An American’s Entitled Perspective on Scotland 2007-2010 😂

When most of the world announced that they would not be allowing Americans to travel to their countries due to our really poor handling of the coronavirus, I imagine a cheer rose from the crowd in at least a couple Scottish pubs.

I’m sure there were more cheers in more pubs but I can only picture two pubs I visited in the three years I lived in Edinburgh which had patrons who really hated Americans.

And I wasn’t offended because… uh, I love America but my country could definitely better itself in countless ways.

Clearly, I’m American, so these conversations could also have been more confrontational and stressful. But, since I talk funny, they didn’t even think I was American.

And this made me feel like an uncomfortable spy/traitor but survival mode kicked in.

I used to enjoy pretending I was a spy when I was younger because I’m an only child and excessively weird. Yet, feeling like a spy in these pub situations wasn’t fun because

1. I talk so funny no one knows where I’m from and that’s both mysterious and kind of unsettling because… did I miss a career in theater or what’s my problem.
2. I was so terrified of them finding out I was American that my strange way of speaking got even more weird. I think at least three of the Scottish pub patrons felt I had survived a stroke somewhere along the way as they gave me sad, concerned looks. My epileptic twitching probably didn’t help. My epilepsy was triggered as I feared their concern would turn to extreme violence and shouting if they found out I was actually American. And/or they’d feel bad even though they were just being honest.

Also, pretty much everyone we knew in Edinburgh, who were mostly Irish and Canadian, blamed us for electing Bush and then later thanked us for Obama.

In response, we said: “Apologies” and, later, “You’re welcome.”

I mean, we definitely voted but it was a little chilling to carry the entire weight of a country’s political reality on our shoulders.

But when you live in a country you weren’t born in, you always carry the stereotypes of whatever everyone else feels about your birth country.

Or when you live in a country you were born in, like America, but aren’t white, you are somehow treated differently.

And beyond xenophobic racism, there are many cultural differences when you’re a visitor in a foreign land.

So my husband who is half-Scottish and I lived in Edinburgh for three years after I received three years of funding to do my PhD.

And, when I was writing my PhD thesis, I took so much shit from my Irish research supervisor about “American English” versus “real English” I was inspired to create a historical outline involving Webster (the Dictionary guy) and language schools.

I resorted to research and history.

Again, I could take shit from the pub folk but not from the intellectuals.

In any case, America elected Donald Trump as president so I realize, in the eyes of the international community, no one cares what this American thinks.

However, I loved living in Scotland and, since English was the official language, I was naive and thus surprised by all the cultural differences between America and Scotland.

Because, while some American co-workers of mine really worried about our move, I didn’t expect life in Scotland to be much different.

I expected to field some anti-American sentiment but I didn’t fully realize what I defined as “American”. And so I was caught by surprise on more than one occasion.

For example, the first thing I noticed after we moved is that I’d have to find a different snack choice.

When my husband’s Scottish family heard that I liked pretzels they kindly scoured the stores for this “German food” and met us at the airport with all these little bags of Rold Gold pretzel twists

and then handed me the pretzel pile like it was a disease and I was a complete freak.

I had liked Nibblers but I quickly realized I’d have to get by with the basic pretzel while we lived in Scotland.

And, since we didn’t have much money for most of our time there, I just went without pretzels mostly. For my 28th birthday, my husband and friends gathered a bunch of these little pretzel snack bags so that was super nice.

Since our friends also thought pretzels were pretty weird, they focused on making pretzel chains and I’m pretty sure I didn’t eat many of the gathered pretzels.

Yet, the best part of Edinburgh was how it looked.

And it’s just Edinburgh. The rest of Scotland looks “normal”. Dublin looked “normal”. The Edinburgh Airport looked “like an airport”. The drive from Edinburgh Airport to Edinburgh was not remarkable.

However, once we entered Edinburgh it was as if we had gone through a time portal. And when we first got off the bus on North Bridge and looked around…

holy cats. Edinburgh hasn’t visually changed in hundreds of years.

