I began writing this shortly before we left Britain, but then life caught up, and in the chaos of returning to the US, it got set aside. As I write these words now, it has been nearly a month and a half since we landed in the US and a month since we returned to Albuquerque.  Life has been…  Very good, but very busy since the return.  But the memories of Britain and Europe are still strong, and part of our hearts still live there, I think.

So now I flip back through my notes and the feel and scents of Scotland return to me.  I will do my best to transcribe some of them, but there’s a great deal to say, so this may take more than one post and some time to get out.  (Not aided, I know, by my incurable verbosity.)  Think of it as a slow-motion discovery for each of you — you’ll never know when another bit of it will pop up.  But I’ll do my best to at least finish up Scotland before, oh, say, Christmas…

One of the final tour targets for the great Rati-Lane British Isles tours was Scotland. We’d been hoping to hit all of the major regions/countries of the British Isles (England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland), but we still missed Ireland.  Ah well — good reason to return at some point.  ;-)

We had to decide on something, and we had really needed a work-free vacation, so we packed our bags and headed North.  A lot happens in a week of intense vacationing, so there’s quite a bit to report.  We’ll start with:

Edinburgh

Day 1 (Fri): Travel

Bus to Manor House station, Piccadilly Line to King’s Cross, National Express train up through England, past the now-crumbling line of Hadrian’s wall, and into Scotland.  Caledonia: land of the lochs and mountains and the flamboyant and tough northern barbarians who threw back Rome’s might.

For Americans’ reference, while the British Isles are small in a global sense, the distances are still large in a practical sense, and Scotland is very big and very spacious indeed.  Really big.  I mean, it’s small when you put it down next to, say, Alaska or the Ukraine, but it’s big to travel across.  King’s Cross to Edinburgh is just about 400 miles (about 650 km) and took rouhly five hours.  That’s roughly the distance from Boston to Baltimore or Louisville to Atlanta or Santa Fe to Denver.

We pulled in to Edinburgh about 8:00 PM and plunked down the cash to taxi to our B&B.  (Refer back to trading money for stress when travelling.)  We caught a late supper at an upscale Thai place near B&B row, and then crashed.

Day 2 (Sat): Edinburgh

Up, not terribly early (vacation!  Score!) and off to explore the city.

Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland and seat of Kings.  It is built along (and spilling off of) a ridge of basalt spanning between two ancient volcanic outcrops, and the scene feels startlingly like something out of a Tolkien novel, or perhaps George R. R. Martin. At one end of the ridge, Edinburgh Castle dominates the skyline.  The “Golden Mile” spills down the ridge away from it, lined with gray Georgian stone buildings.  At the foot of the ridge lies the new Scottish Parliament building and Holyrood Palace, home of kings-in-exile and home-away-from-home for more modern monarchs.  Finally, the ridge lifts up again into Holyrood Park to end at Arthur’s Seat, the other stone mass, open and airy counterpoint to the brooding fortress of its sister pluton.

Our B&B was on, essentially, B&B row, which is pretty much right across from Holyrood park.  So the first thing was walking through the park on the way to town. It was lovely in an ornately-sculpted, eighteenth-century sort of way. Our path took us below Arthur’s Seat (which we resolved to climb… tomorrow) and into the base of the town.

View of Arthur's Seat in Holyrood Park, Edinburgh

Then into town, entering near Holyrood Palace and the Parliament building.  We’d seen a sufficiency of palaces at that point, so we glanced in bemusement at the Scot’s brand new, £400 million (!) parliament building.  I guess when you get your independent parliament back after almost 3 centuries of suppression, it’s a cause for architectural exuberance.  Parts of the (in)famous building are really neat (e.g., the native stone facing with samples graven with various quotes and poetry), but other bits were just odd.  It is something of an architectural marvel, in that postmodern chaos-of-architectural-motifs sort of way.  Given its self-consciously avant-garde design and its order-of-magnitude budget overrun, it is, unsurprisingly, a source of some contention among Edinburgh locals.

View of office windows in the Scottish Parliament building

Side wall and fence of the Scottish parliament building

Front face of the Scottish Parliament building

We chose not to tour the Parliament building, but did marvel a bit at the exterior (with some confusion, as we first mistook the bizarrely-grated windows facing onto alleys as signs of a deluded office building).  I was taken, however, with the stretch along the Mile itself, which is faced with different Scottish stone and graven with Scottish verses in English and Gaelic.

