CHAPTER 3: EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND
Thursday, September 2

Janis here. We spent Sunday just vegging. We were very tired and it was nice to just read and order Chinese delivery for dinner. We did throw on our tennis shoes and walk for an hour after dinner. That's the good thing about not trying to see 16 countries in 17 days: you can take a day off and not feel guilty about it. Monday we ran around a bit looking for supplies for Skip to use in painting, then we had to pick up tickets for "Cinderella" for Monday night. Nap time for me while Skip got his drawing boards ready to use, then we went out to dinner at ”Good Year”, which is a good Chinese restaurant around the corner. Today we did some shopping. We have found that our wardrobes needed some adjustments: I needed to buy some pants other than Levi's, which are too tight to be in all day. I found two pairs of (for lack of a better term) "sports wear pants": drawstring waist and a very lightweight fabric that I can wash by hand. The laundry facility across the street did an awful job on our first load so I want to be able to wash as much as possible by hand. Skip needed a couple of more shirts. I had told him so, but he wanted to "keep baggage to a minimum". I love him anyway.

The weather is cloudy but it has not rained during waking hours since we first got here. It's shirt-sleeve weather as long as you aren't in the wind.

Skip here. We've been very busy ... not just with shopping, as in Janis's note above, but also sightseeing. We've been walking our feet off, many miles a day. Edinburgh is all hills and we've been up and down each one about a dozen times.

Monday night we went to see "Cinderella: The Remix". What a performance! It was kinda like Cinderella in a Mad Max world. Cinderella was a rather athletic babe who was indentured to the mad scientist Dr. Amoral, who created the Ugly Sistas in his lab (a la Frankenstein). The Ugly Sistas were evil punkers who make the Sith creature in Star Wars look like an amateur. They got invitations to the Prince's big ball, while Cinderella, of course, didn't. So they tricked themselves up (they looked like they were trolling for tricks ... acted like it, too) ... and snagged the Prince into an S&M menage a trois. Meanwhile, the Fairy Godmother (a wicked-looking vamp in her own right) fixed Cindy up with her own gown and cool wheels: a gold chariot lowered from the sky from a crane. Cinderella, of course, won the Prince immediately, and they spent a while getting to know each other by doing some awesome high-flying trapeze tricks. At least, they did until the stroke of midnight, when Cindy had to bag it. The Prince found her again pretty quickly and all seemed well with the world ... until the Ugly Sistas, who were thoroughly pissed off, enlisted the aid of a biker gang and kidnapped the Prince. Cindy wasn't going to take it lying down, so she snagged one of Dr. Amoral's suitcases of money, bought a huge assault gun from a drug dealer, shot down the Ugly Sista's escape plane, and saved the Prince. The Sistas wound up in jail, Cinderella and the Prince lived happily ever after, and the audience was invited up to dance with the cast members. All of this was set to techno-weird hard-driving rock that was loud enough to drive your eardrums down your throat, assisted by live TV cameras, overhead screens, dirt bikes, flamethrowers, flame-spitting dune buggies, cranes, and plenty of smoke generators ... all set in an 18th-century courtyard. Disney would never approve. Neither would OSHA, which is why The Remix will never be seen in the States!

On Thursday, we visited the Palace of Holyrood, which is where the Royal Family stays when they're in the area. Great tour. This was one of the places where Mary, Queen of Scots lived when she was being held in captivity for so many years. I can certainly think of some worse prisons! Later we went to the Royal Botanical Gardens. It's a huge park, a beautiful place. In the evening we went to a really awful play. I mean, REALLY awful. Janis says I owe her big time for it. I try to look on the bright side: some restaurants are great, some are terrible; some plays are great, some are awful. We just the "awful" play checked off and are that much closer to seeing a great one again.

Some random observations:
- American influence can be seen everywhere. Ricky Martin is just as ubiquitous and just as annoying as in the U.S. Burger King, KFC, Levi's, and other businesses are here, but there are a lot fewer chain stores and many many more independent businesses. As Martha Stewart says, “This is a good thing”.
- You're never quite sure what you're going to get in a restaurant, but you're rarely disappointed with the quality. A Big Mac is a Big Mac no matter where you go, but an order in a British restaurant could be a small snack or a big dinner ... and price is not necessarily an indicator.

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