I later heard friends bitch about this because the city is a bit mental about preventing any visual change but… when we stepped off the bus on North Bridge and looked around the city for the first time our minds were blown.

It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

Naturally, I didn’t have a camera at this time so I’m using others’ photos to represent the view I saw even though the photos above aren’t doing so as I was on the bridge and not hanging in mid-air at the time.

SIDEBAR: I didn’t have a camera for most of my life. And then I’d randomly buy a disposable camera and take 500 photos in one night, documenting every single detail, fill up the camera, then process the film, dispose of the camera, and then not have a camera or any photos for the next ten years.

And it’s not like I ever had a disposable camera for important events that should be remembered. No, I’d just suddenly have one to document some random Tuesday of living in a punk house.

“Camera phones” have helped me with taking more appropriate and quality photos to visually memorialize times that should be remembered.

In any case, the view of Edinburgh from North Bridge was spectacular. And nothing else has matched it since.

Not like I’m a globetrotter but my husband and I did take some budget trains and braved Ryan Air a few times (Ryan Air was the budget airline where a happy song played and a cheer went up from the passengers when the plane successfully landed) and so we saw some things while living overseas and…nothing ever compared to Edinburgh.

I felt like I was living in Edward Gorey’s land, a thought which was inspired by the beginning of the PBS show Mystery.

I remember running inside my house after an afternoon of sledding to watch Mystery at age seven. I had no idea what was going on in the show but its intro fascinated me.

And Edinburgh felt as close as I’ve ever been to living in that intro. I was working in academia so that helped with this feeling.

My husband is half Scottish because his mom is a legal alien who lives in Wisconsin. So, while we lived in Scotland, we’d visit her family in her childhood village, Brechin, and marvel at the church which stood there as it dated back to the 1200s.

Mind.blown.

I mean, the motherflipping crusades were happening in the 1200s.

And this is when it really sunk in that America has barely existed.

That seemed so crazy to me because I’d never before thought about how young America was.

While we lived in Edinburgh, an American friend’s Scottish uncle who was very well off changed our cynical minds about America with a passionate speech about how America was the world’s last democratic hope.

Of course, this was before Donald Trump and after Barack Obama…

So, uh, sorry, world. We’re blowing it. But… maybe growing pains? Since we’re so young? Teenage years?

In any case, living in Scotland shifted my perspective on my own country and blew my mind at how it felt like we had stepped way back in time due to the look of Edinburgh with its narrow alleyways (closes) and stuck-in-time appearance.

Whenever I walked by the Mercat Cross and St. Giles’ Cathedral

the history literally pulled at me. It’s as if the air thickened and I could feel my body tensing as it was so easy to imagine the public executions which used to take place there. I felt like I could see bodies swinging gently in the air above and before me.

And then I’d look around at the gaping tourists who surrounded me and go back to only feeling irritated.

Edinburgh is beautiful but in a very gothic and Victorian way. And it didn’t help that there was only roughly one sunny day per year there.

So the grey skies and rainy days contributed to the overall spooky feel of Edinburgh.

And didn’t it know it! Consequently, there are about four million ghost tours in Edinburgh. I mean, the city burned down at least a couple times and then the plague hit and the city built over itself so now there’s an underground city and, well, if you’re a history buff or just a fan of the strange, this is a city you have to check out.

Clearly, people have heard this message because the city is overrun with tourists so, while I’m all “Definitely a city you have to visit!”, I’m also very much “Stay away”.

Friends thought my disgust with the tourists was funny because I was, by definition, temporary and American.

However, despite its automatic spookiness, the ghost tours we took were not scary. Maybe this is because the history behind the ghost tours which were mostly based on real events were so interesting and any antics put on by the ghost tour organizers were more distracting.

The most strict ghost tour which was focused on “waiting for a poltergeist to scratch you” didn’t talk much about the history. Yet, it took place in Greyfriars Kirkyard which is spooky, sad and magically thought-provoking.

