A DAY IN OBAN

NOVEMBER 22, 2024

A short one this week. I’d like to discuss the serendipity of actually traveling to a place as opposed to just seeing it on Instagram, which is weird since that is what I’m offering you guys each week. The fact is that no photograph, even such excellent images that I endeavor to produce, can truly convey, for better or worse, what it’s like to visit a place in reality.

                                                           URBAN SCOTLAND, SLATE AND STONE

I had a much better time than I expected in our one day and night in Oban on the Western shore of Scotland south of the Isle of Skye. I had not even wanted to go there, agreeing only because there was a serious lack of places to stay anywhere near Glen Coe on our way to Glasgow. The city is known as another gateway to the Western Isles, with numerous ferry routes to all sorts of islands, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why we were going there since we were not going to take the ferry anywhere.

                                                          OBAN IS MOSTLY ONE HIGH STREET ALONG THE HARBOR WITH A VERY STEEP HILLSIDE SURROUNDING IT THAT HIDES THE RESIDENTIAL AREAS.

In the end though Oban served as a very nice and mellow reintroduction to the urban world after more than a month in some of the most rural places I had ever been in my life. It turned out to be a way to be reaclimated to urban life before we got to the major city of Glasgow.  Oban’s charms, such as they were, did not lend themselves to photography. The shock to my system at suddenly being confronted by traffic, buildings more than five stories tall, and all of the sights and sounds of a typical high street in urban Great Britain, tended to keep the camera in the bag. The fact that it was raining most of the time we were there didn’t help at all.

                                                           THERE ARE S0ME PICTURESQUE VICTORIAN BUILDINGS IN VARIOUS  STATES OF DECAY.

Now don’t get me wrong. Oban was far from an urban hell-hole; in fact it’s layout as a major historical port, surrounded by tiers of hills that offered San Francisco-like walks, lent it modicum of THE picturesque. But it certainly was a tourist town, and it took a lot of very lucky touring to find some places that were for the locals. A big part of the problem was that we stayed only one night; Fran and I quickly resolved that we would endeavor to never do that again if we could help it.

                                                           IT WAS FUN TO SEE TOWERS OF CHIMNEYS THAT BROUGHT BZCK MEMORIES OF MY OLD LONDON NEIGHBORHOOD.

The only things that kept me going were the parts of a trip available only if you actually take the trip. We ate two meals in Oban, both of which were excellent and irretrievably local. I had the most authentic fish and chips I have had since I lived in London almost fifty years ago, in one of the three chipies renowned for being among the best in Scotland which were located overlooking the harbor. The next morning we had breakfast in a locally famous bakery cafe that Bill found on a walk. The food was so good and the cafe was so well run that Fran and I made the effort to stop the harried owner and compliment her as two elderly veterans of the “hospitality” industry.

                THE REAL REASON FOR OBAN - THE VIEW BEYOND THE HARBOR

The last image from Oban might illustrate my point of the necessity of actually visiting a place. I do not expect you to be as fascinated as I was by the sidewalks of Oban. After all, I am a retired architect and unban designer. But this detail of the stone sidewalks of Oban was not in any way unusual. The entire city was mostly covered in stone like this, which to me signified a sense of civic pride far beyond the obvious ubiquity of stone in the local environment. This kind of attention to detail in what in fact was merely a sidewalk illustrates much more to me about Oban than anything else I could capture in my short time there.

                                                           CIVIC PRIDE EXTENDS TO THE SIDEWALK