From there, we walked up the Golden Mile.  Here we discovered a bit of a tactical mistake.  Remember that ridge of rock between the two promontories that I mentioned?  The city lies along the ridge between the two, but it slopes down from the Castle to the Holyrood Palace, which meant that we were walking the whole mile uphill.  Whups.  Still, it was a fun walk and there were great things to see along the way.  Like street bagpipers…

Street musician in Edinburgh

Our favorite street bagpiper in Edinburgh. Check out the tennis shoes.

(Remember kids: Bagpipes were designed to be heard on battlefields.  These guys were playing a good half mile apart.)

And blue police call boxes…

A true blue police call box. Inoperative, unfortunately. Or maybe that's just what The Doctor wants you to think...

And Adam Smith, trade goods in hand…

Adam Smith, the economist of nations.

And my man, Hume!

Hume's da man!

Along the way, we encountered hordes of tourist shops, ranging from kitsch to high-end.  We popped in to a woolen-goods shop, where Susan picked up a lovely Fair Isle sweater and we grabbed a sun-catcher for our friend Cat (who put up with entirely too much shit from our cats).  Further along, Susan invested in her new hobby of Scotch exploration, snagging an (apparently) lovely bottle of 18-year old Scotch (whose name is not presently at hand — oops).

Finally, we reached the imposing Edinburgh Castle, fortress and last refuge of kings and queens for centuries.  From this site, for over a thousand years, Scottish war chieftans and lords and kings had sallied forth to give battle to everyone from Vikings to English to other Scots.  (And, to hear the brief history blurbs in the Castle tell it, largely to get their asses kicked.)  Here, the infant Mary Queen of Scots holed up from her terrifying uncle, Henry VIII, and here too she herself later gave birth to James VI, future king of Scotland and England.  The Castle was the centerpiece of the Scottish struggles for sovereignty and independence from England for centuries.

(Part of) Edinburgh Castle

The intimidating bulk of the fortress, perched on its promontory of black basalt.

At this point, we were famished, so we made a bee-line for the chic castle cafe.  We were surprised to discover that it was actually good — a big change of pace for tourist monument eateries. (Of which we have sampled our share and then some at this point.)  We had a lovely lunch.  A decadent mushroom bisque to start; then I had haggis, neeps, and tatties (haggis with turnips and potatoes), plated in a surprisingly upscale presentation.  Susan had salmon (Scottish, of course), with lime sauce.  And we split a fantastic slice of Victoria Sponge Cake for dessert.

Contrary to popular opinion, haggis is actually not only edible, but in fact quite tasty.

On to the castle.  We toured the Scottish Crown Jewels.  (Older, by a considerable margin, than the English, but a tad bit less pretentious.  But only a tad.)  The great hall, home, now, of piles and piles of weapons, and, says the audio guide, a fantastically preserved original beam ceiling (and lots of Victorian fanciful interior decor).  Dungeons and walkways and battlements and courtyards.  The Scottish War Memorial.

But we’d done plenty of castle touristing at this point and were a bit burned out, so after only a couple of hours, we called it a day on the vasty pile of stones and headed back down the Mile.

We were a bit at a loss for evening plans, but this turned out to be the week of the Edinburgh film festival, and we hoped to get a piece of that action.  After some tired-tourist dithering, we boldly set off across the wilds of Edinburgh, in search of an art theatre.  After some slight bus mishaps, we pulled in to the theatre we sought just in time to catch the early evening round of animated shorts.

This was a bizarre, but entrancing series of indie animation bits, varying in length from about two to fifteen minutes.  Angst was definitely the theme of the evening.  A blind, old widow, searching for eyes in jars of buttons in her lonely hut in the woods, and the owl-spirit of death who comes to bring her sight and surcease.  The tale of the man who sits at the top of the great cliff to count people in animal costumes who come to cast themselves off the cliff.  The counterpointed stories of three everyday people and their reactions to close encounters with death.  A wordless musical tale of the child who wakes to follow the tooth fairy back to her subterranean home.