After all, at one time the graveyard also contained a prison. While standing in the Greyfriars Kirkyard with all its burnt gravestones (from one of the times Edinburgh burnt down), there is a plaque and a memorial so you can read for yourself about the very tragic story of how religious differences produced a group of persecuted Presbyterian Covenanters who “lost” and who were then imprisoned in what was then known as the Inner Greyfriars Yard.

Those imprisoned in that segregated area suffered from disease and exposure and then, if they didn’t die or weren’t executed, they may have made it to being forced to board a ship with the goal being to get them out of Edinburgh but… that boat sank and most of them died.

So then only some of them made it back to pick it right back up to where they left off in the Inner Greyfriars Yard.

When I read that, I just stood there and stared around me because it was so… sad and awful.

To read more about how absolutely tragic this cemetery is check out The Haunted Palace blog at:

https://hauntedpalaceblog.wordpress.com/2017/06/02/greyfriars-kirkyard-covenanters-bloody-mackenzie-and-things-that-go-bump-in-the-night/

To this day this area is separate from the rest of Greyfriars and closed off by fencing.

This allows you to stare through the fencing and imagine those poor people in their horrible condition staring right back at you.

My husband and I did do the poltergeist ghost tour where you go beyond that fencing at night (because nothing is sacred) into what is allegedly the Most Haunted Place (or The Black Mausoleum) and…

meh.

But that’s okay. I mean, I watch plenty of YouTube ghost videos and when people hop on over to a “haunted” place and then nothing happens and they say that it must not be haunted…

I can’t help but think that ghosts+ don’t work on a schedule and “Aren’t you entitled.”

It follows that, just because we didn’t get scratched by an alleged poltergeist or experience anything paranormal while standing in the Black Mausoleum at night during our boring ghost tour… it means little.

The history and feel of Greyfriars Kirkyard is scary enough.

But we were in Scotland not for ghosts but because I was in school.

So, when I first tried to find where the hell I was supposed to go when I started school, I wandered into what was at that time the Law School quad and felt so very small and also big-headed.

The photo above was taken after the quad had been refurbished so, when we uncertainly wandered through the archway, there was no grass (the ground was covered with… “pebble-sand”) and it was absolutely deserted with not a soul around and the sky was grey (clearly the sky in the photo above has been Photoshopped)…

so it was like walking into the most grey and imposing place I had ever been.

I don’t believe in Purgatory but it’s how I imagine the intake area of Purgatory looks.

It almost felt hostile and I loved it.

Sadly, while this was and is part of the University of Edinburgh, my school was and is housed in the old Medical School which was not as epic in appearance but was and is every way equal if not superior in every other way that matters.

And its entry was really lovely, very “Edward Gorey” and a bit more rounded and welcoming.

I never really saw this entry area because, again, doing my PhD in three years was a bit of a hyper stressful blur of tunnel vision.

Beyond Edinburgh’s spooky/intimidating/amazing appearance, there are the various everyday cultural differences between living in America and living in Scotland.

For example:

1. The bread is “thick” or “thin” and “brown” or “white”. In most places in America, you just order “toast” and “kind” (wheat/sourdough etc.), not thickness or color. So once you can’t even order toast right, which I quickly learned once we moved over there, you start to question your ability to do much of anything.

Or maybe that was just me. It was an unhelpful start.

2. Scottish tea is rarely herbal because it’s Real Tea aka black, green, white or oolong. And it’s often served to taste more like coffee (milk? sugar?) which meant my experience with Scottish tea was more like drinking watery warm sweetened milk which I learned to really love.

Thus, when we first arrived and David’s aunt ordered her tea “white” when I was accustomed to ordering mine “green”, I was at a complete loss.

The food items I first encountered in Scotland were based on color. The bread was brown and the tea was white, and the coffee was also white at times.

Thus, for a short time, I felt nervous when ordering tea or coffee which was fine because we couldn’t afford to order coffee or tea in our first year.

3. You don’t tip the bartenders. In America, not tipping a bartender makes you a very bad person. Yet, in Scotland, the bar staff are paid a wage and, if you tip them, it’s an insult. Like… someone throwing change at you while you’re busy being an accountant.

