Chores In Edinburgh
July 2, 2023 Filed under Uncategorized
This is about as dark as it ever gets at night here.
Time to wash some gear!
The machine did a pretty good job.
It takes a very, very long time to dry a sleeping bag.
Drying out tent and tarp.
Stuff drying everywhere…
Hungry cat will eat your pushpins!
After all the chores, I had the urge to sit quietly. Andrew and Nick were out exploring and I didn’t want to just hang around in the hotel alone, so I decided to bike to a nearby cinema and see the new Indiana Jones movie. Not bad! It was late on a Sunday and the movie had been out for a while, so I had the auditorium almost entirely to myself.
When I got out of the theater noticed a missed call from my nephew James, so I called him back and we chatted for about an hour. As we talked I rode the bike, turning randomly at intersections towards whatever seemed like the quieter part of town. Eventually I rolled to a stop outside a late-night bakery on Leith Walk.
The place had donuts filled with custard, as well as cheese and onion pasties, which I mispronounced as “pastries”. I bought one of each, then stood around on the sidewalk nibbling the chocolate off the top of the donut because I’m a “dessert forward” sort of eater, and in the meantime two people came up the sidewalk trailing an enormous shaggy dog on a long leash. One of them went to in to buy snacks, and only a few moments later the proprietor came out with a small steak pie and sat it on the ground in front of the dog, who leaned down and ate it in one bite, then licked the sidewalk for a while as the humans chatted.
As I stowed my remaining snack and got on the bike, I heard one of the dog owners explain to the proprietor that she was worried for her housemate, because he had smoked way too much pot, and then started rolling back and forth on the floor repeatedly insisting that he was “an egg.” Her tone implied true concern, and I couldn’t decide if that was actually more hilarious than the antics of the pot smoker.
It only took five minutes to zig-zag my way back to the rental, and I spent the time chatting again with James while chewing on a warm onion and cheese pasty. When I stood up from the bike a small pile of crumbs tumbled off the front of my jacket.
The rest of the crew was already inside and settling down for the night. The weather was warm enough for us to leave the window open, and for a while I watched the birds churn around in the sky. We were technically as far north here as the southern tip of Alaska, so it never got truly dark.