Heads abuzz and evening falling, we left the theatre in seach of supper.  Walking back in the direction of our B&B, we ran across “La Bagatelle”, a low-key, but fabulous French restaurant, where we had a stunning and surprising meal.  The appetizers, in particular, were strikingly unusual: Salad with sautéed chicken livers and raspberries, and terrine of pork with apricot jelly.  Then Susan had a fabulous chicken supreme with asparagus velouete, while I enjoyed pork cutlet with truffle sauce.  Altogether, it was one of the best meals we’d had since… Well, France.

Back to the B&B and crashed out, to be ready to take on…

Day 3 (Sun): Edinburgh, reprised

We hopped up to head back to Holyrood Park and Arthur’s Seat.  In spite of the imposingness of the butte, the climb was not bad — the greatest challenge was finding the correct trail up the side.  From the top, we attained an unparalleled view of Edinburgh and the Firth of Forth.  (Linguistic aside: Firth is a Scots word meaning “inlet” or “estuary”.  It’s originally from Norse, and is related to “fjord”, which gives some sense of just how prominently the Vikings figure in the history of Scotland.)  Among other features, we could get a much better view of the entirity of the Scottish Parliament building.  They tell us that the aerial view is important to fully appreciate the architectural design of the building.  We appreciated that it still looked rather like a jumble sale from above.

Probably the most photographed vista in the Edinburgh area

Susan enjoying the sunshine atop Arthur's Seat

The direction marker atop the Seat

After taking the air on the Seat, we headed back down, leisurely. Took a turn through a ruined chapel at the base of the Seat…

Ancient chapel just above Holyrood Palace. Susan does her part to stave off entropy.

And then headed back to the Mile.  There was a great deal more of Edinburgh to see, of course, but we weren’t going to be able to catch all of it, regardless.  So our goal for the day were the Vault tours.

The Vaults are a series of chambers located beneath the three major bridges of Edinburgh.  Not bridges over water, but bridges over the valley: they span out from the top of the central rock ridge to either side, meeting the hills that rise beyond the glacier-valleys that straddle the ridge.  Over the centuries, buildings arose along the tops of the bridges and up against the bridge arches, leaving vaulted spaces beneath the streets of Edinburgh.  For a time, these vaults were active as store rooms for pubs and restaurants, spare meeting space, homes for the otherwise homeless, and haunts of murderers and thieves.  In the early nineteenth century, they were condemned and closed because of water leakage and lack of sanitation, and it was only in the past decaded that some of them were re-opened to tourists.

The gloom of the Edinburgh Vaults, lit by Susan's sunny disposition.

Seventeenth century wine racks, echoes of long-forgotten pubs, wine shops, and gathering spots for Edinburgh's famed intelligentsia.

Our guide was a local history student, picking up a few quid by guiding curious tourists through the ill-lighted vaults and telling them tales of the people who lived and worked there and even an occasional creepy-crawley story.  Unfortunately for him, he had no other customers than us that afternoon, so we hounded him mercilessly with questions and requests for elaboration.  I could tell that he was torn between his history geek-ness and his canned spiel.  I think he was happy enough to see us off at the end of the tour.

From the Vaults, we went in search of the Museum of Musical Instruments (a branch of the U. of Edinburgh School of Music, as I understand).  While searching, we were amused to rest our feet near the Tron Pub (considerably older than the Tron that geeks usually think of!).  Sadly, no pix of Tron…  We did find the museum, which focused mostly on keyboard instruments, so we didn’t find any notable violas for Susan to drool over.  We were, however, treated to some fabulous harpsichord playing by a fellow who was working his way through the collection.

We still had a great deal of Scotland ahead of us, so we headed back early to the B&B to catch a nap and then an early Italian dinner. (The high point was the tagliatelle with salmon and white wine cream sauce; the calimari was acceptable, but not as good as that in Madrid. Oh well.)

We crashed early again, in preparation to fly off to the Orkneys in the morning.  But that’s another post, for another day…

Early spring flowers at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew

We woke Sunday morning to a beautiful blue sky and decided that we absolutely had to get out of the house and explore a bit.  Of course, given the vagaries of the weather and the time it took to figure out what we actually wanted to do with the day, by the time we actually arrived at Kew, it was gray and overcast.  Only slightly daunted, we stuck with it, and were rewarded.