4. There is so much change. The UK uses coins for cents (pense) like Americans+ but it uses coins for dollars instead of paper money. So, at the start of an evening out, you may start with twenty quid which you can easily fold up and put in your pocket

but, by the end of the night, you have a pocketful of heavy coins unless you drank more just so you didn’t have to carry the coins home.

However, in case you were responsible you walked home with a bunch of coins in your pockets so so they could not have holes in them (lesson learned… again, we did not have much money and looked the part).

5. Obviously, Edinburgh didn’t have American stuff. It had its own wondrous stuff like… Twiglets.

Twiglets are weird. I thought it funny that people made fun of my love for pretzels when they had Twiglets but, again, while crunchy and brown, and the most similar to pretzels as any other snack food I found, they had a chemical taste which I grew to love.

I am American, after all. I’ve developed quite a taste for preservatives and chemicals.

6. No refills. Things may have changed (friends tell us Edinburgh now has more than two vegetarian/vegan restaurants, for instance) since we lived there ten years ago, but one thing we missed about America was the lack of free soda refills.

And no “fountain soda”.

America is a land of unhealthy excess so, if you order soda at a restaurant serving “soda fountain drinks”, or stop in any gas station, you can expect free soda refills.

In Scotland, that was seen as crazy.

And fair enough. When we moved back to America and saw the gigantic glasses of soda at American restaurants, we did feel a bit sick. Yet, while we were younger and still consuming copious amounts of diet soda, we missed soda.

Accordingly, Scotland also did not have root beer which we didn’t realize until we saw it at the “American store” which sold North American stuff for an unholy price and we remembered root beer because it was on display in the store’s fridge.

For about five hundred quid per can (exaggeration but not that much of an exaggeration).

It was exorbitantly priced but we both bought a can and took it outside and drank it in one gulp as it was hot and sunny outside being the One Nice Day that year and so, after we finished, we went right back inside the store and bought another two cans of A&W root beer.

I hadn’t had much root beer in my adult life and I haven’t had much since but rediscovering it then was a revelation.

7. When we lived in Scotland, smart phones weren’t yet prevalent so everyone had mobile phones in various shapes and sizes. And, unlike America, no one had a phone contract. People just bought SIM cards online or in stores and then popped the SIM into their 1985 mobile, and then they’d “top up” at pretty much any retail store.

For instance, after you were done buying groceries at Tesco, they’d ask if you wanted to top up.

In other words, do you want to buy more minutes for your phone.

In America at that time (and mostly still), you had/have to get a contract and then you have a limited selection of phone options which also cost a crazy amount of money and phone manufacturers make it so you can’t access the SIM card.

Thus, if you asked to “top up” at Target, they’d just look at you.

That’s not to say that phone contracts didn’t exist.

I got a phone contract in our second year of living in Edinburgh because it didn’t cost much of anything to do so and, because no one got contracts, they gave out prizes to you if you did sign a contract.

And that’s how I got my husband a PS3 for his birthday in 2009.

Amazing.

In America, after signing a contract you just get a phone and monthly bills and relatively shitty service.

8. I’m so upset about healthcare I don’t even feel calm enough to discuss it here and I also discussed it in another blog if you’re really interested (https://epileptaste.wordpress.com/2020/05/22/is-the-american-health-system-that-bad-asked-my-scottish-not-scottish-friends-well-it-depends-who-you-are/).

But what was cool is how we could go to the doctor whenever we wanted for whatever reason and ambulances were free. Of course, nothing was truly free (residents pay a council tax) but the tax seemed to pay for so much tangible stuff.

In America, we pay taxes (if we’re not super rich or Jeff Bezos) and have no idea where that tax money goes.

9. The Edinburgh museums were “free” too (again, thanks to the council tax). You could just skip right into a museum to visit a certain object and then skip right back out without worrying about whether or not you got your money’s worth.

10. Before we lived in Edinburgh, my drink of choice was a nice whiskey or bourbon. However, it became very clear I’d have to abandon my drink and develop a taste for scotch which is not called “scotch” in Scotland… it is called whisky.

