Fridays at school are a bit of a special day for the kids. Their morning begins with tests of material they learned over the week, but in the afternoon they get to choose a special activity, many of which are taught by parents (not this one, mind you!). Emma wanted to sign up for baking, but when I snidely pointed out that most Scottish baking involved some kind of meat, she passed and chose art instead. John, of course, chose hockey. I told him that it was probably going to be some form of field hockey since there was no ice rink at school, but he wanted to proceed anyway. They both loved their activities in the end, and came home with lots of stories.
After school, we took John to the university, where he has signed up for a football league. He’s in a group of kids who are five to seven years old, so he’s one of the older ones, but definitely has some catching up to do. These Scottish kids are good! They were divided into two groups and John was in the older one. He managed to get in a few good plays, but I noticed that by the end, he was jumping in to play goalie as much as possible, since I’m sure he must have been exhausted from all the running around. I also noticed that he was one of the only ones wearing soccer socks and shin guards. I guess safety is kind of an American thing too!
Once football was over, all of us walked into town for dinner (partly because we didn’t have much at home, but mostly because we had found a two hour parking spot in town that was free, and certainly didn’t want to give it up!). We went to a “chippy,” which is what the Scots call a fish and chips place that offers take-away. Ours—the “Tailend” on Market Street—is pretty well-received, so there was a decent line forming at the takeaway counter when we got there. I was a little surprised since it was only a quarter after five, but since the sun goes down at 4:30 pm here I guess people are ready for dinner early. We were a bit overwhelmed by the menu, so decided to order in to the restaurant instead, which gave us a few more minutes to look at our options. We still ended up just making wild guesses…Emma declined my suggestion to try veggie haggis (?) and went for veggie spring rolls, which came with chips and fried. John chose one of the three kids’ meals offered (chicken, fish or sausage), and I was surprised when his sausage was served, because it had been battered and fried as well. Talk about gilding the lily! David chose the standard fish special, which was a huge piece of haddock, breaded and fried, and served with chips. I ordered the Arbroath smokie, which was supposed to be served with “streaky bacon,” though I had no idea what any of that meant. Turns out that they are small pieces of haddock, smoked and topped with smoked bacon (sometimes called “American-style” here since they don’t usually smoke pork in Europe). It’s a pretty good dish, albeit quite smoky tasting. They served all of the meals with the ubiquitous “brown sauce,” which I hadn’t yet tried. It’s slightly reminiscent of ketchup, though it has a malt vinegar taste and lots of tamarind mixed in, and it’s not bad…kind of reminds me of how fries taste on the Jersey boardwalk when coated in Old Bay and vinegar. The kids passed on it, but we both thought it was pretty good.
After dinner, we stopped at the library for kids' books on Mary Queen of Scots (for us, not the kids, since we both need a bit of a refresher before setting out to see all these castles) and popped in at the Tesco (taking advantage of those last few minutes of free parking) to pick out some Scottish junk food to try (not hard to do, since the groceries stores are mostly stocked with junk food here!). David and I were also going to try some cider, but while we were trying to choose which one, John got impatient and started marching through the aisles singing “I am an American!” so we had to make a hasty exit before too many of our fellow shoppers gave him the stink-eye. In the end the kids picked Orangina and Irn Bru, David picked ice cream (the first carton we bought at Morrison’s said “vanilla-flavoured frozen product” and tasted just as bad!), and I got some incredibly-milky Cadbury chocolate biscuits. We took our loot home and spent the rest of the evening watching the kids’ favorite series…the BBC production that puts an English voice to animal video called “Walk on the Wildside”. Pretty funny…check it out if you haven’t yet seen it:
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