I decided to start the week off by cementing myself as a Strange Person in the mind of my linguistics classmates by taking pictures of the light fixtures and outlets because they looked like faces.

There were a bunch in the flat as well. Actually, there are precious few that don’t look like faces. At least they’re kinda cute and not the sorts of things that could keep you up at night because they’re watching you.

During the week, my free days were spent finishing earlier photo adventures that got cut short by my camera being cranky, which, oddly enough turned this into graveyard week. Yay?

First up was Greyfriars, where I got pegged as Canadian twice, the second time because I stayed on the trail when taking pictures rather than walking over the graves for a better angle. I’ve seen several people doing this and it always seems so disrespectful to me.  Is there any sort of standard graveyard procedure?

The place is known for Greyfrairs Bobby, the Skye Terrier who waited by his master’s grave until he died. I keep hearing stories of dogs doing things like this. It’s like they’re trying to break my heart.

After that was St. Cuthberts Church, which is where John Napier – the guy the university I’m going to here is named after and the one responsible for that chapter you had to do on logarithms in math – is buried. Apparently. Only about a third of the gravestones are legible, so I didn’t even bother trying to find him. Most of the headstones were either so old the words were worn away, or they’d been recently replaced with new stones where the words were white on a sort of pink-red-white marble that’s almost painful to try to read. It did have some cool headstones though, and made it onto my mom’s list of Things She Wants to See when she gets here.

Nana, nana, nana, BATSKULL!
Managed to get that stuck in my dad’s head for a day. I won’t say I’m proud of myself, but I am.

Having only really visited newer graveyards before now, it was really interesting to see the prevalence of imagery alluding rather bluntly to the fact that, yes, these people are in fact dead. Modern culture seems to ignore that fact as much as possible.

I got the chance to go to a pub called Bennet’s just down the street from my flat. I got fish and chips (because I adore it and I figure I should take advantage of it now while I’m some place that consistently does it right) but one of my flatmates ordered a steak pie and this is what she got:

You can see how it’s a pie, I guess – it has a pie crust at least – but it was just so not what you would think of as a pie in the states that we were all a little stunned.

The weekend I took the chance to go to the general section of the National Museum of Scotland since I’d only been in the Scotland focused part up until then. The general museum stuff – taxidermy, shiny rocks, a bunch of different typewriters – is in the older building and has a more traditional museum lay out of rooms with display cases in them. It was still really well laid out, but after the newer building, which I’m guessing was built with the intention of being a museum and is subsequently very impressive from a museum studies stand point, I was a little disappointed.

That aside, I think my favorite section was the taxidermy.

The majestic tiger. With perhaps the least dignified expression physically possible. I think I’ll call him Hobbes.

The most striking thing about the section – beyond the fact that, wow, my camera is a recalcitrant teenager that occasionally throws temper tantrums that consist of 20 blurry or out focus pictures in a row of the exact same thing – was that there was a display dedicated to the different methods animals use to fertilize their eggs.

I don’t think I could see this happening in the U.S. Not without someone making a huge deal out of it.