Eurotrip: Royal-tea

Our final full day in Edinburgh (for this trip) dawned. When we hung out in London for a while I visited the SOAS archives and this time in Edinburgh my big dream was to visit the National Library of Scotland. It wasn’t archives I was after but instead a copy of Arthington’s Million, an annoyingly difficult book to track down. It is the only real biography of Robert Arthington (of “donating to the London Missionary Society and thereby establishing the modern day Zambia-Tanzania border” fame) and so I wanted to read it. I had to go all the way to Scotland, apparently, to do this, but that is no problem because it was fun to visit the library.

There’s a famous sibling somewhere nearby.

I set out first thing in the morning and on the way managed to stop in to the Dalry Necropolis as I was looking for a Little Free Library (I had a book I wanted to release into the world). That was a nice little wander, and excitingly a sign revealed that the cemetery was the final resting place of Alexander Graham Bell’s brother, Melville, who does not himself have a Wikipedia page (yet). Reaching the library I collected my library card and got the rundown on reading room procedures. I had previously requested Arthington’s Million so there it was waiting for me, and I was delighted to be able to go through it. You’re not supposed to just take pictures of every page of a book there, so I won’t say I did that, but it was a delightful time in the reading room and after I had done what I came there to do I exited via the gift shop (I picked up some tea and shortbread for gifts).

From there I rendezvoused with my super amazing wife at the Waterstones with the nice views of Edinburgh castle for our real adventure for the day: visiting the Royal Yacht Britannia. To get there we took the tram and got dropped off in the mall wherein lies the entrance to the yacht. It is weird to get to a ship via a mall but there you go. The first thing you wander through is a little introductory museum where the biggest thing we learned is that the yacht (and the Queen) had both visited Sierra Leone which we thought was neat.

What am I doing with my right hand?

Aboard the yacht, our first actual priority was lunch. There is a tearoom onboard with a fairly extensive menu. The dining room is an enclosed structure just sorta plopped on the deck which provides some nice views of the harbor. The food was very good! We just got lunch instead of something more afternoon tea-like. Though we also got a scone because come on, you have to. It’s what the Queen would have wanted.

Tea out of the way we finally toured the ship in earnest. The first stop was the bridge which I thought was neat. The yacht is built just like a Navy ship, because it was in fact a Royal Navy ship (perhaps the Royalest Navy ship), and so the bridge looks Navy ship-standard. It’s got sound-powered telephones and the like and from my notes was meant to serve as a hospital ship in a pinch.

After perusing the bridge we continued down the decks. You don’t go up or down on the ship, but instead depart across to a tower which has a stairwell. Probably safer than having people navigate ships ladders. Walking around the main deck, a few interesting notes. The ship carried something like 10 boats which at the time I thought was mad but now maybe I’m thinking that would be an average number of boats for that size ship. The windows that looked into (and out of) the royal rooms are higher than the rest of the windows (from the outside) to keep people from peeking in. The sailors apparently did not wear their covers in the Royal country to avoid the royals having to return salutes all the time, which I suppose is nice.

The Queen’s (I think) cabin.
Are we in Dalrymple or the North Atlantic?

Inside the ship the furnishings are pretty remarkable. I guess if they were like at your grandma’s house they wouldn’t look too wild, but inside of a ship it was kinda jarring really. The royal reception area, or whatever it was officially called, looked like nothing more than a country living room but, you know, it was on a giant yacht. The formal dining room is also gigantic and had stuff all around that had been presented to the royal couple, along with a whale rib that Philip had picked up.

Past the royal area you got to the officer and crew quarters. An important detail that my super amazing wife noticed before I did is that the captain’s slippers were appropriately port- and starboard-colored which was a nice touch. With the ship having such a history there were lots of artifacts and donated things about like portraits of Nelson or Nelson’s buttons or other Nelson what-have-you. I also took note of the books around, and there were a lot of books on Africa I would actually rather liked to have had, so I was jealous.

There’s a bar at the end there.

This brings us to booze. Man. It is a British ship and so they never had a Josephus Daniels. The ship had four bars. Since it was such a special ship, the Junior Ratings had their own bar which meant it had more than usual. That doesn’t count the built-in for the royals’ use. Though, speaking of special, I did enjoy that the rum tub they had onboard was labelled “The Queen God Bless Her,” which isn’t unusual, except they actually had the Queen nearby who would understand their appreciation. At any rate reviewing my photos I do not know which bar I missed taking a picture of.

How do they keep it so clean.

Which finally brings us to the best bit of the ship: the engine room! I had been expecting the whole tour to find that the ship was powered by diesels, but how silly I was because I was very pleasantly surprised to find that it had steam turbines. Oh, to have a steam turbine-powered yacht. And most stunningly of all the engine room was spotless. They have a sign saying some American officer thought it was a fake show engine room and they had a real one elsewhere, and yeah a fake engine room does seem more believable. It is all shiny and polished and man must have been so much work.

