Scotland

This 275 foot monument to Walter Scott, on the river in central Edinburgh is the largest...thing...I've ever seen erected for a writer.

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! To all the sensual world proclaim. One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name."

Monumental, don't you agree?

However, Scott also said: "If a farmer fills his barn with grain, he gets mice. If he leaves it empty, he gets actors."

So even if Scott hadn't written Ivanhoe and the other classics, he really did deserve a tower on the river.

Argentina's Jose Luis Borges loved to sip coffee at a certain coffee house in Buenos Aires. After his death he was sculpted sitting at his table with a book--inside the coffee house itself. Then somebody tore down the coffee house to make way for a mall. But the tribute to Argentina's greatest writer lived on. I found Borges still sitting at the same table-- in the Mall basement near "personal electronics." He looked a bit forlorn. Say what you will about the Scott monument, this is one author who will never be upstaged by a wall of iPods.

You see a lot of bikes tooling around Edinburgh and at least some of the main streets have bike lanes. However, the weather can be...challenging. The British mutter about the rain, then always manage to press on through it. The Scotts actually seem to enjoy being in the thick of a violent storm--on or off a bike. I stayed on foot and focused on remaining upright even when the rain came at me sideways.