A Mostly-Calm Weekend (Part 3)

Sunday was even calmer than Saturday, so this will probably be short. (Well, that and I have my second class of the year in about an hour, and still have a few things to do beforehand.)

I went off to the Archery World Championships at Prince’s Gardens (I think that’s what it’s called—it’s the Something Gardens off Prince’s Street, anyway) to watch the women’s compound semis and finals and the men’s recurve semi and finals.

First off, don’t ever let anybody—even me—tell you that recurve isn’t as accurate as compound. It’s a little less reliably accurate, maybe, but there were still plenty of perfect sets. And both events were shot from the same distance. I don’t know exactly how far it was, but it had to’ve been close to eighty yards. Every time someone let an arrow off, it went hissing through the air alongside the stands. (SSssht!) That was cool. Even cooler was trying to imagine the sound a thousand arrows would make during some Hollywood blockbuster. :)

The scores for both men and women were incredibly close. In both instances, the difference between gold and silver was a single arrow. The American guy, Brady Ellison, won gold (beating out the South Korean, which surprised me—they always seem to win archery tournaments. =P) and the Amercian woman came in third. Apparently Brady Ellison has been doing some sort of cancer fundraiser, and his sponsors have agreed to match whatever he wins. And when he got up on the podium, he said he’d hit $10,000. Pretty cool to see someone doing such a good thing for the world. :)

Something funny I noticed—once the British woman had been knocked out, the crowd seemed to gravitate toward cheering for the American. Kind of interesting, I thought, since I’ve been told multiple times (all by Americans before I left) that they’re not so crazy about us.

Pictures of the matches to come!

The Real Windy City

This second video (below) is even harder to understand--I got up out of the depths of the graveyard and the wind just kicked it into high gear. Watch or not; it's mostly just more meandering and fancy headstones.

I got lost again yesterday. It was a little more worrisome this time--I've wondered, multiple times since landing, how to tell if I somehow ended up in a seedy part of Edinburgh. The whole city is kind of dank and oppressive and gray, and there are definitely hobos hanging around the touristy areas. I'd started thinking that maybe the university was maybe in a not-so-great neighborhood.

Until I got lost. (Again.)

After I visited the graveyard on the Royal Mile, I started walking back to campus when I spotted a map displayed out in front of a tourist center. And lo and behold, Prince's St. is not part of the Royal Mile. It was one street farther on.

The whole point of finding Prince's St. is that I was told there was both a Vodaphone and Tmobile store over there. (And as it turns out, there is also a Burger King and numerous other designer clothing stores. The Scottish do love their designer brands.) By the time I got there, everything was all closed up, unfortunately--everything tends to close kind of early over here.

BUT on the way from the Royal Mile to Prince's St. I had to cross a bridge that goes over the train station. It was SO WINDY and GUSTY. The bridge walls were about five feet up, so there was no chance I'd go over, but the weird gusting--first making it hard to walk forward, then helping me speed along, then shoving me into the wall--made me very nervous. I had to consciously restrain myself from trailing my hand along it as I walked.

After I found the closed-up phone stores, I took a different bridge back over the train station. It was only a block down from South Bridge, but when I came out on the other side the streets were considerably less occupied. No cause for alarm in that alone, but then I glanced up and realized that the street was lined with warehouses decorated with graffiti and all had broken windows.

Uh-oh. Or, more accurately, oh, shit. A young woman walking by herself at sundown through a not-so-marvelous neighborhood--doesn't that just beat all? It's everything any adult has ever told girls not to do in their hometowns, let alone foreign cities.

It turned out fine, though. Some creeper hiding in a car catcalled me, and there were some shady looking people hanging about, but I started walking back in the direction of South Bridge. Mind you, I didn't just retrace my steps. I figured there had to be some connecting street that would be a shorter distance than just retracing my steps.

South Bridge, though, ended up looming out of the clouds. Edinburgh has lots of hills, lots of ups-and-downs. The streets follow those ups-and-downs, and I'd ended up far below where I wanted to be.

So when I spotted a giant staircase leading in the general direction I was aiming for, I crossed the street and started climbing--even though it was called "Fleshmarket Close." ("Close," it seems, is kind of like "street." So, Fleshmarket Street. I just about had a heart attack, but I took it anyway.)

Aaaand the stairs opened up into a street I recognized! I'd been there the day before while I was lost! Ta-daaaa!

Although, to be perfectly honest, the stairs opened up on a street I'd taken about a dozen steps down and then decided it looked to sketch to wander down in the dark. But at least I knew where I was, how to get off that street, and how to get back to the dorm. And that's exactly what I did. I was really too rattled to stay out any longer. And my feet were killing me from all that walking.