My brief guide to the Granite City

King's College, Aberdeen

 

 

When someone asks me where I've just graduated university, he/she invariably reacts to my answer as if I said Tajikistan. Or Mars. And to be fair, it's understandable. After leaving Southampton Uni during my second year there, I wanted to go to Scotland, and only partly because of the reduced tuition fees. There are worse places to live than Southampton but the way things went there made me want to move a long way from both that city and from home. So after considering both Glasgow and Edinburgh, I decided to go one further and move to the most northern university in the UK.

The most striking thing about travelling to Aberdeen from Cardiff, whether by car or train, is how isolated the city is. Scotland is pretty big yet has just 5 million people and most of them are in the densly populated 'central belt'. The closest city to Aberdeen is Dundee which is 70 miles away, and other than that there are small towns whose names I know only because of listening to the football scores being read out, namely Montrose and Arbroath. Despite that, living in Aberdeen doesn't feel quite so isolated because it is a city like any other. At the same time though, it is a city unlike any other, and because of that I miss it.

Seaton Park and St Machar Cathedral

The city boasts that at one point Aberdeen had as many universities as the whole of England, and King's College, founded in 1495 certainly looks and feels impressive and suitably ancient . Or as Laura says, like Hogwarts. Walking around the campus, from King's to the library, then to Seaton Park is the one thing I miss the most. Seaton Park is what separated my halls in 1st year from the university and it's the best park in Aberdeen. The river Don flows through it, and you can follow it all the way round to Brig o'Balgownie, an historic 13th century bridge. If you're lucky, which I was only once, you can see seals swimming and herons patiently looking for fish. 10 minutes walk further along and you reach the Bridge of Don, the mouth of the river and therefore the North Sea.

Brig o'Balgownie and River Don

While the clichés about Scottish weather are generally on the mark, I'll miss the spring and summer, because while it struggles to get above 21-22C the days are ridiculously long. It's still light enough to walk on the beach at 11pm, which means there's so much daytime to do things in the summer. Unfortunatly, the winter is the complete opposite and I won't miss the Aberdonian winter quite so much. The snow is fun at the beginning but soon gets annoying. The sun sets at around 3pm which is hideous, especially when I wouldn't generally get up before midday unless I had to. This lack of sunlight means that NHS Scotland advises that people take vitamin D supplements. The sun is spectacularly feeble even when it does make an appearance!

For someone like me, where this sort of thing is kind of important, Aberdeen scores poorly for its offerings of sport. Really poorly. The only professional team is the football club and several things become evident after living there for a while. Firstly, the wistfulness and pride the fans feel of its past. Every bookshop contains dozens of books about the '80s when Alex Ferguson created a team that became Scottish champions multiple times as well as the famous victory over Real Madrid in the Cup Winners' Cup Final in 1983. Secondly, there's the feeling of disappointing resignation and acceptance that the city now has a team so shockingly bad. I don't think there are more depressed fans anywhere in Scotland than in Aberdeen. Thirdly there is the hatred felt towards Rangers. Three years ago I quite liked Rangers and Celtic. Now I can't stand them. That's what happens when you live in Scotland!

While I lived in Aberdeen I often felt frustrated that I couldn't just come home for the weekend, that I was too far to come home except for at Christmas and the summer. While being able to go to what is probably my favourite city, Edinburgh, was one of the best things about living in Scotland, realising that I was closer to Norway than Cardiff could be frustrating. And yet now, I wish I could go back, even for a day. Because of that I continue to curse the fact that it's so far away although part of the charm of Aberdeen is precisely that it is so far away. The North East of Scotland, to a Welsh person, is kind of mysterious, a place you never really hear about. And Scotland as a whole is like a foreign country. It takes a good while to understand the Doric dialect. An angry Aberdonian is almost as scary as an angry Glaswegian. I miss the colourful and many varieties of Scottish bank notes (none of this Bank of England nonsense). It became perfectly normal to browse a dozen varieties of haggis at Morrisons, and buy multiple packets of Macaroni pies. One of the mysteries of this world is why Macaroni pies are so prevelent in Scotland but not in any place I've been to in Wales or England. They are truly amazing.

I don't think the shopping in Aberdeen or the night life is any different from other cities around the UK (except the stand out pub 'Pittodrie' which is a shrine to Aberdeen FC), but one shop in particular is probably suffering from my lack of custom since May. Peckham's is the place to go for beer, whisky, cake, shortbread, sandwiches, and well, most other things. I have a dream that they will someday open a branch in Canton. But anywhere within a 100 miles radius would be welcome.  http://www.peckhams.co.uk/about.html

Peckham's

Aberdeen's far away from most people in Britain but it's worth visiting (in summer!) as is the wider county of Aberdeenshire. I think the town or city of the university someone goes to always becomes a special place but since it was the place where Laura first lived in Britain with me and the place I got my good old cat Lucy not to mention all the other people I met and the things I did it has added significance. Hopefully it won't be too long before I can go back.

The North Sea from Aberdeen beach