Letter From Scotland #2

Edinburgh's an utterly extraordinary place (I just walked by a bus headed to "Hunter's Tryst" and narrowly resisted my urge to get on it) and I love that feeling of traveling somewhere entirely new and being curious and interested and surprised by everything. And entertained endlessly, as I often am. For instance, if you're not Scottish you may have to visit a museum to discover that "Cockfighting, like other cruel animal sports, was much rarer in Scotland than in England." Mostly I've been strolling around, zigzagging between Old Town (the Medieval section) across a central garden, commons-like green, and New Town (the Georgian section) -- all of it in the moody shadow of the castle -- and admiring the look and feel of the city. It's much more exactly like what I thought London would look like, growing up in America, than London actually does. I would never say that to a Scottish person though because even in my short time here, I've caught on. There are all of these beautiful shields and plaques everywhere, with like dead-serious unicorns and stags and all sorts of heroic motifs and perfectly appropriate blustery mottoes, all of which I imagine translate more or less to an intensely riled-up version of, "Not crazy about the English." At the National Museum of Scotland this afternoon, I checked out the Jean Muir exhibition. Lately I've been skipping fashion retrospectives if they're too entrenched in nostalgia (while fully acknowledging that it can be tough to have any other position in a museum setting by definition), e.g. I passed on Yves Saint Laurent in Montreal because it sounded like it would be a commercial for the glory years, and I never go to the ones at the Met, but the Muir show was very well-done and worth checking out if, as I do, you like British fashion. Speaking of, I got a singular fake leopard coat today. Initially I was on the fence (seems so improbable to me now!) but then I found a couple of lottery ticket stubs in the pocket and was won over by the idea that, like me, the previous owner believed in luck. And, of course, as I learned last night, glamour is a Gaelic word.