We didn’t see much of the town of Kew itself between the train station and the Gardens, but what we saw seemed lovely in that postcard-perfect modern-gentrified-Victoriania sort of way.  Well, I suppose that if anybody has a right to Victoriania nostalgia, it would have to be the Londoners…

The Gardens themselves are…  Amazing.  Defying description.  They are vast for one thing.  We allowed ourselves most of the afternoon, but that turned out to be only enough to barely scratch the surface.

Shortly after arriving, the threatening gray (grey, here, I suppose) clouds opened up and deluged on us.  Complete with thunder and everything — much more violent weather than they usually expect for here.  So we sought refuge in a handy one of the six significant greenhouses on the grounds.

The tropical house itself is one of those Victorian monuments to elaboration, complete with filigreed wrought-iron spiral staircases leading to a catwalk that carries you through the canopy of the tropical trees:

Spiral stair to the catwalk

Susan in the canopy of the indoor tropical jungle

Overlooking the jungle

We discovered that there was even a small aquarium in the basement of the building — a strange find for a gardens.  Though they did have a lot of information on aquatic plants.

Fortunately, London really is the land of “wait 5 minutes and the weather will change” and by the time we had had our fill of the tropical house, the weather had cleared and we got some of the blue sky we had been seeking.

The Gardens really are immense and I don’t have time to describe our entire trip, let alone the Gardens as a whole (most of which we didn’t actually see).  But, really, it was mostly just an excuse to wander around on a lovely early spring afternoon and enjoy the first flowers and and the budding trees.  So pictures will probably tell the story better than I could anyway:

Entrance to the water lily pavilion

No water lilies in the pavilion this time of year, but there was a display of spring orchids on

Snow drops! Possibly the most popular flower there, in early March.

The rock garden

A treetop walkway -- one of our favorite features of the Gardens

View from the walkway. It was beautiful in March -- I'm sure it will be breathtaking once all the leaves come in.

Greek and Mediterranean garden

A sample of the myriad of small flowers that randomly dotted the lawns

[1] Er. I guess it’s actually two weekends ago now, as I finish writing this post. Oops.

While reserving a hotel room, I ran across the following bit as a piece of a larger legal disclaimer:

This Web site is offered to you, the customer, by Travelscape, Inc. trading as ‘Eurostar Planet’, a Nevada Corporation c/o 3150 139th Avenue SE Bellevue, WA 98005 (“Eurostar Planet”).

So this is a Nevada company, run out of Washington, pretending to be French, selling hotel rooms to people in the United Kingdom, using a U.S. credit card, billed to an address in London.

Ah, the wonders of the global economy…

New features in the current layout:

1. Threaded comments!  (Duh.)  Now you can reply to specific comment and it will display as such.  This is probably more useful for us than for you.

2. The picture in the middle of the header changes, and it’s once of ours.  Some of the ones we picked look better than others, so we’ll probably play with it.

3. We can now automatically email you when we answer your comments!  One thing I’ve always felt made blogs like WordPress impersonal in comparison to social sites like LiveJournal is that people have to go back to the site to see if anyone happened to answer their comment.  I believe Terran and I, as admins, are the only people who can use the feature, but now when you comment, we can reply and send you an email notification.

Hope our (very small) devoted readership likes the change :).

We spent the evening of Dec 30 packing and preparing to leave Madrid.  We really enjoyed Madrid and all the people we met and everything we learned.  At the same time, it was about time to move on.  (Not least because our very basic, “student slums” style apartment had begun to seriously degrade and was accumulating failures.  The prinicipal one of which was that the clothes washer had conked out a couple of weeks before and hadn’t been replaced, so we were running on patchwork remnants of clean and semi-clean clothes.)

Here’s a picture of Susan during our final hours in the Madrid apartment, with our bags packed and ready to roll.

Madrid apartment

We had already dropped our cats off with a local vet who’s boarding them until their paperwork can be finalized and they can be sent.  (Therein itself lies a long and frustrating story.)

We slept poorly that night, worrying about things undone, the cats, travel the next day…  All the niggling things that crawl up in the dark reaches of the night and drive sleep away, leaving only fatigue and stress in its place.

New Year’s Eve dawned clear and bright in Madrid.  We were up early, with our bags arranged and ready to roll.  Our flight was at about noon-thirty, so at least we didn’t have to scream off to the airport before the crack of dawn.  We even had time for breakfast.