And if you ordered whisky you didn’t get much as they measured it everywhere. I’d grown accustomed to large glasses of Makers on the rocks and… in Scotland, I had to make due with 25 ml of whisky.

11. Your average pub didn’t fuss with kinds of wine. It was either “red” or “white”. There are plenty of bars in America where it works like that too but you don’t usually find too many in the heart of a capitol city.

I found it somewhat relaxing.

And then, with my guard down, every once in awhile we’d stumble into a pub which was desperately high strung and arrogant about wine and everything else.

Like… yeah, I realize shiraz and syrah are essentially the same wine, Voodoo Rooms bartender, you cunt.

12. Before we moved to Scotland, I rarely heard anyone say the c-word.

Ever.

Somewhere along the way in America, it had achieved such a reputation that only the most crude and foul-mouthed people would utter that word.

But then I lived in Scotland for three years and my French-Canadian best friend and everyone else used that word so much and with such satisfaction.

And they all did so, notably, when referring to men (which, sure, is still terrible because it’s gendered and violent) but… no.

The shock is gone and that word has lost all its power for me.

However, as I now live in America, I usually don’t dare use that word.

Also, because I wrote it above at least 80 percent of my four readers probably stopped reading after they read that word.

Hello to those of you Americans who are still here.

13. Most rental units came furnished. That was especially weird to us but also pragmatic as we were each only allowed to bring three bags with us in our move to Scotland so we didn’t have a lot of furnishings.

14. We also noticed that most flats had a washing machine in the kitchen. In America, laundry is usually in the basement or else in a small little room designated the “laundry room”.

In our first Edinburgh flat, which wasn’t in a great neighborhood and which had patio furniture as its indoor furniture so we could pretend we were on holiday all the time had a tiny extra room (or “box room”) which would have been perfect as the laundry room. In fact, it had a built-in indoor clothesline which was very handy and which, when opened and extended, completely filled that little room.

But it did not have the hook-ups and our washing machine was in the kitchen so we just used the box room as a “drying room” and office which held a shelving unit where I had a bunch of seizures.

Favorite spot.

15. Scottish cows are very different from those I’d known from a childhood spent in Wisconsin.

16. Time! This is one I forget but… Scotland uses military time. In conversation, you don’t hear it as much but when it comes to using the buses and attending formal events or even if you’re just texting about hanging out (“Fancy a pint? World’s End 19:00?”), you will need to understand military time a little.

17. Vocabulary was the most fun cultural difference. Because… the different names assigned to familiar objects mostly made sense so it was more intuitive than the other differences and was thus easy to understand and learn.

We had also seen Trainspotting and all of Guy Ritchie’s movies so we had a leg up on British English which was largely what we heard:

For example:

parking lot = car park (which is where you park cars… British is better)

elevator = lift (I enjoy the American word but the British is wonderfully literal so I was happy to use it)

cigarette = fag (I wanted to start smoking so I could say “Fancy a fag?” I eventually found the confidence to casually say “Fancy a pint” because even the most rough, working class “Have a Lot of Stab Wounds and Are Happy To Show You” friends would roll up and say “Fancy a pint?” and it emboldened me)

beer = pint (to us Americans, this meant “more beer”)

apartment = flat

apartment building = tenement

bro = mate

thank you = cheers (“thank you” of course exists but saying “cheers” as thanks really became ingrained in our three years of living there)

car trunk = car’s boot

car’s hood = car bonnet (this was too weird for us but we didn’t drive and no one we knew in Edinburgh had a car so… not words we often had to use)

truck = lorry (again, a crazy word to me but no one we knew, family or friend, had one so never really had to awkwardly use it)

driveway = drive (to me, they’re essentially the same word)

lakes = lochs (it’s just like saying “lake” using what I think of as a fancy, ridiculous American accent)

vacation = holiday (British word is better)

french fries = chips

potato chips = crisps

drunk-driving = drink-driving (doesn’t make sense like how “it’s really hotting up!” which people rarely said because it never was heating up in Scotland, weather-wise, didn’t make sense as it was simply… not the correct tense of the verb… but… whatever.)

