waiters, vampires and booze

Otherwise known as "Edinburgh, Day Two."

(To recap, Canuck friend Jeff and I are in the capital of Scotland, taking a three-day side trip from a visit with our English friends down in Newcastle in June 2010. Let's see now, it's...June 20, to be exact. All this happened a while ago.)

CHAPTER ONE: A FEW WORDS ABOUT WHISKY

Now I suppose you're thinking "Hey, wait a minute. This is the Postman we're talking about. That erstwhile blogging bartender. And he's in Scotland. What the heck? Where's the booze? He's been tipsy most of the time he's been in the U.K., for Pete's sake. He spent the first two days in Newcastle soaked in beer (watching the World Cup in the pubs), and then greased his gears with whiskey and Guinness when he went to Ireland. So now he's in Edinburgh, swimming in Scotch and Scotch ale, and there's been no action. Sure, yeah, he had a little Ardbeg yesterday afternoon with his haggis, but that's the lot. What's the deal here?"

Well may you ask. Don't worry, I'm getting there.

I'd crossed Islay off my list. So far I hadn't tried any Campbeltown or Lowlands whiskies.

Oh, goodness me. Have I told you about the Scotch-distilling regions of Scotland yet?

Ahem...

As you can see, there are five: Highland, Lowland, Speyside, Campbeltown, and Islay. (The Islands is not an officially recognized Scotch-brewing region, and is lumped in with Highlands.)

Now, before I went to the British Isles, I'd had both Highland and Speyside whiskies. Thought they were dang good, though. The first step to becoming a connoisseur, however, is to familiarize yourself with the many different incarnations of your oeuvre.

If you're reading this from an American standpoint, you've probably only ever had Speyside or Highland whisky. Those seem to be the most popular over here. Glenmorangie and Glenlivet are from the highlands, for example; Glenfiddich and Speyburn are both Speyside whiskies.

I'd never tried Lowland, Campbeltown or Islay whiskies. Thanks to the Ardbeg I'd sampled the previous day, I could knock Islay off the list. There are hundreds more Islay whiskies to sample, and someday I'll get to them, but at least I can say I've at least tried an Islay whisky now.

But I still needed to assay Lowland and Campbeltown, see?

And Jeff and I still needed to climb Calton Hill.

So we decided to get that stuff done on June 20, our second full day in Edinburgh.

CHAPTER TWO: IN WHICH I MEET A VAMPIRE ROMANIAN WAITER

Sometime during the night (during which my mysterious bug disappeared completely) our roommate came back. I had no clues as to the man's nationality, race, or even age: it was pretty dark in the church. I might've been more curious about the matter if I hadn't been concentrating so hard on getting back to sleep...hard enough when you're feeling sick and there are 18 people nearby sawing logs.

I got a better look at him when the new day dawned, and the sky turned from black to purple to blue outside the big window. He was a balding man, stubble ringing his head from ear to ear, dressed in a white polo shirt and black slacks. Yes, those were his pajamas. He looked to be in his thirties, and quite exhausted.

I bumped into him again on the front stoop of the church. (If there's a fancy word for "front stoop" in church lingo, I don't know what it could be. I don't even know what a "nave" is, for crying out loud.) He was smoking a desperate cigarette. Or rather, the cigarette itself wasn't desperate, but the way in which he was smoking it seemed to be. He smoked silently, with quick, furtive, darting movements of his lips, hands and arms, like a nervous bird taking a drink. It looked as though he was accustomed to rushing the action.

"Cold," he said. "It is always so cold here."

He rubbed his arms.

Noticing his thick accent, I asked him where he was from. (Of course I couldn't tell. I'm an American.)

As it happened, he was Romanian.

You'll never believe this, but guess which part of Romania he was from?

You guessed it, folks. Transylvania. (That was the only part of Romania you knew the name of anyway, right? Besides Pennsylvania, obviously.) And to make it even more awesome, the guy pronounced the word "Transylvania" exactly like Count Dracula. Turan-seel-VAY-nee-ah.

Not for the first time, I thought to myself:
The folks back home are never going to believe this.

I wasn't the least bit concerned that I'd been sharing a room with Nosferatu all night. I was intensely curious, rather. What the hell was a Romanian doing in Edinburgh, anyway?

I put the question to him, omitting certain key phrases.

"I am a waiter," he said. "I have been here for months. The money is good here."

I felt like giving him a black cape and saying "Here, whirl this about yourself whenever you speak. I'll stand over here and get goosebumps."

But I didn't have a black cape.

Foolish cinematic fantasies aside, I was amazed. Months! Months living in that tiny bunk in that cramped room with no ceiling, no lock on the door, and a communal bathroom down the hall. Why? Why would this man subject himself to that? Why would he come all the way from Romania (which he had earlier described as green, beautiful, muggy and warm this time of year) to Scotland, to work late nights as a waiter, and come home to a lumpy bunk and unfamiliar roommates and tourists blowing chunks into their wastebaskets half the night?

(Make no mistake: by this point, I wanted to live in Edinburgh too. I'd have preferred something more comfortable than a hostel, though.)

Yeah, sure, he'd said the money was good in Scotland. But Scotland is part of the U.K., and the British pound ain't that far ahead of the euro, or at least it wasn't when I was there. I was still stumped. Seemed a damned difficult way to get a little extra cash.

After I got home, I related the story to my parents. Dad took a swig of his martini and then a guess: "He was probably an illegal immigrant."

I was bewildered. It was an angle I hadn't considered before. It made sense, though. Service job. Cheap, low-profile, low-impact accommodations. Night work. Nervous habits. I didn't really understand how a European could be an illegal immigrant in Europe, though. The U.K. is part of the E.U., and so's Romania, as far as I'm aware. But maybe there was some paperwork or visa that this Transylvanian maître d' had skipped out on.

What a profound effect it had on me. It was possible that we were wrong, of course; the fellow might just have been a good honest immigrant living as cheaply as possible, sending all his hard-earned moolah to his little Romanian grandmother back home in the castle (uh, I mean, cottage).

But if it was true, and my tall-pale-and-mysterious friend was illegal, it shifted my worldview around a little. I knew there existed poverty, hunger, strife, and deprivation in Europe, as anywhere else. But being completely ignorant of Romania in all respects (except fangs), I was shocked by the notion that things might be bad enough there for some folks to emigrate. To be forced to emigrate.

Some things do not change, no matter where you go.

It wasn't the first time I'd had that thought. Nor will it be the last.

We passed the time of day, the chelner and I. He smoked in his twitchy fashion, staring up the street; I rocked back and forth on the balls of my feet and soaked it all up. The people you meet, I thought to myself. The people you meet.

The operative word here being "people."

CHAPTER THREE: CLIMBIN' DA HILLZ

So then, after my encounter with the Romanian Alien, Jeff and I—

Oh, hell.

This post is getting kind of long.

I'll tell you about Calton Hill some other time. You'll have to content yourself with the deluxe transient vampire and my little whisky refresher. Hope it was didactic.

Good night, and good luck.