More importantly, we had time to say farewell to a couple of our neighbors at our apartment building.  Matilde was the woman who cleaned the public spaces in our building.  We saw her out there every morning, cheerfully sweeping up and mopping spaces, chatting with other residents, fiddling with the plants in the courtyard, and so on.  We had also recently discovered that she’s extremely friendly and helpful and willing to speak very slowly, in baby Spanish to us.  Luisa is the little old lady across the courtyard from us, with whom we shared a clothes line.  Negotiating who had “clothesline rights” on any particular day was one of our great Spanish challenges, because Luisa never did process how to speak to us slowly and simply enough for us to fully get what she was saying.  But she was always very cheerful and nice about it, and always seemed concerned about us and how we were getting along.  (She came to check on us when a random cat was loose in the apartment complex at one point, just to be sure that it was not one of our cats.)

So we got to say farewell to Matilde and Luisa, which was delightful.  We broke out our four words of Spanish to tell them that they had been very nice to us and we had enjoyed living there, and they replied that we were all friends and wished us well on our trip to London.  It was a very touching farewell.

Soon, Mike and Eliana, the apartment agents who had helped us find this place originally, dropped by to pick up the keys and see us on our way.  It was good to see them again one last time.  On the way out, they asked whether we had lost weight, which was pleasant to consider.  Eliana suggested that it was the food.  We think more likely it’s all about walking.  A lot.  (Don’t get me wrong — I have really enjoyed learning about the cuisine in Spain, and we have discovered many new, delicious dishes.  But any cuisine in which lunch can consist of deep fried cheese-and-ham croquettes, fried lamb steaks, flan, and beer is not precisely on the crash-diet short list.)

So, off to the airport.  Where we discovered that our bags were over weight.  Of course.  You would think that 23 kg (50 lbs) would be plenty of weight allowance.  That you could fit all your clothes in there, with room to spare.  You’d be wrong.  Even having ditched belongings in Indianapolis and then sent home a variety of boxes from Madrid and packing everything heavy we could into carry-on bags, we were still over by about 2 kg/bag.

Fortunately, the nice woman at the Iberia check in desk pointed out that we could have another carry-on and that we might be able to shuffle a couple of kilos out of each of our main suitcases into a spare carry-on.  We had a light duffel stuffed into the bags, for just such an eventuality.  So we scooted over to the side and transferred a certain amount of heavy items and dense clothes into it until we made all the weight limits.  It was something of a triumph to finally be able to check our main suitcases through, given that we’d had to pay weight surcharges on them from ABQ to IND in the first place.  And we just ended up with extra weight to schlep around Barajas airport and then Gatwick.

On to Gatwick.  The plane flies.  No events. Thankfully.  Landed, made it past the bored passport control agent by flashing our brand-shiny-new visas at him.  Retrieved suitcases which were, thankfully, not lost this time.  Re-compressed duffel back into suitcases, then on to the train.

Gatwick is South of London and is further out than Heathrow.  It is possible to get to our new London place from Gatwick entirely by public transit.  But it’s considerably longer and involves more changes.  That wouldn’t be such a big deal if (a) we weren’t hauling heavy carry-ons plus suitcases that weighed in at 25 kg each and (b) if the London public transit system were more uniform and more accessible and didn’t involve random flights of stairs between any two points.

Still, we made it.  At the last leg, as we hauled our heavy suitcases up the stairs out of the Manor House station, a passing good samaritan gave Susan a hand hauling her bag up and out.  We were exhaustedly grateful.

And into the new flat — a house that we’re renting from a London couple who are, themselves, on sabbatical.  It is beautiful and far larger and more comfortable than our place in Madrid.  (Pictures presently, we hope.)

After a day of travel and who knows how long of stress, it was heaven.

We fell inside, dropped all our stuff, and collapsed with fatigue and joy for having made it.

Our great achievement for the afternoon was getting laundry done and casting “Summon delivery Indian food”.  (The joys of the Internet and of speaking the same language!)

The big debate, after some recovery, was whether we had any energy to do anything else with the evening.  Whether we could muster effort to try to ring in the New Year, or whether we should just crash at home.

In the end, we decided that this was probably the only time we’d be in London on New Year’s Eve in our lives, so we should do our best to make the most of it.

