Random Night

First Time in Edinburgh

It always terrified my friend, Al, when I handed him my camera to take a photo of me.

I don't know if he was afraid that he was going to drop the camera or mess up the settings or do something that would prevent him from taking the photo. Perhaps it was a combination of these actions.

But I had him put the strap around his neck so that the camera could not fall to the ground. I set up the aperture and shutter speed so that the exposure would be fine, and I focused the lens so that I wouldn't be a blurry blob.

All he had to do was point the camera at me and press the shutter button, which I showed to him. Easy-peasy.

I should have told him to also compose the frame so that as much as me could fill the frame as possible, without cutting off my head. When I finally saw the photo, I could see that he had made sure that my face was in the centre of the frame: lots of sky above me and my lower legs cut off.

Oh well.

At least Al got me, leaning against a cannon, on the outer ramparts of Edinburgh Castle. In the background, just below, you can just make out some of the buildings in New Town, on the northern end of the Scottish capital. Further out, you see the industrial region of Leith.

This was my first time in Edinburgh, in May of 1988. I was visiting my friend, who was taking an exchange program at the University of Glasgow. I was also exploring the country that was home to my newly created fictional character, Roland Axam. On the following day, I would head to Roland's hometown, North Berwick.

In a few days after that, I would take a train, from Glasgow to England, and then onward, across the English Channel, where I would continue, by rail, to Berlin, where I would gather information for my novel, The Spy's The Limit.

I never published that novel but parts of it are included in my upcoming book, Gyeosunim.

I fell in love with Edinburgh on that sunny day in 1988. It's still one of my favourite cities in the whole world.

Happy Thursday!

Lunch with a Stranger

I was 23 and alone, in Glasgow.

I had never left North America before, let alone on my own. But a friend had travelled to Scotland, in his third year of university, in an exchange program. And when he left Canada, I promised that I would visit him.

Al was staying in a University of Glasgow student residence building to the northwest of the Botanic Gardens. We would walk up Byres Road, up to Great Western Road, cross to the gardens and cut through, and then take some residential streets to his building. His girlfriend was also in this residence, and he would stay in her room, so I had his cluttered room to myself.

Glasgow Botanic Gardens, 1988.

Glasgow University residence, 1988.

He took me to his student cafeteria, once. The special of the day was lasagna, so that's what I ordered. When the plate was passed to me, I noted the mashed potatoes with ground beef, in a brown gravy under a layer of melted Mozzarella cheese.

"What's this?" I asked the woman behind the counter, who served me this dish.

"Lasagna," she said, a puzzled face looking back at me, "isnae that what yeh asked fer?"

"It is," I said, "it just doesn't look like any lasagna I've ever seen before."

"It's no like any lasagna anybody's seen before," a young man standing behind me in line whispered.

I didn't want to meet Al for lunch at his cafeteria again, so on a day where he had no time to stray from campus, I told him that I was going to head downtown, to wander the core streets to shop and look for a place to eat. I would meet him, later, for dinner, when we would find a pub.

Mall near Argyle St, 1988.

I took the tube, as Glaswegians called the underground, from Hillhead Station to St. Enoch Station, just off Argyle Street. As I remember it in 1988 but cannot confirm today, parts of the surrounding streets were covered by a glass canopy and became pedestrian malls. On Google Maps, the canopies seem to be gone, though some streets still appear closed to vehicles.

As lunchtime approached, I saw a restaurant inside the mall and approached its entrance. On the door, a menu was affixed, and I scanned the lunch offerings.

No lasagna. This place looked promising.

As I continued to read the menu, I noticed a young woman, about my age, stand beside me, also checking out the menu. She was pretty: her copper-red hair was straight and stopped at her shoulders. Her green eyes were glowing and she had a few freckles on her pale cheeks. A stereotypical Scottish lass.

When we finished reading the menu, she looked at me and said, "Well, shall we go in?"

