So August is a crazy month in the wee Scottish city of Edinburgh. Not only do they throw a spectacular cultural festival that is called the 'fringe festival' but the military tattoo also runs for the last week of the month. Not knowing this detail, we chose to go on the last weekend of the month to see our favourite Australian comedian and it was brilliant!!
We had 3 nights in Edinburgh, so that left us with 2 FULL days to spend exploring and experiencing this city. The 1st night was spent wandering around, getting acquainted with the city. We managed to find the castle (not too hard since it is high up on a hill) and a proper Scottish pub to have a meal and an ale in :-) We wandered the streets for a while, taking in some of the street performers and ignoring others. The quality of these acts was reflected by their price, i.e. free so quite poor quality! We also managed to find a shop that sold whiskey, how odd. We instantly regretted being cheap about our travel and traveling with only hand luggage on Ryanair, oh well, a good reason to go back. Some little bottles were purchased for sampling enjoyment with family at Christmas.
On Saturday we strolled into town past the statue of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur C. Doyle was born in the area) and towards the Edinburgh book festival. A couple of hours or so later we emerged with some books after perusing many of the covers (and a great reusable shopping bag that contained a copy of The Guardian newspaper, Spaz misses reading a weekend newspaper). Better still the bag has an Iain Banks quote on it 'empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot'. In the mood for some coffee and snack we roamed towards the castle and along the way found ourselves a lovely family owned bookstore that had a cafe on the 3rd floor, score! I wish there was something like it in Sweden!
A lovely walk through the park (seeing a squirrel play in the park), past the floral clock and we realized it was 1 o'clock as we heard the gunshot from the castle. We made our way to the castle but the line to get in was over an hour long ... we quickly decided that we could do that next time we visit. I had read online that something fun to do was the camera obscura (
http://www.camera-obscura.co.uk/) and we walked passed it as we headed away from the castle, so we stopped in to see it. The camera obscura itself isn't so spectacular. Impressive as it has been in the same spot since the 1880's and impressive that such simple technology can transmit images so far and so clearly, no the
MOST impressive part of this museum or attraction was the
5 floors of optical illusions. Lets just say that in the room of mirrors I hit at least 2 mirrors, earning my name Spaz :-) The other spaz got to shake his own hand and was made a little disorientated by walking on a platform through a rotating cylinder :-) much fun indeed! All this fun made us hungry, so a pie shop was found. We had a haggis pie and a steak pie, both served with mashed potato and gravy (the Scottish know good comfort food). Haggis is nice, much to my surprise.
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| The Castle |
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| Chimney pots for my nan |
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| More chimney pots for my nan |
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| LOOK squirrel - action shot |
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| The sun came out |
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| Very cool art |
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| Tickling his own hand |
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| Tasmanian Spaz |
No city excursion we do seems complete without a trip to a cemetery and low and behold we randomly stumbled across an interesting one in the centre of town.
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| Most other cemeteries are all cherubs and angles, this was all skulls and bones, way cool!! |
All of this random wandering made us thirsty and since we had a paper to read we found a lovely little bar to rest up at. After an hour or so we moved on (don't know why really) but we found another little pub this time to stop and rest our legs at (full of friendly locals which was nice). Beer was consumed, a postcard was written and then it was off to join the line for what was our reason for being there in the first place, Adam Hills and his Happyism show. We thought that the line was long when we joined it, 50m from the start but by the time we entered the building it was easily 300m long. The show was much much fun :-) funny indeed :-) and a hit with both of us.
Before going to sleep we made plans for Sunday, to escape the hoards for a few hours and head out to enjoy the wonderful parkland area that is Arthur's seat. It was a bit of a sweaty walk to the top, a humid 18 degrees with very little breeze. There were still lots and lots of people out walking and enjoying the park but not as many as were in town. We stopped at the top for a little lunch picnic before heading down to walk around the park some more.
As was a favourite past time of this trip, we made our way to a pub, to read the paper some more and enjoy a refreshing ale. We then made our way back towards where we were staying with a little more pub visiting and ale drinking :-) We spent the evening eating in Leith (suburb of Edinburgh, similar to Fitzroy or Collingwood in Melbourne). It has a grimy very working class poor history but it is being gentrified. We stopped to eat at Nobles (
http://www.noblesbarleith.co.uk/) where I had a rabbit burger and it was brilliant! plus the staff are super friendly and really knowledgeable. Wish there was something like it in Sweden! Can't wait to go back to Edinburgh, next time tho' hopefully it will be a little quieter.
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| Lovely little rolling peaks at Arthur's seat |
