People Watching

Something I enjoy doing is people watching. As someone who is quite content to sit alone and stare at people, giving the activity an official and more socially acceptable name is great for me. As it turns out, Edinburgh is an absolute gem for this sort of thing. Any city that prides itself in its giant inflatable purple cow it produces once a year to use as a stage for drama productions is bound to have some interesting people in it. An added bonus is that being an American, everyone here is all the more interesting just for their British-ness or at the very least European-ness. Originally, this was going to be the topic of this post, I had it written out and everything, but upon reading it, I found alot of my observations, while actual occurances, sounded more like racial stereotypes. I suppose the stereotypes have to come from somewhere, but to avoid offending people though, I will refain from giving any examples.

I will however, say that I do indeed love British people. The Scots and the English and the Northern Irish (and I would assume the Welsh, but I have never met someone from Wales) are all walking illustrations on how the coolness scale works. Most of them fall on dorky end of the spectrum. Alot of them are just plain funny looking people. The American approach to the spectrum is to push people towards the cool end, with people getting progressively less dorky as they get cooler. The British approach is to do the opposite. If they want to get cooler, they get dorkier, going around backwards on the spectrum, finally arriving at a place where they are so dorky, they are cool and hip. However, this momentum doesn't seem to stop, as alot of my peers here at University seem to push the limits past cool and into tragically hip, and thus back to dorky. The best example of this is the Beatles. How did they go from the guys whering the funny suits in Hamburg to the epitome of rock coolness (especially Paul and John)? By going backwards. Its great fun watching and hanging out with my new British friends, and makes me thoroughly enjoy the differences in culturs. (Cool thing about my metaphor with the Beatles, it holds true! Look at John in his late yoko-worshiping phase, he went back out of cool into painfully hip and dorky territory).