Day 5: Edinburgh

Edinburgh has a lot of hills. A lot of hills. Steep ones. In the course of our five hours of pub crawling, we walked up and down and back up again. I doubt there's a flat spot in the entire city. Lemont and I arrived by train from York at 3:30, and Duncan (grad-school friend) and his friend Simon (new to me) picked us up. We met Matt and Andrew (grad-school friends) at a pub.

We hit six pubs, I think. (Things got a little foggy toward the end.) I wish I had kept track of the names, but by the third one, I likely wouldn't have been able to remember anyway. Being a lightweight, I didn't drink as much as everyone else (save Andrew, who wasn't drinking), but I still had more than my share. I just let Duncan pick the beers for me, since he knows more about such things. I had ales of all sorts, including one really cool one made with heather instead of hops. It was great until it started to get warm, whereupon it started to taste like perfume. All I can say is that it's a good thing for me that pubs close at 11 in the UK, because they would have had to carry me home.

Matt lives in Milwaukee, but I had to fly to England to see him. He's busy with a dissertation and a two-year-old. Andrew and I weren't really close—I always thought he looked at me like I was a bug—but it was nice to see him. Duncan was still all rakish smiles and bad puns, in a fashionably retro leather jacket and new Converse All-Stars. Lemont was not much different for three years in England, except that he pronounces his "got" and "not" like a Brit.

Some things had changed in the three or four years since I'd seen some of them. I was the only one to remain unmarried; I was the only one not working on a PhD. (We made a rule early on that anyone complaining about his dissertation had to buy the next round.) But a lot of things were exactly the same; if not for the hills and the good beer and the accents around us, we could have been at The Bird in Mt. Pleasant. We had some of the same conversations. Matt and Andrew and Lemont talked about God; Duncan and Simon talked about beer. I did a lot of listening to other people's conversations. The evening was the perfect length; any longer, and I would have had to make the choice between drinking too much, and thus getting sick, and being bored.

The next day, before our train left, Lemont and I dropped in on Liz, another friend. She had been the assistant department secretary the entire time I was at Central. She had dated Duncan, but they broke up and married other people. She lives and works in Edinburgh, and we stopped by her office. It was really great to see her.

Then it was time for the five-hour train ride back to London. Lemont and I brainstormed on a movie we want to write until he got off the train at York, and I was left to attempt to sleep on the train. Good thing: I was in the so-called quiet car, where cell phones are supposed to remain off and conversations quiet. Bad thing: there were a bunch of "chavs," which is British slang for asinine thugs in knockoff track suits and gold chains. They were loud and obnoxious, and they even yelled at an old woman who asked them to be quiet. There are assholes in every country, I guess.