Though we quietly amused ourselves with this whenever we heard it like smug Americans.

posh = fancy/got your priorities mixed up

fancy-dress = dressing up in costumes (this was a disappointing one to learn for me because I liked “dressing up, fancy-like” and so to see a room full of people dressed as clowns and, largely, trade workers, was really… disappointing)

trick-or-treating = guising (another disappointing cultural reality because, when we lived in Edinburgh, the holiday of Halloween was not hyper-celebrated as it was/is here in America which kind of surprised me, given how over-the-top the city was with all its dressing up in costumes or as royalty all the fucking time or else exploiting its haunted look and history.

If there was a city that didn’t need a reason to dress up in costumes, it was Edinburgh.

I also hadn’t thought of Halloween and all that came with it being American. The history of the holiday was, as far as I understood, Celtic, or Christian so… I was simply surprised by the lack of Halloween cheer in Edinburgh.

Now that I think about it, the lack of celebrating Halloween in Scotland could be due to how Samhain was Irish (there remains a lot of angst between various regions… for instance, you best not ever mention “Jameson” (spit on the ground) in any Scottish pub) and All Saint’s Day is Christian and many are still upset about how religion tore apart their country

or it’s just regarded as an American holiday and “bloody Americans” (spit on the ground) so…

perhaps this holiday just generally brings up too many bad, historical memories.

I hear Halloween is more of a thing there now (?) (I can just hear a faint voice saying “Because you bloody yanks and your bloody colonizing culture are taking over our own!”)

In any case, I assume trick-or-treating is still called guising.)

A food a colonizing empire appropriates from a colonized culture, then distorts and assimilates into its own, and then passes along to one of its other colonized nations which happily makes it its own = curry

(grammatical) period = full stop (simply a more dramatic way to stop a sentence)

stovetop = hob (it sounded like a Halloween character to me and we never used that word but we didn’t eat much)

sweater = jumper (yeah, a “sweater” is a gross name for that kind of shirt)

gasoline = petrol (petrol sounds a bit more sporty and yet professional… I prefer the British word)

public school = private school (this one still doesn’t make sense. “He’s a public school lad,” someone would say, rolling their eyes. And I’d understand what they meant, but inside my head I’d always respond “I went to public school, too.”)

bachelor party = stag party (whatever)

bachelorette party = hen party (those were… much more visible to me than the stag parties for whatever reason. In any case, we’d be out and often see a large group of women of alllllllllllllllllll ages wearing crowns and short skirts and ridiculous shoes tottering their way up the ramp into a police paddy wagon because, only based on what I saw, it seemed like most hen parties led to a night in jail.

And usually I’d worry about women who appeared excessively drunk but i never worried about Scottish women. Holy fuck.)

Sigh.

I miss Scotland and I’ll likely never see it again because it’s possible no one will ever (legally) allow Americans into their country again.

But if my husband and I ever got the chance to live in Scotland again, I can’t say we wouldn’t strongly consider it.

And we’d move to Glasgow and visit Edinburgh at Christmas, because living in Edinburgh is somewhat exhausting and we preferred Glasgow.

Or maybe we’d not live in either and live in the village of Blackness, Scotland.

It has a castle but of course it does.

It also has a small beach.

And a little shop where I could work.

And I could say “I live in Blackness on Blackness Bay in the Firth of Forth” all the time.

That sentence cheers me and I don’t think it would ever get old even when I really did.

I could sit on the beach and drink and bitch about Cromwell with the locals until I died and then they’d just roll me into Blackness Bay.

And if I later had the opportunity to haunt the area, I could be the Lady of Blackness.

And if “Lady of Blackness” is not already a metal band’s name, I don’t know what’s wrong with humanity.

Besides the general lack of it.

Visit Scotland if you get a chance, you know, after this whole apocalyptic phase passes.

It’s very worth it.

Please stay safe everyone. 🖤