Isle of Skye

Today we’ve walked aproximately 10 km, trying to find a crafts shop for A. here on Isle of Skye where we arrived by bus from Kyle of Lochalsh this morning (beautiful journey from Inverness!).
When we finally found it, in the middle of nowhere, it turned out to be a private residence where this lady had turned one of the rooms into a shop. She also sells her stuff through the Net.
I chatted with her for a while, allowing A. to browse through the cross stitch stuff undisturbed. Nice lady. She told us the story of one Christmas when it had been very cold on Skye and it had snowed so much that they didn’t have the time or capacity to remove the snow from the roads. She said it was a good thing that it was Christmas and people had already bought home a lot of food, or else they might have starved. Also they had a lot of whisky to help them through the bad weather. :-)

The hostel was sort of a bad pick. It’s not very central and there’s a bunch of French ppl staying here, a group touring in a pink mini bus. Especially one old woman gets on my nerves. She’s so arrogant. When we made our dinner in the hostel kitchen she started staring at me and talking about me in French with her friends, making remarks about how I took too long with my pots and didn’t know what I was doing. She sighed and made gestures about how stupid I was, then she started to move my pots around, turn off the heat and stuff like that. I’m not sure exactly what it was that I did that triggered her, but what she didn’t know was that I’ve studied French for six years and could understand most of the bad things she said about me. :-)
I was so upset. She’s been giving me and A. strange looks all evening.

Some words about yesterday. The bus tour and cruise were very nice. Our guide Anita was rather special – a redhead with a lot of humour and quite a character.
On the way to the exhibition we made a short photo stop, where Murdoch the piper played the bagpipes and tried to charm the ladies. Apparently he’s now married to his sixth wife. Anita told us to watch out. :-)
The Loch Ness Exhibition 2000 was an audiovisual display telling of some of the theories about what might have made people see “Nessie”. Quite interesting. They did leave a few questionmarks at the end, an opening for the myth to live on. :-)

At Urquhart Castle we boarded the Jacobite Warrior, a rather small boat taking us on a 30 minutes very cold trip on Loch Ness. No Nessie spotted, I’m afraid.

When we got back to Inverness we tried to find an Internet cafe in the part of town that we had yet to explore. Unfortunately it was closed.
We had a late lunch at Burger King – they have a great Cajun Chicken Wrap menue here which I hope will come to Sweden – and a dessert at a pancakes place. Then we took a walk to Ness Islands, a few islands in the middle of the river Ness connected by little bridges which moved up and down when you stepped on them. Cute area. Took some photos.

Back in town I had a look around the Whisky Shop before we went to Tesco and then back to the B&B (Fenton house, quite nice).