But having inspected the engines the tour of the ship was over and it was once again a matter of exiting via the gift ship and us making our way back into Edinburgh proper. We did this via several more book stores where, to our utter horror, we bought more books. We also tried to find things like elderberry cordial without success, and finally arriving back to our place on very weary feet we heated up some leftover fish n’ chips to properly close out our time in Edinburgh.

The (aft) end.

Eurotrip: Dundee II

Our story continues from where we left off last week, almost about to begin a tour of Verdant Works…

John’s intro having finally wound down, we went on inside the jute mill. The museum tells the whole story of jute, beginning with how it was grown in India. It was subsequently processed in Dundee of all placed due to the whaling industry. As whale oil was needed to soften the jute, it made sense to process jute where there was a lot of whale oil, which was apparently Dundee. Anyways once it is softened the jute is processed much like flax and also much like wool, so my super amazing wife and I were having a hoot looking at all the mill equipment. The stuff they have in there comes from a training college, and it seems they still use it occasionally.

In the mill they then talked about the industry some, and addressed the relationship with India. They touched on colonialism and how eventually the Dundee industry just couldn’t compete with the Indian industry that eventually grew with the help of Scottish engineering and managers that were sent over there. The museum clearly wanted to do a good job addressing this aspect of the industry. And then another section talked about jute’s attempts to modernize into fashion though without much success. Jute still apparently backs linoleum and carpet though, so there is a future for jute yet.

From there you go upstairs and learn about the mill workers, a section I think is aimed more at like school groups. It talks about class differences and the like, but in a friendly way. The funniest part (skip to the next paragraph to avoid ruining the surprise) was a room labelled “cludgie” with the door partway open. If you try to open it you see a mannequin with his pants down on a toilet, and he yells at you. Some humor is universal. We also wandered up to admire a refurbished mill roof and a big ole’ steam engine. I will have to look more into early steam engine design to really understand what was revolutionary about each development.

This trip taught me that I have so much to learn about condensers.

Having learned all about jute, we then, finally, proceeded (with a short detour for a slice of Dundee cake, which was perfectly alright, it’s basically fruitcake) to the Discovery. The museum had some really interesting stuff about arctic exploration and most importantly had my favorite thing in a museum, old food. They had, framed, 114-year-old biscuits, and upon reviewing the photos I was charmed to discover that the caption in the frame was marveling that they were only 40-years-old. They also had unopened coffee packed for the original Discovery expedition, and cake fragments in a very nice box “alleged to have been sent to Captain Lawrence Oates on board the Terra Nova expedition 1910-1912.” Amazing!

Old biscuits.
Old cake in a box.

After the museum you head out and onto the ship. It really is an amazing ship, and very much a product of Dundee. It was the town’s experience in building whaling ships (a throughline from jute to Antarctic exploration) that gave them the ability to build the Discovery, and as it was in fact the “last traditional wooden three-masted ship to be built” in the UK (according to Wikipedia), it represents the zenith of the town’s skill. And for being the last wooden ship, on later voyages she actually carried a seaplane, and it just boggles me every time the overlap in different technologies.

This way to the Wardroom indeed.

Being a bit up there in years the ship does show its age and was getting a good chunk of work done. As we were exploring we were hearing hammering, which turned out to be people caulking the hull. At that moment I was remembering the caulking we saw in Kigoma and I was left thinking about the reach of time and tradition. The engines are no longer in the ship though they have a model of the fire box, and the wardroom and officer cabins are still there and look very very cool. You could so easily imagine yourself going on an expedition, and so fun to know that so many famous butts sat in those very chairs.

Having gotten quite a lot in during one day, we eventually picked ourselves up and got back on the train to Edinburgh. While waiting in the train station Costas sipping a hot chocolate and a chai latte though we spotted the Royal Scotsman (a train) which, after having watched so much Scottish travel YouTube felt like a real celebrity sighting. We took my final trip (for now) over the Forth Bridge and landed back in Edinburgh, picking up rather too much fish n’ chips for dinner. Our trip in Edinburgh was not over but it was remarkable to us how little time left we had in Scotland.

Famous butts.

Eurotrip: Dundee I

During our time in Scotland, the next big outside-of-Edinburgh adventure we had planned was (as you guessed from the title) Dundee! Getting to Dundee is much like getting to Perth, except you stay on the train slightly longer, so once again I got to experience the engineering magic of going over the Forth Bridge! Amazing.

We had so thoroughly enjoyed going to the V&A Museum in London that we figured it would also be a lot of fun to go to the V&A branch office in Dundee, and so that was our first destination. We arrived in town about 20 minutes before the museum opened so we admired the Dundee waterfront. They have a big ole’ sculpture of a whale, and of course the River Tay was gorgeous. You could imagine rather large fish coming out of this part. Given my enthusiasm for the Forth Bridge it was interesting looking across to (and having just crossed) the location of the Tay Bridge Disaster.