A little Internet research revealed that the city was throwing a big midnight fireworks display over the Thames.  And one of the prime viewing spots was right near the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, and Terran’s aspiration was to hear Big Ben chime the New Year.  The paper warned that viewing spots filled up early, so we rushed out at a quarter of 10.

We made it to the tube station just in time to hear the PA system announce that all of the viewing areas for fireworks were full.  We were crushed.  It seemed cruel, somehow, even though our other plan had only been to sleep early.

But then fate and kindness struck again.  We needed to put more money on our transit cards anyway, so we dashed inside the station to do so.  In there, we ran into the fellow who was manning the information desk.  As it turns out, he’s the same guy who was running the desk the night that Terran first came through to visit the landlords.  (In between Vancouver and Italy.  Long trip, that.  whew)  And he recognized me, and seemed really excited to talk.

We had a great conversation with him.  When we told him about trying to see the fireworks and the announcement of viewing areas being full, he said, “Oh, don’t pay attention to that.  Those are just the official, roped off viewing areas.  You can get a great view outside them, though.”  He gave us detailed directions on how to get to a great viewing location and cheerfully sent us on our way.

Five minutes to midnight

And it worked out just as he said.  We took the Piccadilly line to Finsbury Park, changed to Victoria line, on to Victoria station, and then out to street level.  Walked down Victoria street — literally down the middle of it, as the police had all the traffic cordoned off and pedestrians were just streaming down it.  How often do you get to do that!?

After a little re-routing around the official viewing areas, we ended up at the edge of a crowd just between Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, beneath the clock tower of Big Ben.  Made it there about 30 min before midnight, so we rested and enjoyed the beautiful, clear night and just watching people.

Susan below Big Ben -- three minutes 'til midnight!

In the end, we both got what we were looking for.  The fireworkswere fabulous and, even if we didn’t get the best seat in town, we did have an incredible view.  And we got to hear Big Ben chime in 2009!

We sang Auld Lang Syne with the crowd (only some of whom were so drunk as to butcher it utterly.) And the feeling of good cheer and camaraderie lasted all the way back through the tube to our lovely flat, where we crashed immediately.

But the night wasn’t quite over yet.  We hauled ourselves to semi-consciousness a7:40 AM local time, which just happened to be 11:40 PM in US West Coast time.  We Skyped over to our friends Tim and Emily, who were throwing their own New Year’s bash, reaching them in time to ring in 2009 all over again!  The power of the Internet — faster than the New Year itself.  :-)

All in all, we could not have asked for a better New Year’s eve.  While tiring and stressful in places, it marked a big set of changes for us — leaving one stage of sabbatical and on to another; on to a new country and new city and new things to learn.  And most of all, it was surrounded by good cheer and much kindness.  We were touched to have had the chance to meet so

Fireworks over the Thames, heralding in 2009

many wonderful and helpful people.  In many ways, our New Year’s eve was a microcosm of all of 2008 for us.

We look forward eagerly to 2009, with as many new and wonderful people and as many new things to discover.

Our best wishes to all for a wonderful new year, filled with joy, success, and kindness.

So I started to ask Google “Why doesn’t firefox spellchecker handle contractions correctly in gmail?” (which is one of my current tech annoyances).  But when I got as far as “why doesn’t”, the Google auto-completer helpfully recommended the following:

1. why doesn’t he call (233 Million hits)
2. why doesn’t glue stick to the inside of the bottle (114k)
3. why doesn’t he like me (53.7M)
4. why doesn’t he love me (33M)
5. why doesn’t god heal amputees (21k)

I shit you not.

Now this tells us a couple of interesting things:

First, the top three causal interrogatives that concern the web population as a whole are (a) courtship ritual uncertainties, (b) kinetic curing properties of (likely polyvinyl acetate-based) adhesives, and (c) the theological problem of evil.

Second, the courtship rituals cluster overwhelmingly outweighs the other two.  By like 3 orders of magnitude.  Sex trumps chemistry and god every time, I guess.

Third, the courtship rituals are entirely about the behavior of the male of the species.  There are no “why doesn’t she love me?” queries.  I won’t touch that.

Finally, the most pressing query about evil concerns the (undoubted) suffering of amputees.  While clearly a pressing theological issue, one does wonder about other concerns such as war, famine, plague, crime, poverty, etc.