"I think so." I held the door and ushered her ahead of me.

A thirty-something man in a shirt and tie greeted us at the door. Even though I had let the woman go ahead of me and I was a few steps behind her, the greeter looked at me and asked, "For two?"

The woman looked at me, smiled, and asked me, "What do you say?"

"Why not?"

We both turned to the greeter and, in unison, said, "Sure."

Her name was Kate. She worked in an office, nearby, and had planned to meet a friend, but that her friend had cancelled at the last minute.

"Lucky for me," I said.

She had taken me for an American, when she first heard my voice, but I told her I was Canadian. I told her that this was my first overseas trip, the first time that I had left my continent. She hadn't even left the western Lowlands, let alone her country.

"You've never even been to Edinburgh?" I asked.

"No," she said, sadly.

"My friend and I are heading there, tomorrow," I said. I explained that I wrote short stories and that I had created a Scottish character, and that I thought I needed to see the Scottish countryside to better-understand where he came from. Later in the week, I would make my way to my character's home town, North Berwick.

"Isn't that beyond Edinburgh?" Kate asked. "Wouldn't it make sense to see both places tomorrow?"

"I want to make a day of each town," I said. "My friend will show me Edinburgh, as he's been there before, and I'll go to North Berwick on my own."

"Someday, I'll get to Canada."

"If you do, and you find yourself in Ottawa, look me up." I gave her one of my business cards, from the camera shop where I was the assistant manager. From my camera bag, I retrieved a pen and wrote my home phone number and address on the back.

I never heard from her.

When the bill came, I insisted on covering all of it. We finished, wished each other a good day, and went our separate ways. It was one hour out of the week that I spent in Glasgow but it was one of the most memorable days of my whole trip.

Throwback Thursday: Berlin, 1988

At around suppertime, this evening, DW and I are supposed to be getting on a plane, in Montreal, and flying to Brussels, on what was supposed to be the start of a great adventure of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany.

I was really looking forward to this trip, not only because I was excited to see some cities and countries that I have never seen before, and because I was looking forward to seeing a couple of my friends, who live in Germany, but because I was looking forward to returning to a city that, when I was there more than 32 years ago, I was there during a very different time for that city.

Berlin has held my interest since my teens, when I was an avid reader of spy novels. This Prussian capital has gone through many changes, particularly in the past hundred years, with World Wars I and II, and the Cold War, during which the city was divided both physically and ideologically.

When I visited Berlin, in May of 1988, the Wall was still firmly in place. The 23-year-old me was both fascinated and anxious when I walked along the concrete barrier that separated the free, western citizens from the Communist folks in the east. And, when I finally crossed into East Berlin, I was afraid that I'd never get out again.

One of the photos that I like from that lonely trip (I went by myself and sometimes went for hours without speaking) was from the top of the Victory Column, Siegessäule, looking down Bundesstrasse, toward Brandenburg Gate. If you look carefully, you can see the Berlin Wall just in front of this famous landmark.

There's a stark contrast between the lush green of the Tiergarten and the concrete jungle of East Berlin.

I was so looking forward to climbing this tower and taking a similar picture of what Berlin looks like today. I guess I'm going to have to wait another year or two before I can do that.

Happy Friday!

Love of Maps

Long before the World Wide Web, and much longer before smartphones and Google Maps, we relied on maps to get from points A to B. In 1988, when I travelled to Berlin, I purchased a handy fold-out map to help me get around that divided city.

I'm really glad that I kept that Falk Plan map. At the time, it fit easily into my camera bag, and I would pull it out, turn the pages, and flip down sections to locate where I was, and where I needed to go. I'd memorize the directions to a point along my walk and then walk with confidence exuding from my face and gait, trying to not look like the tourist that I was.

Now, in 2020, I'm turning to the map again as I write my fiction. Berlin is a different place than it was in 1988. There is no wall to divide the two sectors of the city. To look at the city with Google Maps, there's no way to tell where West Berlin ended and East Berlin began, save for some memorial landmarks.

