St. Andrews Day Celebrations

St. Andrews held an especially large festival this year in honor of St. Andrew and as part of the Homecoming Scotland festivities. There were a number of activities over the weekend, but Monday (this was last week) was the only day we really got a chance to participate.

During my lunch break, we headed down to the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, which is where James works. St. Andrews Day happens to be the only day of the year that "the rest of us" (aka non-members and women) are allowed inside the clubhouse, so we were excited to go in and see where James spends all his time. We spent a good portion of our time hearing about all the famous portraits hanging on the walls, and getting some good gossip from our rather ancient tour guide. Unfortunately, we thought that cameras wouldn't be allowed in so we have no pictures to show you.

As we were sitting in our room working that afternoon, I noticed the street in front of our house was gradually emptied of cars and a stage was set up. Suddenly, the peace on the street was shattered with banging drums and bagpipe music as the marching band began to practice and the band playing on stage did their sound check. Which was totally awesome, except that I had another hour left of work and Matt was really trying hard to work on his dissertation. Bagpipe music is distracting. We did our best to finish, and then headed out to the street to meet up with our friends and check out the action.

The first event was the "beating of the retreat," which apparently was used to signal troops to come back to the castle back in the day. Our street was packed as the bagpipers and drummers marched up and down for about twenty minutes. Everyone had these little Saltire flags, our friend Elijah was wearing a kilt, and it was just about as Scottish as it gets around here (which is pretty Scottish, apparently!). Oh, it was also freezing cold! Here's a picture of Matt and Elijah, please note how bundled up Matt is! And yeah...Elijah's wearing a kilt. Crazy.



After the bagpipes retreated off to the distance, everyone moved down the street by the stage for a traditional (sort of) céilidh dance, or a bunch of people attempting Scottish country dancing. It turned out that probably half the people knew what they were doing, and the rest just followed along. As long as you can sort of bop and spin around, with an occasional hand clap or kick thrown in for good measure, it's pretty easy!



After the whirling masses calmed down, there was a bit of a break (during which we grabbed some food) before a torchlight parade. Basically, everyone marched through the streets with torches behind a group of bagpipers and drums. Totally epic. (Side note: I would make a terrible member of a torch carrying mob, because I found my torch kind of scary and hard to control.)



At the end of the march was a "secret location" (some lawn outside the museum, basically) where we watched some kind of interpretive dance/light/music show about the history of Scotland? Actually, I'm still not sure about the subject matter, except that there was a lot of martial arts inspired dancing and a really epic stage. None of the pictures really turned out from this portion of the night, sadly, but Matt has a bunch of video from the various events that he'll hopefully post at some point.

So that was our first St. Andrews day! By next year, we're totally going to be professionals at céilidh dancing.