Highland Weekend

Last Saturday, sporting exhaustion-hangovers from running a bop (for Skyros!) the night before, Lachy and I headed into the Highlands for a spot of hiking. It was the first time I'd been to the Highlands proper, not including Pitlochry (since I was a child at least, and all I remember is my mum saying 'This is the Highlands!' and me saying 'Why?') and we were headed to the village of Tomintoul. I'd heard of the village because of the Tomintoul and Glenlivet Development Trust, an initiative which is trying to regenerate the area and attract more tourists. Since there was no specific Highland destination I wanted to visit, why not select a rural village and play it by ear?

We took three trains from Leuchars to Dundee to Perth to Aviemore and a taxi from there. Our hostel's website had said the taxi would cost £24 but it unfortunately cost £50, rather more than I could really afford. Then again I could have just misread it since the next time I checked the website the price had changed - either way, it was much cheaper on Monday morning when we left. We arrived at the Smugglers Hostel, a converted village school building, where we were welcomed and shown around by Simon, who helped us plan our hike for the next day and lent us a map and a guidebook. The hostel gets its name from the whisky smuggling that was once prevalent in the area, and our hike the next day actually crossed one of the old smugglers' trails.

We took a quick walk around the village just before dark, then made ourselves some dinner in the spacious, clean kitchen, chatting with some fellow hikers who were making their way through the Highlands. We got a very early night. We were very tired.

In the morning we partook of the hostel's breakfast buffet, a huge, tempting spread of cereals, eggs, bread and spreads. Scrambled eggs on toast with a glass or two of orange juice - a damn good hiker's breakfast. Cereal just never fills you up for the morning. We left the hostel with our maps and packed lunches and promptly set off in the wrong direction, then found our way to the correct end of the village and set off along the wrong path again. My orienteering skills have never been great and Lachy was too polite to question me, so it was a farmer and a herd of cows that finally set us walking on the right path. But we did get to see some deer up close on our brief detour.

We walked the Speyside Way through some beautiful valleys and over a couple of hills, through an amazing forest. Within an hour we were far from any roads; the silence was beautiful. We had been planning to walk a circular route to Glenlivet but by the time we reached the place where the guidebook's walk began there was no way we were going to get the whole thing done before we lost daylight, so instead we walked for a couple of hours until we reached the village of Tomnavoulin and then walked back. We passed a total of three people (one group) the entire day.

When we were back in the village, we wandered around the local shops, and I bought some fudge and tablet for my brother while Lachy tried a few drams of whisky in the Whisky Castle and bought a bottle of something. For dinner we went to the Glen Avon Hotel where Lachy had a local venison burger, then to the Richmond Hotel where I had a veggie burger since the Glen Avon was out. We had a couple of bottles of Cairngorm beer, White Lady being our mutual favourite. Then an episode of Peaky Blinders and another early night following a very hard day's walk.

Tomintoul is a lovely village. There are plenty more walks I'd like to have a go at in the area, and the Smugglers Hostel made us feel so welcome, I hope to return many times in the future!

Teaching is Not My Calling and Other Lessons Learned in Romania

This summer I spent a month in the town of Suceava, Romania, otherwise known as Whitehaven, Romania. The reason I call it that is that, like my home town of Whitehaven, there is very little to do there. Yes, there are museums and shops and so on, but it took about two weeks to have visited every place of interest in the town, and unfortunately, we (myself and the other teachers from Scotland) were there for four.

Since I spent such a long time there, this won't be a day-by-day record of my activities. Instead, I'm going to organise it thematically, by lessons learned.

All right, this was a good day

Teaching is not my calling
This, I'd say, is the most important lesson I learned during July. As an English student I have often felt that I don't have many career options and one of the questions I get asked most is whether I plan to be a teacher. Well, I thought, I may as well see. So I signed up for ScRoLL (Scottish-Romanian Language Link) to see what it was like. Please note: I really have no problem with the programme, only with teaching. For the first two weeks I was teaching twenty-two 12-16 year olds in a classroom big enough for twelve. I struggled to keep up with my students, who were very good English speakers and difficult to palm off with colouring-in. In the second week, however, I realised they were so good we could easily take up two to three hours with discussion of who was the best superhero and whether the Harry Potter films were as good as the books. I got to know my students really well and we even hung out outside of class.

The second two weeks I taught 8-10 year olds. At first there were about twelve but when my friend Beth's class was reduced in the second week we combined our efforts and taught our classes together. This took a lot of the pressure off and meant we could divide the class into awesome Hogwarts houses and play games and have competitions with them. It was a lot of fun. They were very sweet, but they didn't speak much English, and some of them obviously didn't understand a word I said, and that was hard. Unfortunately, I don't have the patience for teaching, and since I used to be very shy and not enjoy standing up to give presentations, I found it quite hard to be the centre of attention for four hours a day. Lesson learned: teaching is not my calling.

