Winter is Coming

If you read Games of Thrones, or the Song of Ice and Fire to be exact, a common phrase is Winter is Coming, and the north is always depicted as somewhere cold and desolate. Even the undead/zombies are from the north. In some ways the north of England, which is Scotland, is cold (as a matter of fact, any place on the northern hemisphere is colder the further north you go), but I imagined Scotland to be as cold as the north in the Games of Thrones. There’s also the thing where George Martin says he based the books/series on the wars in medieval England/Scotland.

However in general the people in Scotland are much friendlier than I imagined, and it was quite warm the few days I was there, with no rain at all during my holiday. Not sure if there is a correlation between the weather and the people’s mood. A friend commented on this saying that in general people are more friendly the further north you go, i.e. the ‘rudest’ people are the ones in the south (England) and the friendliest are the ones up in the Highlands of Scotland. I wonder if that’s true or not.

Anecdotally during my holiday, not less than 7 times people offered to take our family pictures. In comparison, during last year trip to London, no one offered to take our family pictures. It might be that there are too many tourists in London, but we went to Edinburgh and quite a lot of tourists can still be seen. And most of the people who offered to help seemed to be tourist themselves. Maybe the friendly mood is infectious?

So in short, it is true that winter is coming as summer comes to an end, but it is not true that the people from the north are cold, or for that matter, zombies who have ice swords.

Thank you for reading.