Two random things that annoy me about Scotland

So here we are in the Edinburgh airport waiting to fly home and instead of reflecting on the positives I'm going to complain about two negatives. First, pubs need a special license in order to allow children in. Now I'm not talking about a crowded pub at 10pm on a Saturday night. I mean that two different pubs turned us away--one at two in the afternoon where we were going to sit outside--because they didn't have a children's license. I could see if they flat-out said no kids in pubs because it will corrupt them (I would disagree, of course, but I could see). But to require a special license seems like a shake-down, pure and simple. The UK Nanny State strikes again, I suppose.

The other thing that annoys me is people in Scotland don't stay to one side of the sidewalk. In the U.S. people generally stay to the right; same thing in Germany. You'd think people in Scotland would stay to the left, right? Wrong. It was a royal pain in the ass to walk down crowded Edinburgh streets because some oncoming pedestrians were moving to their right while others moved left. For a country that is obsessive about queueing, you'd think they could walk down the street in an orderly fashion.

Anyway, those are my nitpicky complaints. If that's the worst I have to say about the Scots, they're not doing too bad. Of course, I guess my biggest problem would be them outlawing my ancestors (the Clan McGregor) for two hundred years, but I'm over that by now.