Eventually the V&A Dundee opened and so we head back toward the entrance. The building is very pretty, with no straight lines outside and it is covered in these pre-form concrete blocks (we learned they were pre-form on the inside, I’m not a concrete expert). The RRS Discovery (I’ll get to that) is right next to it, so you can hardly miss the ship connection. The V&A also has these shallow water pools beside it and the wind was whipping them up while we were there, and as you looked out from inside you could almost get the sense you were at sea. Meanwhile, the Discovery was in a dry dock, so an interesting contrast in building-like-a-ship and ship-like-a-building.

Inside the V&A we went up the stairs into the first gallery on Palestinian embroidery. That stuff was gorgeous. Here is the link to the exhibition Thread Memory: Embroidery from Palestine and another link to a longer related article. What the exhibition was displaying is tatreez, a type of embroidery and “a rural women’s craft, embedded in village life,” with different styles from each village. Dundee, turns out, is “twinned” with the Palestinian city of Nablus, hence the connection, and as such the exhibition did not shy away from current events. The signs noted that “for the past 45 years, the Palestinian flag has been displayed at the City Chambers in Dundee, even during periods when the flag was outlawed within Palestine.” One of the art pieces were plastic bags, embroidered with the things refugees carried in them as they fled.

Kiass by Aya Haidar, 2018-2025

Even without the weight of history, the garments on display were gorgeous. They were all so intricate, and the signs pointed out some of the symbology. The colors and geometric designs really spoke to the care that went into these garments that meant so much. And speaking of not-so-current events, one interesting detail on a particular taqsireh jacket from Bethlehem was that it was lined with tartan, which had been imported during the British mandate.

Departing the exhibit on tatreez, we bopped across to another gallery on Scottish designers, which had a hodgepodge of a lot of different Scottish stuff. They had fashion and they had paisley and they had ships and ships and ships. A great museum, what with all the ships. One sign said that in the early 20th century, fully 1 in 5 of the world’s ships were built in Scotland.

Model of the Saiko Maru, about 1888.

Our tour of Scottish design history done, we went outside to Heather Street Food to pick up some lunch. Between my super amazing wife and I, we got one “New York” and one “Philly” bagel, creations that were pretty good even if I am sure they would be disowned by their namesake cities. We also got two donuts. As we were eating a seagull was stalking us, which my super amazing wife referred to as a “Scottish monkey,” referencing the more traditional types of monkeys of Tarangire which stalked unawares tourists. We managed to finish our lunch and then made our way to Verdant Works.

Verdant Works is a really nice museum. It has a small courtyard, so you wouldn’t think it was so big, but behind that small courtyard is a large facility. Having bought tickets, our tour began with an intro by a nice gentleman by the name of John. John was a fairly charming, slightly older gentleman with a very thorough Dundee accent. Two Scottish ladies (who I think hailed from Aberdeen based on a later joke) joined us, and this caused John to go down a variety of tangents. It was very nice.

Interesting notes from John’s intro included that the mill owners hired women because they thought the women were less likely to unionize (and also got paid less), and Dundee was represented by Churchill at some point. I didn’t understand all the political history he was trying to explain but I was enthralled nonetheless. Though speaking of women, Dundee was apparently a very women-forward town, with so many being the breadwinners of their families from working in the jute plants (I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Verdant Works is a museum made out of a jute processing plant and telling the history of Dundee and jute).

Our story continues next week, woven together like jute…

Eurotrip: Mountain Whisky

Reading this week:

  • The Zambezi by Malyn Newitt

One of the most charming aspects of the place we were staying in Edinburgh is that one of the other apartments had a cat that just liked chilling right outside the door. Like, all the different doors to the various apartments led into a central stairwell. This door had a catflap, and sometimes there was a cat just chillin’ right on the doormat. The cat didn’t seem to go anywhere besides the doormat, and there weren’t any windows to the outside or anything, so this cat obviously just liked watching the passers-by in the stairwell. Oh, to be a cat.

A cat that knows that they’re about.

The big plan for this day was to climb up Arthur’s Seat. I was fairly excited for this. I had been to Edinburgh several times and Arthur’s Seat is right there and by all accounts is not too hard of a climb so it feels like I should have climbed it already. It was exciting to cross it off the bucket list. First we had to get there which involved a bus ride, a brief stop at Dunbar’s Close just because we were in fact close, and a few moments admiring the Burns Monument. We also walked by “Dynamic Earth” which featured a model of the Earth outside and a sign which read “Do not climb on the globe, the Earth is fragile,” which I thought was funny.

Eventually we got to the bottom of the hill. We had tried to take the easy trail, but it appeared closed, though having been there I do not quite understand any of the maps you find. So we instead diverted and more or less followed the crowds up the hill. I had thought it would be somewhat easier than Leicester Peak to climb but it was steeper and rockier than I expected, though not too bad in the end. The weather was about as good as could be hoped for, with sun and clear skies, though at the top of the hill the wind could threaten to knock you off your feet.

The summit, no chairs or lounges or any sort of seat in sight.

