We live as long as we fly
I grabbed my stuff and hopped on a bus closer to the center, where I landed in my new little room. I was met by a black guy again, and a jacked one at that. To add to the weirdness, his name was Giovanni. He turned out to be originally from Nigeria, and I barely held back a joke about princes and millionaires. Giovanni was an electrical engineer, studied in Edinburgh, and worked at the uni.
In the morning, I spent a long time googling what a foreigner should do in a case like mine, especially without insurance. Because of my shyness and anxiety, I always have a problem when there's no ready-made recipe for how to act in a given situation. I found a universal short number for non-emergency medical help in Scotland — 111. It turned out that socialist ideas are traditionally stronger in Scotland than in other parts of the United Kingdom. (Which, by the way, influenced the work of Banks, whom I mentioned earlier). So, this number is supported by the state, rather than private clinics and organizations like in other parts of the UK. As a result, it is reliably accessible at any off-hour anywhere in Scotland, at least in theory.
Alas, I couldn't get through to it from my Latvian number. Try as I might, I couldn't dig up a long number or a website. So much for socialism. Free and universal, but efficiency and forethought are down the drain. In the end, I said screw it, and just decided to go to the nearest hospital in the morning, called the Royal Infirmary, since it was relatively close, albeit by bus.
The Water of Leith Walkway is a marked path that leads along a small river flowing through Edinburgh and emptying into the Firth of Forth, the bridges over which I've already told you about. The whole path is about 22 km long, and at first I thought about walking the whole thing in a day. However, man proposes, and fate plays jokes on him. It turned out that I never walked the whole path, just two long chunks and one short one. On this day I didn't have enough time left to go to the very beginning. I took a bus to about the end of the first third, from where I started trudging along, listening to podcasts and YouTube videos a bit.
The path turned out to be beautiful and interesting; it's even amazing how a path with so much nature, sometimes quite untouched, can pass through a relatively large city. The landscape along the way changes too: now hills, now little waterfalls, now tall broadleaf trees, now bushes. The path is usually gravel, sometimes it comes out onto asphalt into the "city," but rarely. You often meet dog walkers, cyclists. Less often — runners and idle wanderers like me.
Our way home lay through Glencoe, a very beautiful gorge in the southwest. A glen, if I'm not mistaken, is a valley in Gaelic. I probably haven't mentioned it yet, but one of the languages in Scotland is — Gaelic, from the Celtic family of languages, of which only Irish is otherwise widely known. There aren't that many native speakers left, around seventy thousand, but their number is at least not falling. Measures are being taken, kind of like what we're doing with Latgalian, only more serious. Radio, TV, press and websites are published, road signs and pointers are duplicated, you can study it in schools, and so on. Even the police cars have TODO written on them. The language is beautiful, but a bit tricky for native English speakers. Stefan tried to pick it up, but stumbled when he realized that word order in a sentence can vary, and the meaning depends on the order. In Russian, basically, it's the same.
