Birthdays and Motormania in Grantown

As most of the days are filled with a large variety of jobs, from contently cleaning the hostel to vigorously scrubbing away dried human sweat in the hot tub, I keep myself fairly busy. Especially when considering that in the spare moments where I'm free from any kind of hard labour, I still find time to work on my assignments for school.

Now as it turned out, in the first week of my stay here it just so happened to be my birthday. Sadly, I still had to work on this day, but in the afternoon I was invited up to the main house of David and Valery. Accompanied by my fellow volunteers, I made my way over to what turned out to be a fully organised birthday party. Besides David and Valery, another couple of volunteers from Varely's daughter's hostel had come over to help me celebrate. Ryand is an English fellow, while Babette is from Germany. They had especially been invited so that I wouldn't be surrounded solely by, as they called it 'old farts', on my birthday.

They honoured my birthday by singing, presenting me with a massive homemade chocolate cake and a glass of whisky. The chocolate cake turned out to be a tradition, usually served with a small bowl of fresh raspberries and whipped cream. It tasted wonderful and it might very well have been the best meal I'd had during my stay here. I didn't know that there was a local tradition where you were given a chocolate, and only chocolate, cake on your birthday, especially with raspberries.


A few days later, I received an invitation to Ryan's birthday. This invitation included a healthy and prepared meal, something that we hadn't seen in a long time. So after a day of hard work, where we were allowed to leave slightly earlier than usual, we made our way to the Dell of Abernethy. Getting there proved more of a challenge than we had originally thought, because it had gotten dark sooner than we expected and the route to the Dell continued far after the point where we assumed civilisation had ended.
But after a few minutes of absolute uncertainty, we managed to find our destination.

Ryan and Babette were already waiting for us at their fire pit, which can only be described as either gigantic or enormous. We quickly joined them and were treated to a couple of much appreciated drinks, before Polly and Ross, Valery and David's daughter and son in law, joined us. This prompted us to burst into a birthday song, which is quite difficult given the fact that you know the lyrics, but most of them are at the far back of your memory.
They brought with them possibly the best meal I've eaten in all my life, but this may very well have been because I at this point was relatively malnutritioned. Although the chili was not as spicy as promised and expected, it tasted delicious and had homemade flatbread as a side dish. What I later learned was that both of them had been chefs at a restaurant before opening their own B&B. This might help all of you understand just how amazing this tasted. After we had eaten enough to see us all through the next couple of years, Ryan was presented with his birthday cake; also a chocolate cake, but possibly of an even higher culinary level than the chili. This led us to fill our stomachs far beyond their bursting points, but the sheer level of deliciousness made us both like and survive this incredible ordeal.
When we had finished with this moment of gluttony, we simply chatted and watched the fire burn to ashes before we all decided to head back to our own camping and caravans.


On the 8th of September, there was a festival in Grantown by the name of Motormania. David and Valery were kind enough to let us drive with them after we asked if we possibly get a ride over there.
Basically it was a traditional festival where car enthousiasts would gather and either show their own car or walk about and see other people's cars. While to us it might not have seemed extremely spectacular, we could see clearly how big this was for the locals. Despite it being an annual event, everyone was enthousiastic and in a real party mood. It also served as a way to interact in a casual way with people from other towns, which makes the community here so much closer to each other.

For us it was just a nice day to explore the town while it was a fair bit more lively than it usually would be and the large collection of cars certainly helped us enjoy it more. So we, and by we I mean myself and the other helpers, explored the town, looked at all the different kinds of shops that this slightly larger town had to offer, saw a few people playing traditional Scottish music on a large variety of musical instruments and ultimately found the church or Kirk, where the local band of bagpipers were playing.
When we were done sightseeing, we found David and Valery, wondering if they'd like to head back. Only, they didn't, they were having too much fun and hadn't yet seen everything. Not very difficult seeing how their average walking speed is perhaps one eight of what we younger people can manage. So we decided to explore the interior of a rather well-frequented social gathering place: the pub. This one is an actual pub, rather than the one in Nethy Bridge, which is merely the extra bar of the hotel, meant for non guests. The plus side to this was that for once we actually had a view of the kind of pub we had expected to see in a small village; people sitting in groups chatting, some people visiting only for a single pint before heading out again and a group of people enjoying a small and cheap meal. Since we were here already, we hardly could pass on the chance of trying out a small selection of relatively local beers. Local meaning that they were brewed somewhere in Scotland, which is more than we could have expected, less than we could have hoped for, but nice altogether.

After an hour where we had had the possibility of chatting to other patrons, we had had enough and we went to find our way back to David and subsequently to The Lazy Duck where sadly we still had to work later on in the afternoon.