At the top the views were gorgeous. The way up had been gorgeous too, with heather in patches and the city gradually opening up. It gave a really different perspective on Edinburgh. Before climbing up Arthur’s Seat I hadn’t quite understood how sprawling and new the city really is. And from the top it is somewhat fantastical to be looking down upon Edinburgh castle and from afar. You could see clear to the Forth Bridge and for miles and miles around.

The way down was of course easier and by the time we got there we were quite peckish. The most convenient spot for a bite to eat was the café at Holyrood House which I can say I highly recommend. We had really only meant to pop into the gift shop, but then my super amazing wife got a mug that came with a free fill of tea at the café, and well, we were hungry anyway, but it was a visually cozy spot to eat and the food was pretty great and reasonably priced. Best venison sausage roll I’ve ever had.

Having demonstrated our dominion over earth and sky the next bits were water and fire and for that we went to Holyrood Distillery (via of course Ginger Twist Studio for some more yarn and knitting books). For all our time tramping around Scotland we hadn’t yet actually made it on a distillery tour and we were fixin’ to fix that. It was a really nice tour at Holyrood! The place is obviously set up for tours in mind which made it all pretty pleasant. Our tour guide was Diego, from Honduras, and he must have an interesting story. Most of our tour group was also from Latin America, though there was a French couple and a woman from Indiana. But that is all by the by, and we were there to learn about whisky. I just made an elements joke, but Diego told us that distilled alcohol was in fact called at one point “Quintessence,” the fifth essence.

The Holyrood Distillery tries to set itself apart from other distilleries by trying to glean different flavors from their whiskies by using different types of barley and yeast to get specific flavors. I did enjoy all the different flavors of the whiskies and gin they gave us to try. They had started us and the tour off with an elderflower and gin cocktail which my super amazing wife and I both very much enjoyed. Another big thing I learned is that Scotland apparently produces 1/3 of the world’s gin, and as just mentioned they do gin at Holyrood. I had thought that whisky distilleries would start making gin at the beginning to get some profit while they were waiting for first batches of whisky to age, but no, to produce gin they buy the alcohol from a supplier and then the stuff they do is the flavorings. Holyrood’s thing was making gin with only juniper (and beeswax and salt) to highlight the flavor of the juniper.

Getting back to whisky we did the usual bits about mash and what have you, and the final part of the tour was of course about barrels. Barrels used to age sherry are valuable for subsequently aging whisky, so much so that, according to Diego, all the money is in the barrels so people will age sherry in barrels, only to throw out the sherry and only sell the barrel. Interesting stuff. I wound up getting a small bottle of whisky at the gift shop to later to give to my parents for their anniversary.

So between the mountain and the whisky it was a really great day. Also too, the other thing in the middle of everything was that my super amazing wife and I were buying an unjustifiable number of books. We went to so many used and new bookstores that day. Between walking out of the apartment in the morning and returning to our orange cat friend in the evening, we were nine books heavier. We visited Topping & Co, McNaughtans, and Till’s through the course of the day and any willpower to not buy a book simply fell apart. These are the struggles we live with every day. Drained from our book-bosomed guilt, we cooked up some quite good fish pie for dinner in preparations for more nautical-themed adventures on the ‘morrow.

Eurotrip: Perth

Reading this week:

  • The Elements of Power by Nicolas Niarchos

I went to Perth, Australia one time via submarine. What a strange time that was. I hadn’t expected to go to Australia, I barely knew where we were, the drinking started right away, I hugged a koala, had fries with mayonnaise for the first time, and on the way back home they served us kangaroo steaks with every meal. The trip to Perth, Scotland was not like that at all.

During out stay in Edinburgh we wanted to take a few day trips to other places. So on this day we woke up early and got on the train, carrying pastries along to fortify us. These came in handy when we were stopped in Ladybank (a very funny name for a town) but before that we had to do the most exciting bit, which was cross the Forth Bridge! Big Forth Bridge fan here. I think I first read about it in The Way Things Work, perhaps my life’s seminal text. Unfortunately I don’t have a copy handy to fact-check myself here, though don’t bother doing it for me. But wherever I learned about it here I was finally crossing it on train, and that was amazing. I felt so safe. I tried to take some pictures and they all turned out bad but I did discover the existence of North Queensferry which I’ll have to visit someday. As the train rolled on hugging the Firth we enjoyed the views across to Edinburgh and on the other side all of the sheep and horses in yellow fields.

I enjoyed all the Victorian engineering in the train station that was our portal to Perth, though it was a long hike up and down to get to and from Platform 6. Our destination once in town was of course The Scottish Yarn Festival. As good an excuse to go to Perth as any. The whole yarn thing is of course my super amazing wife’s thing and not so much mine, but there was some interesting stuff and I learned about Latvian mittens which have very pretty designs. We also attended a talk by Donna Gillies all about her efforts to start up Highland Wool, a nascent wool processing company.

Donna not pictured.

