It was Saturday morning and Grass Market was a bustle with food vendors and crafters selling their goods beneath pop up canopies. We had wanted to wake up early but it just wasn’t in the cards. By 1PM we had concierge knocking on our door, letting us know that if we stayed any longer they would charge us for another night.  We dropped our bags at the front desk with plans to pick them up later in the day. We had about two hours to kill before Grietje would arrive so we ventured out in search of a coffee shop with decent WiFi.

We walked up Victoria Street. First we stopped at a tweed specialist shop where Neil flirted with the idea of buying a new wool flat cap then we ventured into The Old Town Book Shop where I picked up five post cards. I had always wanted to write post cards when I traveled ever since I was a kid. The only problem was that I never really went anywhere for a long enough period of time to justify it. I would often send a post card to a friend on a trip and get home before it arrived which kind of defeated the purpose. So this time I made it a point to collect the addresses of some of my friends and family and make an effort to send some cards out whenever I moved around.

There was a small place called Filament Coffee across the street from the bookstore that advertised free WiFi.  So we stepped in, ordered a couple of teas and got cozy. I wrote out my postcards and then delved into some work I needed to get done for my business back home. When I had left I had told my two partners that I would make it a point to still get work done while I am here. Now that I was in the thick of it, I was starting to realize that it was much easier said than done. I don’t know if it is just bad luck or some kind of international conspiracy to keep free Internet painfully slow, but such was the case at every hot spot where I managed to get a signal.

After several failed attempts at uploading a video to YouTube I finally gave up and Neil and I left to go find lunch somewhere. We passed a narrow cave of a stare-well where we heard live music being played.

“Neil. Buskers man, we gotta go check it out,” I said.

We walked up the steps and saw a young man and woman playing music. I reached into my pocket, pulling out what little change I had, tossed it into their guitar case, pulled out my camera and started recording.

Neil went ahead to grab some food. I stuck around for another song and chewed the fat for a moment before leaving. As much as I wanted to keep listening and talking with them, I didn’t want to hover too long. I still didn’t really know the city and I was worried that the longer Neil and I stayed separated the greater our chance of truly losing track of each other would become.

 

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE. ITALIAN BUSKERS IN EDINBURGH

Neil had said he would be at the restaurant at the top of the stairs when he walked away, but when I got to the top of the steps and looked around, I noticed that there were more than one and they all kind of looked the same. I looked and looked and looked for Neil with no luck. I reached into my phone to call him and then realized I couldn’t because A: My phone didn’t work in Europe and B: Even if it did, I wouldn’t be able to afford even the shortest of phone calls. Eventually, I found Neil munching down on some blood pudding upstairs at the very last bar.

It was around 3pm at this point and we had only one more hour to kill before Grietje would be making it into town. She had already landed in Edinburgh and had gotten on a bus leaving from the Airport and into the old part of town. She said her bus would be letting her off at the train station so we headed north, finding another coffee shop called Café Musa on Bank Street one block over from Queen Street.

Queen Street is probably the biggest tourist center in Edinburgh. It’s the road that leads to the castle and is filled with all sorts of shops vendors and street performers. If you’re looking to stand in lines at gift shops, over pay for food, or shell out the £16.00 for a tour of Edinburgh Castle, this is the place to go. Ergo we tried to spend as little time as possible there.

We had walked into Café Musa right as it was closing, but they still let us hang out in there until they were done cleaning and breaking down their kitchen area. I used their WiFi to get on Facebook and touch base with Grietje. All of the busses in Edinburgh have free WiFi too, so we were able to tell Grietje where we were. While we were waiting one of the employees struck up a conversation with us.

Michael was an average build man from southern Scotland. He didn’t normally work at the café but was filling in for a friend.

“Where about are you fellas from?” he asked.

“Baltimore,” I replied.

“I’ve heard of Baltimore. That’s where they shot The Wire right?”

“Yeah but, I mean, there is a lot more to it than that.”

“Oh I’m sure.”

The conversation quickly degraded into talk of Americans and our general obsession with guns. This would become a recurring theme with a lot of the people we talked to. Eventually we were able to steer the conversation toward traveling.

“You know you don’t see a lot of American’s travel really, but I don’t blame them,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well your country is just so big. You guys probably do more traveling than people in Europe but you never have to leave your own country.”

Up until that point I had never really thought about it that way. He was right, in a sense. Living in Baltimore is an especially good example. Travel three hours in any direction and you will find yourself in a completely different world. Go north and you have New York. Go west and you have the Mountains. Go east and you have the ocean. Go south and you are in good old Dixie Land. We have deserts to the southwest, temperate rainforests in the northwest and states so different in culture it’s sometimes hard to even believe we are all part of the same union.

By the end of our conversation, we were the only people left in the café, so Neil and I thought it apt to get out of the guy’s hair. The only problem though, was that it meant we wouldn’t be able to communicate with Grietje anymore. The café was on top of a hill and we could see the train station about a half a mile below us. From the looks of it there were about a half-a-dozen ways Grietje could climb the hill to get to us. Still, there was no way of guaranteeing from which street she would come. She had randomly stopped responding to our messages in the café and there was no other way of getting in touch with her.