(If you look at the map, to the right, you can see West Berlin's Tiergarten. Between the R and the G is the traffic circle of Siegessäule, the column that opened in 1874 to commemorate the Prussian victory over the Danish during the war of 1864. Follow the road that leads east, and you come to the Brandenburg Gate. The red line indicates the Berlin Wall. This was also one of the most-used sections of the map during my visit, in 1988.)

In writing Gyeosunim, the sequel to Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary, I have introduced a timeline that takes Roland Axam to 1988 Berlin. With the help of my old Falk Plan, I can see where the wall moved its way through the city. I can find streets that suddenly came to an end, to possibly continue somewhere past the no-man's land that made escapes practicably impossible. With the help of Google Maps street view, I can virtually go to spots and see how they look now, and even imagine how it would have appeared when I visited the city.

Though I still haven't made the final decision to keep this timeline in my novel, I'm having fun writing it, nonetheless. I'll share some of these excerpts later this week.

Google Maps is helpful but if I want to go back into the past, having old fashioned maps has saved my skin when it comes to writing.

Throwback Thursday: A Man of Many Hats

He started off as the neighbour who drove cool cars.

Then he became a friend, helping me catch a baseball and teaching me how to box. He got me interested in cars, in vintage aircraft—helping me build models: he, doing much of the work and the finishing touches; me, playing with them and displaying them, like special trophies, on my bedroom shelves.

And then he moved in with us, was my mother's boyfriend, then husband. He went from the man who moved into my home to the man in whose house I lived, the man who took three kids on as his own.

He went from being referred to as my step-father to being the one I referred to as "my father" around my friends, even though I have always addressed him by his name, rather than by any title.

He taught me how to drive, helped me get my first, second, third, and more cars. He gave me my first camera, let me use his when I became good enough to entrust with it. He gave me my first glass of wine, my first sip of beer.

He was there when I got married, when my kids were born—to them, he is a in every way their grandpa.

He has played all of those roles, and more. And though he is still a friend, he is above all else, family. He is one with whom I can share a laugh, a serious discussion, a beer or a single-malt whisky, or a rant.

Happy Birthday, Greg.

Game night, circa 1988.

Music Monday: ÜBerlin

In May, 1988, Berlin was still firmly divided, and for a young Canadian visiting the historic German city, alone, without knowing the language, I found it somewhat intimidating.

And exciting.

And scary.

I walked through Checkpoint Charlie, from the American Sector into the Soviet Sector, knowing that I was entering this repressive district with a plan to explore back alleys, away from the tourist areas. I had a micro-cassette recorder in my camera bag, and I would use it to make notes about a novel I was working on.

It was a spy novel, with Roland Axam as the main character.

It was only on my return to West Berlin, as I was smuggling the unused West German marks in my shoes, that I realized that had the border guards decided to listen to my recordings, they would hear me speaking about alcoves in apartment buildings that could hide entrances to a tunnel to the west. About names of defectors.

Not knowing that one-and-a-half years later, the wall would come down, I sweated over the possibility of being held in a Communist country on charges of espionage.

But if Roland could bluff his way through Checkpoint Charlie, why couldn't I?

On the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, I couldn't help but think about the song, ÜBerlin, by R.E.M. I only discovered the band's final album, Collapse into Now, in 2011, a few weeks before the group called it a day and disbanded. As a big fan of R.E.M., I was at first saddened to hear that they were breaking up, but also surprised that they were still together in 2011. While I loved their sound and had followed them since the release of Lifes Rich Pageant (1986), I was disappointed in Monster (1994) and took a break from listening to them. Only every once and a while, I would hear them on the radio and tell myself that I should start listening to them again.

I finally did so in 2011. And then they broke up.