The web is a far stranger place…

Anyway, as a pathetic attempt to make this post at least marginally travel-related, I’ll note that fruit cocktail tastes exactly the same in Spain as it does in the US.  Ah, fond memories of preschool snack time…

We also played Pinch the Poachers, a collaborative children-and-adults game about saving the cute animals from the evil poachers.  The game itself was rather nice, and I think it would be fun to play with your six or seven-year-old.  The company itself had a big agenda about using collaborative gameplay to shape young minds to be nice rather than competitive that we found to be a bit too much.

This weekend we’ve been at the Spiel gaming convention in Essen, Germany.  There’s a lot to say, but I’m writing this from our hotel in Essen and I don’t want to take the time for a full report just yet.  But a few quick notes to you gamer geeks out there on the games we’ve seen, ranked in decreasing order of coolness:

1. Accused — one of the most fun indie games we found.  It’s by a single developer in the UK, and he’s working hard to get it off the ground.  It’s a neat twist on the detective game.  The shtick is that, once again, there has been a mystery in a small British town.  In this game, however, all the players have been accused and are under investigation.  The truth, of course, is irrelevant — the important part is fixing the evidence so that you look innocent.  You start by randomly selecting three town locations from which to build your “story” of where you were when the deed went down.  Then the body is placed and the murder weapon is selected.  (How inconvenient for you, if your story ends with “and I spent most of the evening at the library, studying”, if the victim turns up dead at the library.  Not that that happened to me, or anything.)  You then are dumped with a pile of “guilt” evidence, all of which points at your malfeasance, and a tiny amount of “innocence” evidence with which to help prove that you never knew him and were nowhere near the place.  About 3/4 of the game is a fairly snappy mechanic for moving around the town to hide/erase your guilt evidence, pick up new innocence, bribe (or kill, heh heh) inconvenient witnesses, and mug your buddies or plant evidence on them.  But the really fun phase is the end-game.  As soon as some player walks into the police station, the game “ends” and the trial begins.  Now begins a battle of wits, as you each try to establish your innocence, explain away any nasty “guilt” cards left in your hand, and pin the blame on your friends.  This is the fast-talking phase, and is, IMHO, the most fun single aspect of the game.  “How unfortunate for you that half the people in town hated you, and three of them ended up strangled to death during the game.”  When all is said and done, the players vote on who gets convicted.  And after you send the poor schlep off to the slammer for the rest of his natural born days, then you get to reveal the “truth” cards and find out who actually committed the crime.  Not (yet) available in the US, though he’s working on getting it there.
2. The Stars are Right — a very clever and novel pattern matching game based (somewhat loosely) on the Cthulhu mythos.  Cthulhu makes everything better.  Unlike most pattern matching games, this one also involves a bit of puzzle solving and forward planning, as you work out fairly elaborate move sequences in order to arrange the stars to the liking of the elder gods whom you are trying to summon.  As you summon more small things, you become more capable of summoning big things, but the pattern matching and planning become correspondingly nastier.  Probably coming to a game store near you in the US in the near future.
3. Pandemic — has been released in the US for a few years (Z-Man games, I think).  But it’s a very nice cooperative game about, what else?  Saving the world.  Specifically, from a gaggle of nasty plagues.  (We didn’t really need Miami anyway, did we?)  Quick game play that increased the sense of urgency — gotta move fast before the bugs get out of control!  Fun game.
4. Munchkin Quest — the very newest Steve Jackson Games product.  World premier here at Essen and we were lucky enough to play it with some great Germans.  Nice game.  If you’ve played and enjoyed Munchkin, this is probably your kind of game.  It has enough of the old Munchkin cards and mechanics to be familiar, and enough new elements and mechanics to be novel and allow you to discover new facets.  And, yes, brand new ways to screw your buddies.  ;-)
5. Urland (?) — Nice game by the same couple that produced Ursuppe (Primordial Soup in English).  A basic territory conquest game, cast in terms of evolution of lungfish onto the land.  The nice twist is “evolution” cards that allow your icthyoids to acquire talants like flight, teeth, care of young, etc., which help your icthyoids beat out the other icthyoids in the race for land dominance.  Appears to be a couple of years old, now, and I’m not sure you can get it in English, but it’s a fun game.  Fun for adults, but I think it could be played by, say, an eight-year-old.

Those are the highlights, I think.  I’ll leave off the games that sucked.  ;-)

More on the trip later.  Enjoy!