We stepped outside and I saw a street corner that looked like it had the best view for trying to spot someone. We walked over and started to wait, hoping our meet up wouldn’t turn into a daylong hunt to find each other.

After about 20 minutes I spotted Grietje walking up the hill.

“By god she’s headed right for us!” I shouted to Neil.

It had been a year and a half since the three of us had been together. So everyone was excited. I snapped a picture as she spotted us. Then we all gave each other a round of well overdue hugs.

“Time to get after it guys,” Neil said, then we all high fived and headed back Grass Market to get a pint.

We holed up at the Black Bull Pub while I got on Neil’s phone and called John Wilson.

“Hellooooooo!” John answered in a manner that sounded like he tacked about 6 W’s onto the end of the word.

“Hey John, it’s Matt from America. How are you?”

“Oh I’m quite well! A bit drunk actually… Where are you?

“Where at the Black Bull but where hoping to meet up with you so that we could swing by your flat and drop off our luggage.”

“Wonderful!” He replied. “We can either meet up closer to now, or I can meet up with all of you a little bit later. I am with my friend Vic and there is a birthday party that we are going to attend in an hour or so.”

We opted for the former, left the Black Bull, picked up our bags from the hotel and caught a cab to John’s flat. We waited outside for about 20 minutes before calling him again.

“Hey John, where in front of your house. Where about are you?”

“Oh dear, I am at Chambers Street right by the Black Bull. So sorry, I thought we were to meet you there,” he said. “No worries, Vic and I will head over. See you shortly.”

The sun had started to set when John and Vic finally made it to the flat.  We went up stairs stepped into the door, threw our bags into one of the spare rooms and put on a pot of tea.

“Welcome welcome welcome,” John said. “I apologize for the mess. I’ve had little time to clean the past few days because of work.”

His house was a little cluttered, but certainly nothing to scoff at.  We drank some tea then switched to alcohol. We didn’t know it at the time, but prior to meeting up, John and Vic had come to the conclusion that they were a bit too drunk to entertain sober people. They then decided that the best plan for remedying the situation was to feed us a good bit of alcohol as soon as we got in so as to get us caught up.

There was beer, wine, prune liquor, Kraken rum, and some other kind of rum mixed with a Scottish soda called Iron Bru. Iron Bru is a harsh mistress of a soda. It has twice the caffeine of Coca-Cola, costs half as much, is bright orange and tastes a bit like bubblegum flavored medicine. “This must just be a cultural thing,” I thought to myself as I forced the drink down, because as much as I tried to like it I just couldn’t get the medicine flavor association out of my head.

Once we were properly lubricated, John and Vic escorted us a few blocks to a place called the Captains Bar. Their friend Nick was a bartender and they said he would take care of us. While we were there we started to make plans for the rest of our European excursion.

It was at the Captains Bar that I started to realize something.

Before I had left, I had planned on covering stories on topics ranging from the Scottish referendum to the Arab refugee crisis in Calais, or even the France to German Squat communities.  But in the 48 hours we had been there, the closest I had come to doing any real reporting had been to ask everyone we met whether they were for or against Scottish Independence. Between the time it took to get from place to place and the desires of others to drink there wasn’t anything I could do to make reporting a group priority.

Life has a way of putting you in your place from time to time. For me, this meant facing the truth that I was not in control of what was going on. At that moment I had to make a decision, fight the tides pushing me away from my original goals for the trip or concede to the forces at play and make the best out of it. Either way I was still in Europe with two of my closest friends and the nothing could dissuade me from believing that every moment was an opportunity for new adventures no matter how inebriated those adventures may be.

At that moment I heard the sound of live music coming from the back of the bar. There were two young guys sitting in the corner by the bathrooms, one with a guitar and the other with a fiddle. They were playing traditional Scottish folk music. I pulled out my camera, put it on a tiny tripod my roommate had lent me, plugged in my shotgun microphone and started recording.

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE THE CAPTAINS BAR

“This is amazing,” I though to myself. As the crowd around them grew I started to feel inspired. Witnessing the buskers earlier in the day and now watching this I decided that the solution to my quandary would be to just keep my camera close and document whatever happened in my life.

I listened to the two guys play for about 30 minutes while Neil and Grietje drank towards the front of the bar. Eventually the battery on my camera died and my glass of cider was empty. I headed back to Neil and Grietje and in an exuberant tone I professed my desire to just “let it happen.”

“Good!” Grietje said. “You know every time I have ever traveled I had tried to make plans, but I’ve learned that you really can’t do that. Shit happens and the more you open you are to plans changing the more fun you will have. Look at me, I never had any plans of living in America but traveling and going with whatever happens got me there. I wouldn’t have met you if I had stuck to plans all the time, and that would have sucked.”

“Good fucking point,” I said.

Everyone’s face lit up with excitement.

“SHOTS?!” Neil said.

“Yup!” Grietje and I said in unison.  Neil ordered a Jim Beam for himself, a Jägermeister for Grietje and a Jameson for me. We clanked our glasses tossed them back. We had hit the reset button. From here on out, anything and everything was fair game.