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Andrew Stowe - Watson Project 2006-2007
I have never particularly enjoyed being in cities or even felt entirely comfortable in bustling metropolises. I certainly have never considered myself a 'city person', to use the oft-employed term for someone who seems to thrive on the strange tingle that percolates in one's nose after a day of breathing in the cigaret smoke of hard puffing European masses and the fumes from a phalanx of buses, taxis, and cars; someone who walks in time with a rhythm that can't always be detected and is (for non-'city people', to use the second of the obviously useless categories that will never adequately describe someone completely) usually impossible to detect: the pulsing beat that binds the streets and the people together (if its not the beat emulating from the IPod in the pocket of their tight-fitting jean jacket); someone whose sense of style is as fluid and shfiting as the sunny Scottish sky that in the blink of an eye can be ominously dark and precipitous. I have visited and experienced cities in America and Canada and Europe and have usually felt some degree of relief when I saw each one fading in the distance beyond the foamy wake of a ferry, or shrinking on the horizon at the place where the parallel lines of the road or rail become a mathematically impossible single point. Of the cities I've experienced in Scotland, Aberdeen was no exception. A large town that stands upright yet shakily on two legs, the oil workers / industry being one and the university students being the other, Aberdeen is a gray city of granite that can feel cold, dreary, and unfriendly, where the color of the sky, the sea, the buildings, and the people have all reached the same ashen hue. The founding of the city, its underpinning logic and philosophy, has a blankly characterless and industrially logical feel as well, with a single straight road, dully dubbed Union Street, sporting all of the establishments of the people, the cafes, bars, restaurants, and pubs. But if of the two Scottish cities I've experienced Aberdeen is the dark side of the moon, the one shadowy, grimy face of a two-sided coin, then I have found its lighter and brighter counterpart in Edinburgh. I am no city person, but I think that I could call Edinburgh home. Surrounded on all sides by modernity, the old portion of the city is perched on a central hill, with the awe-inspiring castle its most distinguished and distinguishable of landmarks, a monument that is clearly visible from most sidewalks and street corners. Even in the daytime, when the lights that emblazon and emphasize the castle's prowess are turned off and the fireworks no longer explode above that bastion's battlements, the hulking stone structure seems to paradoxically offer hope, strength, and solace. It stands on its throne of rock, perfectly unflinching and unmoved by the busy hum of the streets running out from the hill like arteries branching away from the slowly beating heart of a massive sleeping beast. Often cobbled, the roads meandering down from the elevated Royal mile form an uncharted web with winding narrow closes and hidden stairways. Scattered throughout this web are eerie kirks and ancient churches, bestowing on the city a feel of the dynamic, of something powerfully secret and mysterious that persists along side of and in spite of such enterprises as McDonalds, Starbucks, Burger King and Subway that bustle continuously nearby. Most of the roads stretching out from the old city are also dotted with the nightly havens of respite and rest for the city's inhabitants and for the passing visitors to this area, the pubs, both famous and infamous. Tass, Canon's Gait, the White Hart Inn, and Beehive, names of character and color that buzz with the lively scottish accents of people with an equal wealth of character and color (though the color is often a ruddy tinge, especially as the night progresses). Astute readers may note that the timing of my visit, coincidental with the world renowned Fringe Festival, biases my account of Edinburgh, and this view might bear some pondering if my current stay was my first encounter with the Scottish capital. Two years ago, however, for only two days in the first week of January, I visited Edinburgh for the first time, and even then, brief, inadequate, and cold as the visit was, i began to feel the twinges of the emotions I have grown to feel for this city. Day light now fades on the walls of the shops of Shandwick Place outside the window on this Friday evening and the yellow-walled green-ceilinged hostel kitchen hums with the spanish, dutch, german, belgian, scottish, swedish, australian, and american voices of travelers discussing the night's potential in between hurriedly chewed mouthfuls of food. A man sits down in a chair opposite me at the round table next to the window and stares past me out to the street with a blank expression. I will offer him a standard greeting and in the ensuing conversation I will learn that his name is Marcus and that he is from Austin, Texas. Marcus will tell me of the week-long highlands tour he just went on and the small record label that he worked for when he lived in Chicago for several years, and of the record label that he and his friend are planning on starting when he returns to Texas. He will expound on the hope that they'll be able to help out small folk bands like the South Austin Jug Band that I heard at the Winnipeg folk festival, the same festival that Marcus attended two years ago. Sharing his pizza with me, Marcus will invite me out to Three Sisters, a bar where he will meet with and introduce me to the group of people with whom he toured the Scottish western hills and isles. I will join Marcus and walk with him through the Edinburgh dusk, talking of good whiskey and his time at Columbia University, and I will continue to learn as I have done in Manitoba and Newfoundland and the Shetland Islands that loneliness is the most futile of endeavors in a world that is not an immense rock drifting through the cold empty void of space but simply a small ball that fits easily and comfortably among the lint at the bottom of one's pocket.
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