I don't like meat
Over the year preceding my summer adventure I made a valiant effort to eat meat, despite having been a vegetarian for more than ten years beforehand. I thought it might not be easy not to eat meat when I was travelling, and to an extent I was right. Some parts were easy; I always loved saveloy and pork pies. Other parts were not; there was no way I could stomach a steak. I ate meat with greater frequency while I was abroad, getting stomach aches afterwards, and in Romania, after being sick for two days after eating some chicken, I gave it up for good (well, almost). I don't like eating it. The end.

I love beer
I knew this already, but the extent of it wasn't really clear until this summer. I spent my first two weeks in Romania with a family that didn't drink, and when I once had a beer in a pub with my fellow teachers, I received some pretty shocked looks from my host. Then, when I moved to a different family in my third week, we spent the first day at the extended family's shared cabin by the woods, and I was given beer after beer from one o'clock in the afternoon until I fell asleep in a caravan at five. Nothing like making up for lost time.

Family camping trip

Gypsies are not Romanian
I'm kidding. This was quite the contentious issue.

We drove past a guy driving a cart. 'There! There's a gypsy!' says my host. 'How can you tell?' I ask. 'Look at his face!' is the response I get.
We drive past another cart. 'Is that a gypsy?' I ask, pointing to a similar-looking man. My host laughs in scorn. 'No!'

Family member: 'The worst thing is, it says Romanian on their passports, so people think they are Romanian!'
Me: 'If it says Romanian in their passports, surely they are Romanian?'
Family member: 'No.'

There is a huge divide in Romania. My hosts drove me through a 'gypsy village' (part of their own village) and said 'The gypsies live like kings!' Their houses were no less ramshackle then the others. Which leads me to my next lesson.

Romania is like The Sims
It is traditional in Romania to buy land and build your own house. As a result, the landscape is dotted with huge houses in every colour. I really like the idea. In some cases I have to say it might have been wiser to employ a contractor. Others were architectural masterpieces. Many houses in the village were built around courtyards with a barn and a well which I thought was lovely.

Street in my village

Agricultural technology has not yet reached Romania
One thing that really struck me was the prevalence of carts and the near-absence of tractors. On two occasions I got to drive a neighbour's cart and loved it. We would pass several carts on the way to school, speeding by in our cars. Scythes are used to cut hay and the hay is baled up in the fields, piled onto huge sticks and wooden racks; no baling machines to be found. Agriculture seems to be one of Romania's largest industries, so its methods obviously still work - it just struck me, coming from a rural area where I've never seen a cart on the road but have been stuck behind tractors many a time.

In the driver's seat

I romanticise
The final lesson. Before I headed out to Romania, I read William Blacker's book about his time in Romania, Along the Enchanted Way. It was a wonderful book about falling in love with a gypsy and an agricultural way of life. Suceava, however, was a large town, not a tiny village with no tarmac roads (although I spent two weeks in one) and Romania is a twenty-first century country, not a historical wonderland. It is beautiful and I enjoyed my time there but it is not my country the way it is for William Blacker.

But I'm looking forward to find it.

Still pretty damn beautiful.

What this summer made me realise about my life

This summer, I was too busy with trivial thoughts like 'how am I going to afford breakfast' and 'now I'm in Berlin, where actually is my hostel' to have any startling revelations. Actually, this revelation wasn't really startling at all, even when it did show its face. It just gradually built up until it was glaringly obvious.

In my daily life I spend a lot of time at a desk. I sit at a desk to write my essays. I sit at a desk to translate Old English. If a book is particularly painful, sometimes I have to sit at a desk to read it so I don't fall asleep in my bed. I'm a hotel receptionist, and when I get to work, I sit at a desk. For an eight-hour stretch.

Sitting on a mountain. Preferable to sitting at a desk

Over June, July, August and a bit of September, I must have spent about eight cumulative hours sitting at a desk. I'm not saying I didn't sit. I sat at restaurants and on sofas and on the bed while I read a book (for pleasure, not for my degree!) but I barely even saw a desk the whole summer.

I never had sore shoulders or a sore neck, I barely had a single headache (apart from one strange week of tension headaches, but that may be because I'm not really used to sunlight...). I was tanned, and I felt strong for the first time in years.

Sitting on a horse. Preferable to sitting at a desk

Now I'm back in St Andrews, a town that I love, in a house that I love, with people that I love. That's all great. And the desk. The desk is back. I've already had to go to a physiotherapist about the ache in my shoulders and the pain of trying to maintain good posture and keep from hunching over my books is almost as bad.

Like all other fourth years I am continually battling The Fear about graduating in a year, but at the same time, it can't come quickly enough. I don't want to sit at a desk any more. 

As an English graduate I used to think I wouldn't have many job options, but then I started to get the message that English equips you to persuade just about anybody that you're the man for the job. One thing is kind of a given, though: you're going to have to work at a desk. But I'm not going to.

If you thought this might mean I know what I'm doing with my life - no. Of course not. I'm a fourth year English student. I know I like to write, and I don't mind spending an hour or two at a desk. I think what I want is to work with horses in some capacity.

For an English student, and a university student in general, this feels like a lot to admit. It's difficult to realise after three years that you're not doing what you want to be doing. But I am in the place I want to be. So that's enough for now. :)

This got way deeper than I anticipated! Next blog post will be about silly things that happened in Romania. Over and out.