County Fair and USCB (Unidentified Sea Creature Bits)

Saturday I went to the Kirkwall county fair. It was simply called the "show" but it was surprisingly like the county fairs where I live, except much larger. There were a lot of tourists there, and I get the feeling that is pretty common, so the locals prepare.
We went through looking at chicken, ducks, cows, and ponies. Apparently a Highland cow won best in show, but we didn't see it.
We watched some of the horse competitions and it was really fun to see the riders in their fancy riding gear on little English saddles. I guess I've never seen that in pereson before.
We had heard rumors that there were going to be sheep races and sheep-shearing contests, but we didn't see them if there were. We didn't get there until about noon either.
There were vendors of all sorts. They were selling wool textiles, paintings, bags, clothing, wood-burned art, jewelry, haggis, burgers, alcohol of all shapes and sizes, chips (which we call fries), sweets, candy floss (cotton candy), and so much more.
I bought a pattern to use for either counted-cross-stitch or counted-tapestry, which is a design of Skara Brae. (Hopefully I can finish it before I'm 90 years old. That means I'll have to finish the dragon at least by 80.) The friend I was with found a painting that she really wanted, but she didn't have enough money so we pooled our money and checked to make sure we had enough for the bus tickets home. We did, but just barely.
Most of the people from the fair went to a soccer game after which was between the teams from Ham and Sandwick. We thought that was really funny. Anyway, we were out of money and pretty tired so we didn't go to the game. Instead we went to eat dinner in the same Chinese place that has the best fish-n chips around. While we were standing in line to order, we saw our professor in there waiting for his food. He came and talked to us for a while and we happened to ask him if the restaurant took credit cards. He said no, and we looked at eachother in a kind of "uh-oh" way. He saw it and gave us a 20 pound bill. We would have had to find another place to eat, or gone hungry. It's a good thing that place has good fish'n chips because the Chinese food was iffy at best.
We went to Tesco which is basically the Wal-Mart of Orkney, and bought some groceries for the week, then saw that the next bus back to Stromness and our hostel, wasn't for another two hours, so we went into a Bistro and ordered drinks while we waited. The Bistro was decorated with American things, which was really amusing. They had lisence plates from at least 30 states up on the walls. There was an 8B from Idaho! Somehow it seemed so out of place to see the lisence plates there. I took a picture of the one from Idaho. I felt weird doing it, but I just had to. There was a wooden Indian on the wall with a feather sticking out of his hair, and an old leather base-ball glove next to a wooden bat, under a picture of a taxi.
Today we were going to have a field trip, but it ended up not happening, so my friend and I went to the beach at low tide and combed. We found lots of cool stuff, some of which we brought back to the hostel. We will need to high-grade before we try to pack it though, unless we want to buy an extra suitcase for all of it. We have sea glass, several different kinds of shells, some chips of pottery worn by sand, and two oddities. One is, or at least was, clearly a table knife, but now it is a rusted... thing. We've decided it's from some famous ship wreck. We're not sure what the other thing is.  It's about two inches long, and the shape of a tusk. It's hollow, and white on th inside, but a dark greyish purple on the outside. It might be some kind of really large crab's claw... we're just really not sure. If only I could upload pictures, maybe some of you would know. Anyway, we like it and it's really sturdy so it's coming home with us.
We went to lunch at a pub/restaurant and had fish'n chips. (The fish'n chips are just so good here that we eat them all the time.) It was about four in the afternoon but there was one very drunk older guy at the bar who started singing "Black Velvet Band". The scene was so steriotypical of a Scotish pub, that it felt like an excerpt from a movie.
We only have four more days on site. I'm not sure how I feel about that.