The Highland Games and a Fond Farewell to Stirling

Hello Everyone,

Daniel is going to start this post off by telling you about out interesting morning in Stirling.

After running across the street to the grocery store for breakfast, we noticed that the front door was missing the lock that it had had the night before. We didn't think much of it and continued upstairs to eat our breakfast. Once up there I overheard the manager complaining about being woken up at 5:00 AM because of the 'vandals'. I asked him what had happened, and he told me (and the rest of the room) that that morning at 3:30, two very drunk locals had broken the lock on the front door and spent 5 minutes using up 5 different fire extinguishers all over the staircase leading up to the reception. 4 were left in various places around the hostel and one was taken with them. What had happened was that one guest had been out drinking with two locals, who then wanted to come into the hostel to continue to party. The guest pretended that he had forgotten the code that would gain him access to the front door, and when the two locals finally left, he quietly let himself in. The locals returned and, noticing that he had let himself in, began pounding drunkenly on the door. After a minute or two, one of the two leaned against the door, and (caught on video), the other pushed him hard enough that he broke the lock and fell through the door into the hallway. From there we can assume that they they somehow equated revenge on the guest with trashing the fire extinguishers. Throughout the day the hostel was visited by both the owner of the hostel, the owner of the building, and two police officers who took the situation much more seriously than the manager expected.

While watching the security video of the break-in, the manager warned us about the 'crazy estonian lady' who would talk to us for hours about being a prostitute for Vladimir Putin. Lo and behold, as I returned to join Kamaljot in the common room, he seemed bewildered while a lady in her 40s was gesturing wildly while speaking in Russian. When she spotted me, she smiled, and rushed back to her seat at the table to get her laptop, with which she began again and spoke to us in rapid Russian, peppered with English phrases. For example: "slkdsdfhkjlsdhf business kjfldsi Russia. RUSSIAN BUSINESS [while grabbing her groin." Then she proceeded to show us pictures of Putin and Medvedev in various places around the world, and highlighting random passages in articles. For example, in France in 2011, Putin was photographed in front of a statue of a horse smelling a soldier's boot. The then looked at us wild-eyed and quickly said something involving 2 months in London, oral sex, and Putin saying she smelled like a horses boot. Thankfully after about 5 minutes the manager made eye contact with me, winked and asked us sternly if we had yet brought our linens from our beds to the reception, saving us from what is reportedly a two and a half hour unintelligible presentation of random Russian news articles.

Kamaljot has gone to bed, so I may as well continue by telling you a bit about our trip to the 156th Annual Alva Highland Games.

We caught a bus from Stirling to a town about 20 minutes outside of the city called Alva. Alva has a population of about 5000, and is well known around Scotland for its annual games. Usually there are many towns whose games happen in July, but nearly all of them have been postponed due to the lousy weather this year, including the ones we had originally planned on attending in Balloch in the park of Loch Lomond. Anyway, Alva has continued it's sesquicentennial tradition of hosting the games on the second Saturday in July. 

We arrived while much of the games were still being set up, but things were in full swing before long. The area was centered around the games area, which was ringed by a track for some of the longer foot races as well as the bike races. Running lengthwise down the centre of the ovular track is the 90 meter sprint track. on the close side (to us) was the dancing platform and the judges tent, while the far side was the competitors' area and the heavyweight area. This entire area is surrounded by spectators' benches, which in turn is surrounded by a fun fair with rides and many, many food trailers. 

The first event to start was the highland dancing. Many boys and girls in traditional highland formal dress showcased their dancing skills to a piper's melody.

 The dancing continued on for the entirety of the games, and there was consistently an event happening at at least 2 of the 3 other areas. On the long track, they began with preliminary races for the 1600m bike race, and many of the longer runs. On the sprint track a good deal of time was spent on the preliminaries for all of the sprints for different age groups. It struck us that for all of the events there was never any gender segregation, and in many events women and men fared equally. The races were all fairly standard, besides the cyclists attempting to move quickly while sinking in the Scotch mud. The unusual parts came in the heavyweight area. They began with a shotput competition, which lasted for hours, as each competitor (all big, burly men with kilts and t-shirts) had three opportunities to throw each of the seven different weight categories. After the shotput came the hammer throw, in which the competitors gripped a wooden handle with a weight on the end (again, various weights, but most of them were around 20lbs), and spun around three times before releasing it. Every few seconds we'd notice a giant hammer flying over our view of the races. 

Two of the most interesting (and usual) events happened at the end of the heavyweight games. The first was the caber toss, in which the competitors lift a 19'6" log, run forwards, and flip it upwards, forcing the far end towards the ground. The object of the event is for the caber to fall away from the thrower at a straight angle (if the thrower is running from 6 on a clock towards 12, and throws at the centre of the clock, a perfect toss puts the caber pointing at 12), but it is a feat even to have the caber complete it's arc. Each competitor again had three chances to throw, and only two or three managed proper throws. 

After the caber toss, the last heavyweight event was the Weight Over the Bar competition in which, you guessed it, competitors attempt to throw a weight over a bar. Competitors stand directly under a 19' bar and attempt to throw a 56lb weight from between their legs over the bar without knocking the bar off. One handed. Again, you get three tries, and many competitors knocked the bar off of its stand.

(sorry the video is sideways, my fault)

The most astonishing event by far was not one of the heavyweight events, but rather one of the races, called the Hill Race. Behind the games area rose a large hill (or rather a small mountain), which is a part of the Ochil Hill Range. Beginning from the far side of the track from the mountain, competitors would being running halfway around the track before peeling off, running through town, across a golf course, over an ancient wall, and up the hill to varying points (depending on the age group competing). A different group left at quarter past every hour, starting with those aged 9-11, then 12-14, then 15-17, and finally the adult run. The adults ran to the summit and back, with the record for the 2.6km, 400m climb being just over 18 minutes, set in 1981. This year the winner came in at just over 20 minutes, winning over more than 50 other competitors in the adult race.

The 'Hill'

After the excitement of the Highland Games, we headed back to Stirling, collected our bags from the Hostel, and caught a train to Glasgow where we were to take an 11:00 bus overnight to Birmingham. In Glasgow we found ourselves a quick dinner at a KFC before finding our bus. As we learned when we presented the driver our reservation number, somehow in the headache of the 14 trillion timetables we'd seen, we had booked the bus for tomorrow night (15th-16th). This was not a problem, schedule wise, but it was 11 PM and we didn't have a place to stay! We took the news rather well and started slogging through Glasgow's club district on a Saturday night with our giant backpacks towards the hostel we'd stayed in earlier that week. Upon arrival we learned that our hostel was completely booked, but the nice receptionist gave us directions to another hostel, owned by the same person, on the west end of town by the University which might have some space. This time the journey was not so lighthearted, through empty streets and past dark, abandoned parks. After another 30 minutes or so we finally found the hostel, 5 minutes before they accepted their last reservation. We booked our rooms and settled in, It was not a nice hostel by far (the common room was a bare room with a single light, a picnic table, and a vending machine), but it was a place to sleep that wasn't a store doorway or a train station, so we were satisfied. We stayed up fairly late blogging and writing letters, and eventually fell asleep past 1AM.

I'm not sure how Kj usually signs off so..

Th-th-th-that's all folks!

-Daniel

P.S. Sorry for the typos, I'm not yet used to kj's keyboard, and it is quite late here so I'm not in my top spelling and grammar form.