Auld Lang Syne...

Things I did this weekend:

1. Attended a full-blown bonna-fide ceilidh (pronounced kayleh). Think of it as a Scottish hootenanny.

2. Discovered that my beard trimmer had died on me. Which is a big deal for me. So I went on a cross-city-beard-trimmer-acquisition-quest. This lead me to discover an interesting cultural phenomena; the bargain store.

3. Searched for a Church. Kinda fun, kinda funny.

But I promise this will not be "dear diary", so here is so color commentary on my first ceilidh (a baptism by haggis if you will).

A ceilidh is, in a word, a phenomena. Folk dancing, kilts, bands consisting of fiddles and pipers, the whole shebang. It was a truly bizarre, very non-American experience. It was also alot of fun. Dancing, when not about "getting low", or about how ironic you can be, is actually a really fun thing to do. A ceilidh is also designed, and I am sure cultural anthropologists and other cultural hoighty-toighty types would disagree, to make absolute fools of everyone involved. Think about it: guys in skirts dancing with girls in skirts, dancing to what is essentially Scottish polka music played primarily on the fiddle and flute, two beautiful but squeaky instruments. The music is is too fast to really keep up with adequately and thus designed to make you tired, red-faced and sweaty, and is combined with dance steps that always seem to end up in spinning your partner fast enough to lift her off the ground and send her careening into a collision course with Jupiter, (which actually saves you some embarrassment, because you can barf your dizzy guts up while she is reentering the atmosphere on the completion of her orbital flight). Oh, did I mention that you end the evening with the yelling of a traditional folk song at the top of your lungs while holding hands in a giant circle, charging headfirst at eachother at every chorus to create a giant scrum of sweaty screaming tartan clad revelers? Combine that with the raging youthful hormones of the lusty sons of Scotland attempting to woo yon fair lasses, overwatched by the stodgy presbyters of their local kirk, and you have the fun-yet-freaky bizarro-world sheeps-gut eating cousin of a high-school prom.