From that talk, a few takeaways: I hadn’t thought about how big an issue water was, as they have a limited supply and are trying to recycle. From what I could tell they wash all the wool by hand which just sounds like so much work. The power at their farm also goes out for days at a time as well, so they are set up with a system that can handle those outages. It sounded like their only big piece of equipment was a giant carder they had recently got going. They had purchased a lot of old equipment for £5k which was nice because they had originally been budgeting for a Belfast Mini Mill setup for £100k. To get themselves started, they only (at the time at least) go to batting instead of making yarn. She also said that every bit of wool gets used, even if it is just stabilizing roads, which is not a thing I knew you could use wool for.

She also said that on their farm they have Hebridean sheep, which are very protective of their young and therefore good for a farm like theirs, which gets surrounded by predators. For a while all the animals and predators had moved away because the grass got too tall for ground nesters and therefore the predators had no food. Donna also said that the hardest part of the operation was tracking one client’s wool all the way through, which yeah, I can see how that is tricky, and reportedly requires a lot of paperwork. As a guy who had pondered setting up a yarn mill when I thought I was going to get let go, these were interesting lessons to hear.

“Trout Stream” (2013) by Debbie Lawson
Also “Trout Stream” (2013 by Debbie Lawson but now you can see the fish.
Silly glass geese. Gleese. Glooses.

After the talk my super amazing wife made her final yarn purchases and then off we went, after a spot of lunch, to learn about Perth. The biggest thing to know about Perth I think, based off of our visit, is that it is very fish-themed. Our first destination was the Perth Art Gallery. They had some really interesting stuff. They had a glass exhibition going on which featured some really gorgeous stuff, including some silly gooses and even examples of the Blaschka invertebrate models (it’s a different museum but here are some details). Having seen that we then had a wander into the Millais exhibition. The art was very nice but prominently displayed is a 44lbs salmon caught in 1884 by Millais himself on the River Tay itself. “Wow,” I thought, “what a unique thing to have on display in a museum gallery.” It certainly complimented the salmon rug sculpture thing on the floor which was visually beguiling in-person.

Next up was the Perth Museum, which we (I) wanted to go to explicitly to see the STONE of DESTINY. And maybe, you know, crown ourselves King of Scotland. Alas, we were unable to see it as a man had broken the display and so the exhibit was closed. It was a very cool museum and it traced the history of Perth from the neolithic until modern day. They had a 3000-year-old log canoe and Celtic and Roman artifacts. But upstairs was the real gem of the museum, a 64lbs salmon. The largest, apparently, ever taken from the River Tay. On the way between the Art Gallery and the Museum we had stopped by the River Tay itself and I am stunned that such salmon could have come out of it. In another spot of the museum was even yet another salmon, though this one at a waspish 19lbs. And then, as I inspected the Pictish stones on the first floor again there was a carving of salmon, swimming to us from across the ages. Truly bragging about the fish we caught is what ties all of humanity together.

The Fish of Destiny

With that lesson about the human race under our belt, we eventually turned our feet back to the train station and Edinburgh for more gorgeous views on the train and another evening of Lidl-based dinner. Who could ask for more?

A view from the Forth Bridge

Eurotrip: Edinburgh

Reading this week:

  • The African Revolution by Richard Reid (this could have been shorter)

Time for another vacation! This one we actually took last year, on the cusp of fall and while we were still in Sierra Leone. For their 40th wedding anniversary my parents had decided to book the whole family on a cruise through Europe. The timing of the cruise though meant my super amazing wife and I had a few days to spend somewhere in the vicinity of Europe before rendezvousing with the fam. We searched high and low for reasonable and interesting places to go in Europe before deciding, eventually, why not just go to the best bit? So off we were to Scotland!

Being, at this point, seasoned in Caledonian travel, our aim was a slightly more relaxed time of it. We had mixed success at this. Upon arrival where we were staying we were very quickly out the door again with one of our more important destinations in mind, a triumphant return to Aldi to recreate fond memories we had of a cozy night in Fort Williams. But hey, while we were out, why not hike into town, get some hot pot, admire the castle, pick up some tea at a tea shop, check out Waterstones, get some bubble bath at Boots only to discover our bathtub had no plug, and generally soak in all the things that Sir Walter Scott wrote about. We crashed hard but were well prepped for the next full day in Edinburgh.

Our first big set-piece destination were the National Galleries of Scotland. In our last romp around the Athens of the North (it was one Athens to another for us) we clearly didn’t see enough art so it was top priority to squeeze some in. There was some fantastic stuff there. The first piece that really caught my eye, maybe because it was in the entrance of the first gallery we went to and had lots of gold, was “The Hunt” by Robert Burns (giving a kid big shoes to fill if you name him that in 1869). All the gold makes it hard to do it justice in a photo, and also easily lost are the small indentations in the paint that made it interesting to inspect up close.

