Thursday, January 19, 2023

Glasgow to Edinburgh

Corrie and I, for some reason, have been watching a program on one of our random streaming services, Curiosity Stream, about Scottish Murder Mysteries throughout time. It's nice to listen to the Scottish brogue, especially when they're trying to be as posh as they can be (ie auditorily legible)(I think I just made up "auditorily").

Curiosity Stream is a streaming service I signed up for back when the pandemic first hit, and at a dollar a month, it fit the budget. The program that got me originally was "Out of the Cradle," a hundred-minute documentary about the human family (genus Homo) and how it developed and spread out of Africa and around the world. It was worth it, and I recommend the movie.

Beyond the mostly terrible user interface, the service has a ton of documentary shows and series, ranging from 11 minutes long to series' 25 episodes long at an hour each episode.

The Scottish thing was a bit of a time fill, but the first few episodes center around Glasgow. Some things went down there and some people eventually went on trial either there or in Edinburgh.

We've never been to Scotland, but Edinburgh has been on my short list of places to visit for a very long time, as the number of luminaries from there is long (Darwin, Huxley, Hume, Bell to name a few). 

As the show progressed, I pulled out the phone to see how far Glasgow is from Edinburgh:


It's less than 50 miles and takes about an hour to drive.

For random comparison sake, the drive from the southern most point of Austin, Texas, to the northern most point of what's considered San Antonio along I-35 is really about 20 minutes, despite what this map says:

Maybe how I've captured the trip between the two Scottish cities makes it seem like they're further apart. How about this:


That seems like just a quick drive. Like, say, closer to home for Dan and Norm, and me once upon a past, the drive from Citrus Heights to Vacaville:


Relative distances in this American-car society show some of the inherent differences in how we (Americans) approach the world. Even being from out west, or either living in or being from Texas, distances are treated differently that in the northeast of this country.

As of now, though, I don't have any first hand information of how Scots view their two large cities and the distance between them. Maybe this is the best reference we have in California for that relationship:

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