Sabhal Mòr Ostaíg

We've spent the last couple days at Sabhal Mòr Ostaíg, the Gaelic university on the Isle of Skye. We had a campus tour yesterday that I felt captured exactly what we were trying to observe at the school. They provide Gaelic immersion classes for all students, all of whom spend a year studying Gaelic then go on to take all their other courses for the next three years in Gaelic. However, they understood that we weren't as interested in actually learning the language as we were in understanding the phenomenon of why people want to learn it. The school itself has incredible facilities, interestingly enough most of which were paid for by the EU in an attempt to promote Scottish nationalism.

Today we had a free day, and it was awesome. I spent it hitchhiking to and then hiking up Beinn na Caillich, the largest of the Red Hills on Skye. It was an incredible experience, although I am definitely sore tonight, but don't mind given the views I got to experience from the top. Tomorrow we will be taking a taxi to the train station where we'll catch a train back to Inverness. From there we'll be flying BE 6919 to the southernmost tip of Shetland, then taking a bus and two water taxis to the northernmost tip, where we'll be staying at Saxa Vord Resort on the Isle of Unst. Although Shetlandic culture is likewise concentrated on fishing, it is completely different from Skye. Rather than Gaelic, Shetlanders speak a Nordic dialect that can be traced back to when they were owned by Norwegian Vikings. There are almost no similarities between political culture either - Shetland and Orkney stubbornly keep electing Liberal Democrats to the Scottish Parliament, a party that is otherwise almost extinct in the entire UK, and most natives would be just as happy to secede from Scotland! This would actually be institutionally reasonable as well, since most of Scotland's oil money comes from Shetland and Orkney. But, more to come on that later, once I actually get a chance to talk to real Shetlanders.