Edinburgh: Cathedrals, castles, and the challenge of minimal pairs

In case you missed last week's adventures, ... oh, wait, I didn't post anything last week ..., here are some of the highlights:

How do you get the general public interested in research on teaching intonation to English language learners in Finland?  Well, if you're my colleague being interviewed for a story to be published in the most widely read and well respected newspaper in Finland, you'd find a relevant example that people can relate to: 

a first date.

You can read the article (in Finnish) here.

AND, remember how excited I was about having a white board in the new office I moved into a few months ago?  Yeah.  Well, my colleague has now made said white board famous with the photo that accompanied the article.  It was tons of fun photographing the photographer photographing Elina Tergujeff (one of my colleagues and office mate) for the article:

One of my publications is officially out--a chapter in an edited volume. 
The publishers sent me my very own copy of it.  :)

 Then there was the book club dinner...  

We missed Wendie who was feeling under the weather.

And playing the Finnish version of the famous board game...

...with the "Finnish fam"!  :)

This week I jetted off to Edinburgh, Scotland, for the first Management Committee meeting of the EU COST Action Network project 'New Speakers in Multilingual Europe', but not before leading the first workshop of the professional development series for sign language interpreters.  We had 15 interpreters attend (we thought maybe 6 or 7 at most might come given the date and time of the event).  The feedback?  "This should have been longer--two hours wasn't enough time.  When can we meet again to continue the dialogue?" AWESOME.  

Not 24 hours into my stay in Edinburgh I found myself navigating a catwalk on the roof of...

...St. Mary's Cathedral.

Seeing is (sometimes) believing:

 The catwalk...

the stairs leading up to (this is looking down them, though)...

 the belfry tower that 12 bells call home to.  The average sized bells weigh about 800 lbs and the treble bell (the largest) weighs 4,100 lbs.  They're rung by bell ringers (pictured here during their Thursday night rehearsal).

 Here are Ian and Barbara (on the left) and Helen and Bill (on the right).  They are two sweet couples who have been bell ringers since their teens/early 20s.  I met Helen when I was passing by the church and that led to an invitation to watch them rehearse.  It's quite an honor to have been invited up to join them given that very few invitations are extended to non-bell ringers. LUCKY ME!!

 The rope is attached to a pulley that rings the bell when it's pulled.  There were so many historic documents in the tower.  SO AMAZINGLY AWESOME!!  I fell in love with Edinburgh in the belfry tower of the cathedral in Scotland that has the most bells (a total of 12).  :)

Edinburgh castle.  The only way to make the visit better is with Mary's home made salted caramel gelato.  Cheers!!  :)

So, English pronunciation is quite tricky, as we learned in Elina's interview that was reported in the Helsingin Sanomat newspaper article above.  Funny enough, I ordered an omelette with spinach, tomato, and cheese and what came my way was an omelette with spinach, potato, and cheese.  Yeah.  Gotta love those minimal pairs.  My compliments to the chef for his valiant effort to make this 'special' dish for me, though!  :) 

(I overheard him asking the waitress if she was serious about my request.  I thought, 'Is it too much to ask to have them substitute tomato for onion?' 15 min later, the chef brought out the plate: 

"Here is your potato, spinach, and cheese omelette.") 

I enjoyed the salad and 'chips' that came with it.  The omelette itself, was...well...interesting. 

There are tons of 'closes' that branch off of the Royal Mile (which runs from Edinburgh castle down to Holyrood--the Queen's Royal residence).  These closes are passageways that lead to large residential areas.  You never would guess that communities existed through these 'closes'.  (The guy who led the walking tour said that the term 'close' comes from 'enclosure'.)  I was taking a picture of one of these 'closes' and a group of very friendly guys just couldn't resist posing for the camera. 
I promised that they'd now be famous.  :)

Here's the entrance to the castle (above)

and the back of the castle with the sun breaking through the clouds.

 

 This is the George Heriot School a private school initially established in 1628 by George Heriot for orphans.  Just across the road from here is the Elephant Cafe where JK Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series.  The window overlooks the Greyfriars Kirkyard ('Churchyard') and the school.  Hogwart's is inspired by this school and the names of many of the characters are taken from the gravestones of those buried in the cemetery.  The coolest discovery for me, though, was the grave marker of a deaf minister (which I happened upon when I walked up to the gate to check out the school (pictured in the background).

(The tour guide explained that 'kirk' means 'church'.  He said, "I hear that the Scandinavian languages use a similar term."  Yep.  Indeed. In Finnish it's 'kirkko.'  Pretty cool trivia, eh?  Just for the record, though, Finland isn't technically part of Scandinavia.)

More pics to come next week.  :)