There were many such works that rewarded close inspection. I espied from across the room a gorgeous tetraptych of paintings only to get near and discover they were in fact gigantic embroideries. The series is by Phoebe Anna Traquair and is bonkers good and intricate. The photos I’ve included here are of the third piece, “The Progress of a Soul: Despair.” It is crazy how she pulls that off, literal years of work going into it. I tried embroidery exactly once and it nearly drove me to despair.

Speaking of embroidery, one other loose end to mention is that in this gallery they had, in addition to the regular notes on the paintings, various captions done by young students which were invariably insightful and delightful. One identified a brown splotch in an impressionist painting as equally likely to be a barn or a wooly mammoth. Reeling from the power of the mouths of babes, we also had to hit up the real star of the National Galleries: “Callum.” My super amazing wife was absolutely delighted with this pupper and with good reason. The museum’s gift shop is also filled with Callum merch (less full after we were done with it), again quite reasonably, though the one thing I noticed is that in some of the cartoony versions in the gift shop the rat is portrayed as alive which I thought somewhat undercut Callum’s triumph. But oh well.

Emerging from the galleries we proceeded on a good wander. We picked up lunch from a chippy and enjoyed it at the foot of Castle Rock and paid tribute to Wojtek with a visit to his memorial. We reviewed New Town and did some shopping and then with a good chunk more walking eventually made a return to Dovecot. We arrived late enough that we only had exactly one minute to admire the weaving of the tapestries, but what we came especially to see this time was their exhibit on the textiles of Ikea. Very interesting! Their work was reminiscent of African fabrics and if there isn’t a Nordic connection I do wonder if there is a North Sea one.

A small corner of the exhibition “Magical Patterns.”

Our art itch sated, we could finally turn our way towards home. We wandered through Armchair books and then on down to the canal which would take us back to our place. The canal was exciting since Ruth Aisling had just been there, so it was like seeing a celebrity! Along the canal there were flowers and it felt cloistered and the weather was still beautiful. We were getting passed by food delivery bikes constantly, and my super amazing wife pointed out that the canal existed for delivery, so historically, that was perfect. An Aldi dinner of sweet potato fries and mussels rounded out a phenomenal day.

Just Enough Money

I don’t re-read a whole lot of books. I think I would like to but there are always new (usually new old) books to read. Apropos of nothing though recently I did re-read Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris, by A.J. Liebling. I had picked it up quite a while back I think off of a New Yorker recommendation. I would have had a New Yorker subscription based on official advice about where worthy news came from. During the re-read the one thing I was really waiting for was this passage, which had stuck with me since my initial run-through:

I was a student, in a highly generalized way, at the Sorbonne, taking targets of opportunity for study. Eating soon developed into one of my major subjects. The franc was at twenty-six to the dollar, and the researcher, if he had only a certain sum – say, six francs – to spend, soon established for himself whether, for example, a half bottle of Tavel supérieur, at three and a half francs, and braised beef heart and yellow turnips, at two and a half, gave him more or less pleasure than a contre-filet of beef, at five francs, and a half bottle of ordinaire, at one franc. He might find that he liked the heart, with its strong, rich flavor and odd texture, nearly as well as the beef, and that since the Tavel was overwhelmingly better than the cheap wine, he had done well to order the first pair. Or he might find that he so much preferred the generous, sanguine contre-filet that he could accept the undistinguished picrate instead of the Tavel. As in a bridge tournament, the learner played duplicate hands, making the opposite choice of fare the next time the problem presented itself…

A rich man, faced with this simple sumptuary dilemma, would have ordered both the Tavel and the contre-filet. He would then never know whether he liked the beef heart, or whether an ordinaire wouldn’t do him as well as something better… A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment. In learning to eat, as in psychoanalysis, the customer, in order to profit, must be sensible of the cost.

He then goes on for much longer than I initially remembered about fish.

I think the profundity of the argument speaks for itself even if, like Liebling did, I have had to add a few more paragraphs to pad this out into a blog post. Actually I think the real power of the argument is that it makes a measure of poverty an essential ingredient to insight, though neither Mr. Liebling nor myself have ever been anything close to real need. But no one ever thinks of themself as rich and here the reader is rewarded for holding on to that notion.

Still, the essential point that you need to try different things and more importantly have reason to seriously consider the merits of what would otherwise be overlooked must be a good guide to developing both literal and metaphorical taste. The even harder skill in turn must be to hold onto that taste once you have the means but no need to employ it. Liebling a bit later does warn about older “eaters” set in their tastes, though maybe he would think one group earned their taste and one simply fell into it. Already I see my own weakness in re-visiting restaurants; the first time around inevitably I choose what I think is the best-looking thing on the menu and so when I go back I can’t be tempted into the second-best thing.

So maybe I am already doomed in Liebling’s eyes, or maybe I just need to go to more variable restaurants. Ideally, the small mom and pop (mère et père?) restaurants that Liebling finds throughout the book. The tragedy is that the book was already written as a memoir of a Paris that no longer existed when Liebling was writing about it, and a century on I figure there is no hope of finding my own beef heart and Tavel. But you never know until you try and maybe, by the time I get there, I will have a strict enough budget to train my taste.

