I'm so pleased
Actually synagogue was very nice, as the first part of doing shabbat the way it's meant to be done. Lots of service, lots of good company and interesting discussion and long, leisured meals accompanied by singing and finally some more intimate time with friends after all that general socializing. Yum. Edinburgh scored very well as an experience of walking into a strange synagogue; everyone was friendly and welcoming, especially the rabbi who invited us (together with all the other strangers he could round up) for meals both on Friday night and Saturday lunchtime.
R Rose is an interesting guy, to say the least. I had already heard of him by repute (he's relatively new in Edinburgh), and he did indeed live up to his reputation. Over the course of the weekend said or hinted quite a lot of stuff that's almost shockingly liberal for an Orthodox rabbi, but at the same time his sermon on Saturday had me absolutely seething. Clearly someone who doesn't toe any party line. And very boisterous, not at all afraid to ask strangers very probing, if not actually directly personal, questions, or to forcibly drag the conversation round to topics he wanted to talk about. Luckily his interests and erudition are extremely broad, so this wasn't a problem. He was also astoundingly good at the multi-national (and multi-lingual) game of Jewish geography that was going on among a dozen strangers from three continents.
There was annoyingness at the end of the Friday night meal about people insisting I couldn't possibly walk home on my own, and coopting this American exchange student into accompanying me, when he clearly had no wish to do so and wasn't actually going in my direction at all. He was very nice about it, but we agreed tactfully that he could turn back and head to where he was staying once we were out of sight. What really got my goat was a particular woman bleating on about how women are never safe on their own at night. It's bad enough coming from anyone, but she's a professional feminist; she's studying feminist interpretations of the Chronicles of Narnia and Harry Potter, which is kind of cool in its way, but meant that she typifies exactly the kind of thing that annoys me about a lot of feminism. I just don't see how women are helped by someone devoting her life to feminist literary theory while at the same time professing opinions which restrict and belittle women.
Anyway. It turned out that one of the people from the community who was being nice and welcoming and friendly was in fact
On Saturday afternoon
The later part of the evening got kind of weird. We ordered a takeaway from Ayutthaya (sp?), and unfortunately, the food took a really unreasonably long time to be delivered. So by the the time we ate (getting on for 11pm) we were all too tired to properly appreciate the undoubtedly delicious food. Then I turned into a pumpkin and spent the next couple of hours half-falling asleep inconveniently and impolitely, then half-waking up and being fretful and clingy and confused. And I apologize profusely for being such incredibly bad company. (The reason we didn't just give up and go to sleep was that we were waiting for
Anyway, after all that we took quite a while to get going on Sunday morning. I said goodbye to
Then we climbed Calton hill for more magnificent views (offset by a bunch of rather quaint follies and other miscellaneous buildings). And in the afternoon, tracked down an exhibition about Etruscan archaeology which I'd seen advertised on the side of a bus. It turned out to be in the Museum of Scotland, which is itself a very fine building. And the exhibition was as much fun as we'd hoped it would be, so yay.
We then met up with FB again for tea. He picked a very nice café called The Elephant House, which I was most taken with. Lovely atmosphere, individual without being consciously look-at-me-I'm-so-eccentric, and really taking advantage of the big rooms and high ceilings that old Edinburgh buildings have. And the sort of place where strangers sit together at the big tables, and people read and play board games and it's generally relaxed and friendly. Also I got to introduce
Wow. That was a really, really lovely weekend.