Again, we had a relatively late start and headed out to a local Safeway to get the makings of a Mexican meal for dinner at midday. After downing copious portions of vegetarian fajitas (made with Quorn, a tasty meat substitute that puts tofu to shame) with Ryan, Al and Laura (Ryan’s Scots-Kenyan friend who works with the BBC in Edinburgh), we relaxed with some chill music and several bottles of wine, while looking at the early New Year celebrations in other parts of the world. Meanwhile, our Scottish hosts engaged in the beginnings of what would be a long night of recreational drug use.
About 19:00, we headed into town in a cab with Laura. Before entering the Hogmanay/Royal Bank Street Party enclosure, which was now being tightly patrolled, we stopped in at one of Laura’s hangouts, Edward’s, where her husband works as a doorman. Here, we met Lindsey, her friend, and her brother, who luckily had four spare tickets to the night’s main attraction, the Concert in the Garden.
So, around 20:30 or 21:00, already quite sozzled, we queued up for the concert inside the Hogmanay Bank Street Party (for which one needed a wristband that we had ordered months in advance...there were only 100,000 available). The atmosphere was electric, and people were passing bottles of homemade punch around everywhere. Our concoction contained 1/3 Lilt, 2/3 Bacardi, and we had another flask of pure rum along, for good measure.
Once we entered the concert arena, which was located directly beneath Edinburgh Castle, the official “Snogmanay” festivities took off. Noticing a group of Spanish-speaking girls closeby, I began chatting with them in Spanish. They turned out to be venezolanas and colombianas who were all working in Scotland. Soon after, a group of English girls moved up next to us. We all started introducing ourselves, and then one of them, a gorgeous, tiny blonde Anglo-Irish girl named Fiona said to me “nice hat! Can we swop?” Sizing up her offering, which was actually very similar to my own, I said sure, and we swopped. And the snogging began. All around us, similar liaisons were being made --a kind of tittery, romantic energy (not to mention copious gallons of hard liquor) keeping us all warm.
Fiona’s friend Monica was quite gorgeous, being half canariana. Despite her Spanish roots, she didn’t speak much castellano, so I got her talking to the latinas. After about 15 minutes, Fiona’s friend Katie came along and, upon meeting me, took a grievous dislike to the fact that I was wearing her friend’s hat, and subsequently stole it and lost it somewhere in the crowd. The concert was now beginning, the snogging and dancing in full swing, and the bottles being freely passed around. Things begin to get a bit fuzzy for a while, but I know that the latinas, then Kavita and Jen took off to head to different parts of the arena. Then, the English girls needed to run in search of a toilet and assured me they’d be back soon. But in a crowd that size, I figured, quite correctly, I’d unfortunately never see them again.
After a bit, McDow and I set off through the sea of people on a drunken escapade to find some of the folks who had left. Instead of that, we ended up leaving to a higher tier of the arena, from which we couldn’t descend again. So we spent most of Culture Club (surprisingly, one of the headliners of the evening...I felt more like it was 1983 instead of 2003!) bobbing around to Karma Chameleon with a bunch of Thai backpackers who didn’t speak much English. And, after a few drunken incidents with strangers during Ms. Dynamite, after the fireworks (including one belligerent Brit who pushed me, along with lots of other folks, over in a drunken rage), we headed back to Stockbridge. Arriving at around 03:30, we found our Scots pals doing lines of coke. Even better than the real thing. What a way to spend Hogmanay night!
Since they all stayed up seemingly endlessly, I passed out on the couch and awoke about two hours later, when Kavita and Jen stumbled in, after having gone to a roof party in some other zone of the city. Good thing they made it back at 05:30, since at 08:00, we needed to catch a cab out to the airport to fly to Dublin, tired and hungover as we were.
Still, what an incredible party and an amazing way to spend New Year’s!
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