Kigoma Graves Update

All three graves.

Tanganyika Notes and Records, which became Tanzania Notes and Records after independence, I think is an outsized publication in the realm of research into late-19th/early-20th century Lake Tanganyika goings-ons. You find it cited all over the place. The only problem is that it is kinda rare. There are rarer publications out there sure, and yeah it is actually in a number of libraries, but I mean like obscure ones! What I wouldn’t do to visit the U.S. Geological Survey Library! (actually now that I’m looking at it, I probably could, which is something to think about) I really wanted to read it, but options were limited.

It seemed to me the most likely place to read it was the Smithsonian Library. Several years ago I actually reached out about visiting, only to unfortunately learn that while independent researchers are welcome, the library can only support these requests during the workweek and during working hours, which unfortunately is exactly when I am working. But just last week (as I’m writing this) I arranged to take a Thursday off and go visit the library!

This was tons of fun. I was visiting the Anthropology Library, housed at the Museum of Natural History. Although the African Art Museum Library has a couple copies of “TNR” the Anthropology Library has more. Per the instructions provided, once I was through security I called up to the Library and they sent one of the librarians down to help me. Man they were so nice. Only two librarians were on duty (they are reportedly very understaffed at the moment), but they were still very enthusiastic about setting me up. We walked up to like, the the main library I guess and there figured out where the books I wanted were. They were a couple floors up so we walked through the backrooms of the museum, which despite visiting the Natural History Museum many many times in my life this was of course something totally new. We walked through at least one room full of storage for various insect specimens.

My only regret is not having longer to gawk at the full extent of their collections. We located where the copies of TNR were kept and pulled off the shelf every copy they had, before my new librarian friend set me up in a different room to read through them all. And so I spent the next four hours without even stopping for lunch to flip through decades of Tanganyika Notes and Records because I wanted to see every possible thing that could be relevant.

It was a roller coaster of emotions. As readers will recall, while in Kigoma I was trying to keep an eye out for the location of the graves of Rev. John Thomson and Rev. Arthur Dodgshun. I did not find them and pondered if there would even be any trace of them left. And so in one of the first articles I read out of TNR my heart leapt to discover a footnote referencing an article titled “A European Graveyard at Kigoma” by Sir John Gray, which could only be referencing these graves and might give a clue to their location. But my heart sank to realize the issue it was in (Number 37 from July 1954) was not one that the Smithsonian had! How on earth was I going to get that issue if the Smithsonian didn’t have it? I could only hope against hope that somehow it would pop up on eBay or something. But that thought was shelved as I had more TNR to get through.

As I was taking the metro home I went ahead and did some more Googling to see if maybe that issue was online. Only to discover, and you’re not going to believe this, that all of TNR is online at the Internet Archive. I didn’t need to go into the Smithsonian at all, even though I am very glad I did, that was super cool, what an amazing resource, they have a insanely good Africa collection and it is such a privilege to be able to visit and see some of the work that the researchers are all doing behind the scenes while being under-resourced if not underloved, though I can tell you they are very loved by me, specifically at least. But anyways the point being that you can read the article about the graves here.

From the article, we learn a couple things. The graves were in fact maintained, if maybe a bit poorly (the article notes the spelling mistakes in the photos below), through at least 1954. The article says they are “at the top of the hill behind the Government Hospital at Kigoma,” which narrows it down a bit. It would narrow it down more if I knew where the government hospital was in 1954, which I don’t, and I can’t find any maps that shed any light on it. However, now that I know it is on top of the hill and looking at Hore’s map again, I have to think it is on top of Mlole Hill. Nothing I can see on Google Maps confirms they are there, but there aren’t a whole lot of other options if indeed the grave stones are still recognizable. And of course as already mentioned we get the photos below, which will help to identify the graves if, again, they are still around. If someone is ever in Kigoma and can go take a look, let me know!

Closeup of Thomson’s gravestone.
Closeup of Dodgshun’s gravestone.

Goodbye Sierra Leone

Reading this week:

  • Fifth Sun by Camilla Townsend

By now as readers will have realized we have left Sierra Leone. We have been back in DC for a few months, having arrived right before the city was plunged into its entirely frigid depths. I feel the need here to wrap up our time in Freetown and say whatever goodbye is appropriate.

The entire time I was living there I found Sierra Leone to be a wonderful place. The city of Freetown is beautiful, draped over the mountains of the peninsula. People want to live there and consequently the city has been forced up the hills. It is already a tough place to balance both the immediate material concerns of the people and the long-term sustainability of the land itself, but I am excited to see how they work through those challenges in the next decade or so. In the meantime, the cascade of homes and lives from the mountains down to the sea was something to behold every time we rounded the right bend on the road.

