you so much Janet!). And so, having found a place to stay all that was left to do was enjoy the night. We put our stuff in the room (It was so nice to be able to just leave my stuff in the room without trying to lock it up, or strategically hide things from the other people in the room.) and headed out to a sports bar to watch the game and have a couple drinks. We had a great time talking, and drinking and watching the game. By the way, I found it is in fact true what they say about how women get hotter the more you drink. I remember seeing one of the bartender ladies and not thinking all that much of her, and then later in the night I couldn't figure out why I didn't immediately think she was the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen, then soon after I remembered why.

After we came back from the bar we went back to our room and enjoyed thuroughly the fact that we had our own bathroom, and that I could go and get clean water whenever I wanted it, and we watched some quality UK programming on our very own TV. It was amazing, and I knew I would miss it the next night.