The Perfect Romance and Shield-Biting

Made it. Back to Scotland. And you guys. You know how when you are flying alone there’s that thing where as people are boarding you are sending prayers and entreaties into the Universe about your incoming seat mate especially those qualities you absolutely do not want? I’m here to tell you that sometimes this works. On a ten hour transcontinental and transatlantic flight I somehow drew a tall gorgeous German physicist with dark hair, sleepy eyes and long eyelashes. I am not even kidding. I was so gobsmacked that I could barely speak to or look at him at first. Until, that is, I couldn’t open our introductory snack of artisanal cheese crackers. No really I couldn’t. He Sir Walter Raleigh’ed the situation and gallantly surrendered his open packet to me while he struggled with mine since it didn’t have the “notch” or whatever – at which point we started talking.

Dear Reader, I will not hold you in suspense but instead will answer your immediate question by breaking the devastating news that he has a girlfriend. Also I can’t remember his name because his mother is from Pasadena and his father is Bosnian and his father won naming rights.

He was born in Germany and moved to Zurich for his PhD (!) in quantum physics (!!) and he owns his own quantum computing company (!!!) that sells parts to, among others, the NSA. His ten minute presentation to me about quantum computing, complete with eloquent hand gestures, made me die a little on the inside. He had been in Portland and Seattle for a conference and meetings with Intel and Microsoft. He planned to disembark in Paris and hop on a private prop plane to a small town in France where he was meeting a friend for a sail around the English Channel. He also is about to take possession of a new catamaran which will feature prominently in his plan to take a year off with the dreaded partner – whom I immediately liked when he said he thought sailing was fun but his girlfriend really liked to arrive at places.

We had a great conversation wherein he said things like, “I usually don’t talk this much or share things like this.” To which I responded well that’s because we are soulmates (actually well that’s because I am a relentless question hamster). We both love the flight tracking thing and he reached over to my seatback screen and pinched and moved the map to show me various things like where his uncle lives and also the freaking Northwest Passage.

And obviously we slept together side by side after we ate our tiny portions of marginal food wrapped in foil. He had a very elaborate sleeping-on-a-plane system (he travels a lot) whereby he completely covered his head with his hoodie and put on weird sleep goggles but this charming quirkiness was easily forgiven.

In the morning he remarked about how well he had slept (because soulmates) and we embarked on a political discussion about the rise of white nationalism around the world and also how direct democracy works in Switzerland. While not in NATO because #neutrality he said their fighter jets were very old and this is the kind of national security thing that VOTERS DECIDE and they have refused to authorize modernization which seems risky since their defense is all on them and Russia is a two hour flight away. Also unsurprisingly the government has tons of excess tax money they’ve collected but can’t deploy because voters won’t greenlight anything.

He invited me to lean over and look out his window several times – and this was before we had brushed our teeth – once at a wind farm in the sea and once, in his sad words, at the “disappointing” English Channel which was like glass. While this would have been helpful during the Dunkirk evacuation, not so much when one has a sailing trip planned.

I also admittedly touched his shoe one time because he was wearing Tigers and I just got a pair and love that little flap over the heel, and also we both ordered our Starbucks airplane coffee black. I’m just saying.

Once we landed he helped me figure out my connecting gate because Charles de Gaulle is weird – as he described it the airport is organized in an unnecessarily complicated way for no reason except this is obviously a very French thing. Finally, I gave him a hug and we bid farewell forever.

I’m very sorry I don’t have a photo but I felt it would be a bridge too far and he was already, I could tell, being very Swiss/German about the hugging situation.

Travel, my friends, is the best.

And so I made it to Edinburgh in a very pleasant fashion, had a jet-lagged meal at Tom Kitchin’s new restaurant KORA, a lovely walk around parts of town I haven’t seen and spent some time at the Scottish National Museum.

The Museum is something. It’s like all the museums crammed into one. So you wander through quiet rooms devoted to fashion and design, through busy child-packed rooms featuring natural history, science and technology and finally through largely kid-free rooms devoted to Scottish history. So one minute there’s a dinosaur hanging from the ceiling or maybe an old airplane and the next you are looking at a silver box owned by Mary Queen of Scots and a sword allegedly carried by Robert the Bruce.

The coolest thing though is the Lewis Chessmen, 11th century hand-carved ivory chess pieces found in a Viking hoard on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The Scottish National Museum owns eleven of the pieces and the British Museum owns the remaining 82 (because that Museum has famously pilfered most of its collection from other countries’ stuff and I know that technically Scotland is part of the UK but still). Nobody knows the circumstances surrounding the find, the pieces just appeared one day in 1831 at a Society of Antiquaries of Scotland exhibit.

My favorites are these:

Since this is Scotland, there is of course a Harry Potter connection. In Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry and Ron played their game of Wizard’s Chess with a replica of the Chessmen.