Day 11 Kirkcaldy

It's Saturday in Kirkcaldy. The Family History obligations only take an hour or so. A couple of hours in the shopping centre gives yet another view of the urban Scots. I could have been in any shopping centre in Australia except that the people hear "talk funny".

My B&B was across the road from the Raith Rovers football ground. And there was a match on at 3pm. So @ 2.30 I cross the road and try to enter. "You have to go up t'other end." I go in the gate marked "Visitors" and find myself virtually alone with a whole grandstand to myself.
At 2.45pm it happened! Several hundred supporters of the "Queen of the South" (Dumfries) joined me. It became the complete British soccer experience. Songs, bagpipes, drums - the lot!
With the same venom of the worst Collingwood supporters for their own, the opposition and the referee, these "grown-ups" provided a better spectacle than the game itself.

After the game I learned the security measures that surround the soccer fans. I only had to get across the road to the B&B. But, as I was seated with the visitors, there was only one way permitted - direct to the station, do not pass go, do not try and pretend you're an impartial foreigner! After standing still for 15 minutes, and assuring a chatty policeman that I really was from Melbourne, I was permitted to walk the 40 metres to my B&B.

This really is a different world.