Andrew Seiple's Blog: Transmissions From the Teslaverse - Posts Tagged "scotland"

About four weeks ago, I took my family and went to Scotland.

I had good reason to do so: This was a working vacation. I was off to a writing event, 20booksto50k Edinburgh. I went to meet several good friends I'd never seen face to face, and learn a few things from accomplished writers, both in and out of my field.

Now.

I've never been off my birth continent before.

I worked hard to go in there with no expectations.

And holy fudge, it blew my mind.

Not just the conference, and the networking, and the awesome time spent writing with other writers, hanging with people who GET it, folks who stay up into the wee hours working and reworking paragraphs...

But the city itself. Edinburgh is old. Edinburgh is big. Edinburgh is cosmopolitan in a way few US cities can match.

In the one week of my stay, I heard more languages spoken than I had in my previous forty-one years of life.

I saw people of all sorts getting along, walked the streets without fear or concern, and generally was accepted without hesitation.

I accepted to get some ribbing about Trump (Whom I didn't vote for and want gone, ) but nobody gave me crap about our orange tyrant. I expected to catch some eyerolling when I was clumsy and hesitant on the public transportation (I haven't been on a bus since the early nineties,) but everyone helped, and let me adjust.

It's eye opening.

Living in the US, you get told a lot of things about the rest of the world, things that are exaggerated or frankly lies. Things that right-wing propaganda harps on again and again to keep people from looking over the pond and wondering why people over there are so happy.

Objectively you can read about it and know it isn't so, but still there's gonna be a part of you that always wonders...

Edinburgh was good. The people were good, and maybe someday I'll be back there.

But when I do, I tell you this now, I'll be staying in someplace with better beds. My back is still messed up from the dorms we were in, and my chiropractor keeps sucking his teeth and shaking his head.

Ah well.

Back to writing. This next book is about a human dreaming he's a dragon, and dragon who dreams that he's human...