This is a story from August last year, but I feel like it is a story that should be told as what happened was so ridiculous and unbelievable. To understand this story, one needs to understand that the Royal Mile in Edinburgh is littered with gift shops. Moreover, these souvenir shops all sell the same thing. If you want to buy something cool during your trip to Edinburgh. I don’t recommend paying a visit to one of these shops unless you want the the typical tourist tat.
Anyway to tell this story, I was showing a friend who came all the way from Los Angeles to visit me. I said I would show him around both Edinburgh and Glasgow. He only had 2 days to do it, so we took the train over to Edinburgh. I gave him a tour around the main sites of Edinburgh for the whole day. After walking up to see Edinburgh Castle, we then headed down the other end so I could show him the Scottish Parliament Building.
While walking down, he saw the Lion Rampant flag and was curious to know about the meaning of this flag. My friend saw that it was on the window of one of the shops. We walked in and he then asked the woman at the till what the flag meant. She didn’t look like she wanted to be there and was behaving boorish when we we came in. She said she would only explain it if he explained what his flag means. He then explained what the Italian and Venetian flags mean as that is where his family is from.
However, during this conversation, the woman demanded that we take our masks off. I refused to do so because I was going on a backpacking trip a few days after and I didn’t want to take any chances. This woman was adamant that I should take my mask off. However, I said in retaliation that as a person who studies law I was simply following the law at the time.
This caused the woman working at the shop to go into a rant about how the whole pandemic isn’t real. She dished out a load of insults and said I’m being brainwashed by my university. Even more than that, she called me a “snowflake” Furthermore, she said “Nicola Sturgeon is a communist” because my friend had voiced a favourable opinion towards her.
I was speechless and really wanted to tell her to spare me the poetry. Despite that I just left the shop. My friend came out a minute later and was baffled. I found this to be a very strange and rude encounter. I do not feel that this woman was fit to be working in a job that would involve tourists. A nasty person like her could really ruin someone’s trip to Edinburgh or make a bad impression of Scottish people in general.
That’s the end of my story, however there is more surrounding this souvenir shop. If you Google the name of this shop: Neanie Scott, you can find a few negative reviews. These reviews mention a rude woman working there on Google Maps. Furthermore, I recently found a review on Tripadvisor which states that the shop has permanently closed down and has been replaced by another one.
This man’s experience was absurd as mine, he mentioned that he just entered the shop. Then the woman working there screamed him that her insurance claim was denied and that was a very random introduction. Similar to my experience, she then ranted on to this man about misinformation to do with the pandemic. Furthermore, she ranted on about how universities are pointless.
I’ll be honest, it does give me a bit of freudenschade to hear that this place has closed down. The woman working there is very much not suited to a simple job working with tourists. No more does this woman pose a threat to the many tourists who come to Edinburgh.