I have lamented it in so many of my posts already, but I do really wish I could have travelled more in Sierra Leone. It is a tough place to travel if you don’t know it but I think that shouldn’t be so much of a hurdle to overcome. It is my fault for not doing better. And furthermore I think that because you have to work a little harder to dig up the history of the various towns you may visit it becomes all the more rewarding in the discovery. I never got to visit Sherbro Island or Plantain Island or fully trace the railroad up country. I would have liked to have hiked right into the border and the sources of the Niger river. Tiwai Island is my most glaring oversight and if I had only two more weeks or so I would have seen it. So many islands! And mountain peaks and valleys and forests. And even more broadly it would have been so great to see more of Sierra Leone’s neighbors and beyond in West Africa. But I suppose the world is so large and you could spend a lifetime studying just your own corner. There’s still time to see more.

The biggest joy in any act of learning is seeing from then on the connections to all the other things you come across. Sierra Leone has such a close connection to much of the history of the American southeast. We saw those connections before without understanding them, but now we are connected in a way we weren’t. Since our departure from Sierra Leone I’ve already gotten to see an explanation of Bunce Island at a National Park and now that is a personal connection for us. These understandings will only unfold and expand as time goes on.

Looking through some of the photos I don’t think I otherwise ever uploaded, Sierra Leone is a country of beautiful places and friendly people working hard to get by. And of cool-looking bugs, photos of which I liked to send to my one friend. Like all places I suppose its history has been shaped by the people coming to it, inland from the Sahara and forests and from the sea to its shores and up its rivers. Those people have sought their fortune by taking Sierra Leone’s resources in both soil or people. Others have come to Sierra Leone seeking freedom or just their place in the world and found it via hard work and toil. Sierra Leone has in turn shaped the world by the people coming from it, spreading those connections in ways hard to see until you’ve been there. It has long been on the map, with visits by the Queen and a place in pop culture, even if it takes a long time for people’s more dire perceptions to catch up to the modern day. Research and publications to that effect continue. And like all countries, it has more work to do to make the material conditions of many people’s lives better but that is a pursuit we can all help with through judicious acts of interest and learning. Until next time, Sierra Leone.

Sierra Leone Peace Museum

One of the very last spots I went to while we were in Sierra Leone was the Peace Museum.

I think the primacy of this connection is fading, but I would guess that if someone knew one thing about Sierra Leone, it would be that there was a civil war. The civil war ended in 2002 and in its wake the government of Sierra Leone asked the UN for help in setting up the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Special Court was replaced in 2013 by the Residual Special Court for Sierra Leone. The Peace Museum is associated with the Residual Special Court and housed on its grounds (there is also downtown the “Sierra Leone Peace and Cultural Monument” which is related but different; the Peace Museum is here).

I visited on a weekday morning. I took a few pictures before seeing a sign asking one not to though I think the photo at the top is okay. If you won’t be able to go to Sierra Leone soon there is a virtual tour on the Residual Court’s website as well. When I first arrived I was alone but eventually a person running the place realized I was there and began to take me on a tour.

I learned a lot. When we first moved to Sierra Leone I sort of avoided learning about the war. I didn’t actively avoid it, but focused instead on other parts of history. Colonial-era history is more my specialty anyway but this was also my way of avoiding stereotyping Sierra Leone as merely a place where a civil war happened. If you look up Sierra Leone it seems as though all the recent scholarship is about the war. There is also of course Blood Diamond. But it is a wide and beautiful place where more happens than a war.

I was especially interested in the efforts towards justice. Besides the court there was also the Truth and Reconciliation commission, documenting what the people went through. During the tour we saw the archives which are well cared for and I believe in the process of being digitized. Much of the museum focuses on these efforts along with those of the Special Court, since the museum is on the premises. The bulk of the tour was about the function of the Court and its workings. The most surprising thing I learned is that the Special Court “only” ever indicted 13 people for war crimes and convicted 9 (of the other four, three died before their conviction and one was or still is a fugitive). The Court focused only on “those who bear the greatest responsibility” for the war, which is why they focused on so few. But still I was stunned that all the work of the court, and all the pains of the war, and yet it took only these few convictions for justice to be served. That is a result I am still considering.

For what else the museum comprises of, the largest physical collection (besides the archives) were a lot of samples of the “juju” (as it was labelled) that the fighters thought would protect them. These are all carefully catalogued and on display, some with more explanation than others. Some you can see on the virtual tour. These were interesting to see for all the influences they contain, and illuminating as to one way that people can come to do the things they do in war. There was also a room dedicated to mass graves, which thankfully only had pictures of the memorials, and another room about the Mongolian contingent of the peacekeeping force who had guarded the court facility. Furthermore on the walls are the testimonies of the victims of the war, with what they went through and how they are surviving now.

And after about an hour the tour was over and I departed the museum. Achieving a sense of justice after such a cataclysmic event is hard. In Sierra Leone it seems, as far as I could tell, to have been successful. The scars of war are still evident but where Sierra Leone could rebuild they have rebuilt and where they couldn’t they have remembered. I suppose the evidence of the Special Court is that it isn’t the number of convictions which make for justice but the care with which those convictions were reached and the opportunity for people to be heard.