ÜBerlin is a lovely song, and when I looked up the video on YouTube, I was happy to see that it was set in Berlin (though no real discernible landmarks are shown). The video features British actor, Aaron Johnson, dancing while he walks through a graffiti-spattered, run-down part of the town. His almost spastic-like dancing looks very much like how I dance around the house when I do my weekend chores.

Another reason to like the video.

With Berlin's historic anniversary, I couldn't help but remember my experiences in the city when the wall was still up, about my main fictional man, and a band that I loved strongly in 1988.

(And now you can think of me dancing on Saturday afternoons.)

Enjoy the video.



Happy Monday!


(If you want to see more of my photos from Berlin, click here.)

Photo Friday: My Loneliest Place

In May of 1988, I boarded a train in Glasgow, Scotland, and headed to Berlin, Germany. It was the first time that I had travelled abroad, my first time in Europe.

And I travelled alone.

I was doing research work for a story I was writing about Roland Axam, and for that I spent some time in Edinburgh, in North Berwick, and finally, East and West Berlin.

Because I spoke no German at the time, and I found that not many of the locals spoke English, I spent most of my three days in that Cold War-torn country without speaking more than a couple of words. To eat, I pointed to pictures of food on menus. I knew how to say "ein bier, bitte" and "danke," but otherwise kept my mouth shut.

I stayed in a pension off the Kurfurstendamm, the Kima, and spoke to no one. Not the hotel staff, not to the other guests. When I cleared my breakfast dishes from the table in the dining room, I received laughs from everyone for my efforts.

My only solace was that I wandered the greater part of the city, on foot, taking hundreds of photographs. I made lots of notes on being an outsider, on your own, in a city divided by a tall wall and landmines.

My favourite place to sit and collect my thoughts was Europacenter, with its shopping centre and memorial to WWII, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. This large plaza was a common meeting place for all walks of life. It was the one place where I didn't feel lonely.

For the rest of the city, for me, seemed the loneliest place on Earth.

Photo Friday: Another Foggy Sunrise

Sometimes, I think that posts like this one are a big of a sham.

Because it's Friday, I've made a ritual of showing you a photo. Preferably, it's a photo that I shot this week: something fresh and creative.

But because I didn't get out with my camera much this week, apart from when I went skiing on Sunday and with my Bate Island Project, I came up short with fresh photos. Last night, in a panic, I took some closeups of a collection of beer bottle caps that I've amassed, using my 40mm micro lens, but ultimately I wasn't happy with any of the shots that I took.

So I went through my archives, looking at some of the slides that I scanned but hadn't sorted. And I came up with this one.

This is a photo that I shot in 1988. On that particular morning, I arose long before the sun rose and drove all over Nepean. I took photos of old churches, of farms, of railway crossings, and, as the sun came over the horizon, foggy roadsides. Last week's Photo Friday was shot on the same morning, after this one was taken, before I returned home.

What can I say? I was profoundly inspired that morning and took some pictures of which I'm proud to show. Are you tired of them? Should I move on?

Happy Friday!

Photo Friday: Paved Paradise

Do you remember I wrote a story about growing up in Nepean and how I used to explore the field that separated my neighbourhood from the back of the K-Mart Plaza that used to run along Merivale Road, near Meadowlands? I used to roam that area with my good friend, Jeremy.

If you haven't read that post, you can go there from this link after you've finished with this post.

I was looking at some old slides, from 1988, and I came across a photo I shot in that area. By then, most of the trees had been felled, most of the field plowed. Some development was beginning.

These were the last of the trees from that era, planted behind the old fire station that was next to the McDonalds.

Today, they're all gone. This spot of land is now occupied by a Toys R Us. Gone is the field of my childhood.

*Sigh.*

Happy Friday, anyway.

Wordless Wednesday: Time Machine 8

Edinburgh, 1988

Wordless Wednesday: Time Machine 3

North Berwick, Scotland: 1988

Wordless Wednesday: Time Machine

West Berlin—May 1988