I grew up in Glasgow. I’ve lived in Scotland since I was born. Yet, when an international student (someone who has only lived here for four months) asked me where he should take his parents up North, I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t Dunoon caravan park.
Specifically, he wanted somewhere scenic and memorable: a location to justify the eleven-hour flight. “I’m not really sure, to be honest,” I said. He looked at me for a moment with an expression of confused concern, as if I had just told him I’d never looked out a window before.
I was nineteen-odd years into living here, and I walked away from the conversation doing something I realized I had never actually done before: I Googled “things to do in Scotland.” I was standing on my native soil, the place I have spent my entire life, and I had to use a search engine to tell me how I should spend my time.
The most embarrassing thing about this interaction is that Scotland doesn’t exactly hide its beauty. You can’t drive more than twenty minutes outside of a city without being in awe of the landscape.
You’ll spot a loch hiding around a bend or see a Highland cow standing majestically in a field, with the aura of a creature that knows it’s going to end up on a scenic postcard. It doesn’t take much effort to spot the striking scenery when it’s basically everywhere you look.
Unless, apparently, you grew up here. In which case, you see it every day and decide it doesn’t count.
Having No Excuses
Growing up in the Central Belt, the Highlands were something that only existed in theory. Vaguely associated with school trips to Loch Lomond, or occasionally a picturesque wedding venue.
My weekends were spent doing what every Glaswegian teenager considers a perfectly reasonable use of time: shopping on Buchanan Street, a subway trip to the West End if we were feeling adventurous, maybe a Sugo for lunch if we were peckish, and home by nighttime. The fact that I could have hopped on a bus and witnessed genuinely jaw-dropping scenery within an hour and a half was information I possessed and chose to do absolutely nothing with.
And it does get a bit more difficult to defend when you remember that Scotland offers completely free bus travel across the country for those under 22. The government, in its wisdom, decided that young people should be able to explore their country without cost being a barrier. Effectively handing young people an open invitation to treat the country as their back garden.
And so far, I’ve only used mine to catch the bus back home for reading week.
The Tourists Know More Than You Do
The real thing that keeps me up at night (or would, if I were the type to lose sleep over my own cultural negligence) is Instagram.
Browse the account of an adventurous student who’s spent a semester abroad here, and you’ll find that their highlights look like VisitScotland commissioned them. Perfectly framed photos of peaks they’ve already managed to traverse in the short amount of time spent here – somehow always captured on the one dry afternoon in November. These are people who arrived in the country with only a suitcase and a student ID and have somehow already seen more of it than I have.
The tourists are savoring every moment of it. Every weekend accounted for, every spare afternoon was an expedition. “Where haven’t I been yet? What else is there to see?” They arrived with a return flight pre-booked and decided to make the most of the time in between.
But I don’t have a return flight. I’ve always assumed that Scotland would still be there when I got round to it.
And, reader, I think it’s quite obvious: I have not gotten round to it.
There’s a weird thing that happens when you spend a lot of time living somewhere. The place stops being a place and becomes part of the unremarkable scenery of your ordinary life. You stop seeing it the way someone seeing it for the first time would see it, because you’re too busy living in it. (Looks like familiarity is an effective blindfold.)
What an outsider brings (what that international student brought) is the thing you’ve lost: the ability to look at where you are and actually observe it. His parents were traveling halfway across the world to stand somewhere I could reach before lunch on a random Tuesday – excited about Scotland in a way that I had never been. And seeing the place where I’d grown up through someone else’s eyes made me realize it looked a lot better than what I’d given it credit for.
Since that interaction, I’ve caught myself differently in those moments, the ones where I’m lying on my bed on a Saturday afternoon, insisting there’s nothing to do.
There is something to do.
There has always been something to do. It just never occurred to me that it was an option, because it didn’t feel like one; it was just someone else’s holiday destination.
It isn’t, though; it’s mine too. I just forgot to act like it.
I don’t know exactly when I’ll go. But I do know this: the next time someone asks me where to take their parents when they visit Scotland from abroad, I’ll be ready. And I’m going to have an answer that goes beyond “Well, there’s … Loch Ness.”
And ideally, I’ll have actually been.
