Edinburgh, Scotland; with a dash of Harry Potter
There are cities that you like, and cities that you fall in love with. Edinburgh is definitely in the "fall in love with" category for me. I couldn't get enough of the sights, the sounds, the people, and the bustling metropolis rivaled L.A. (making me feel a bit more at home!) At the same time, everything has this ancient flavor...
We came at the beginning of the HUGE Fringe Festival, which lasts the entire month of August and draws performers and attendees from every corner of the globe. Over 300 different venues around the city are allocated for the many varied performances which include comedy, cabaret, music, and theater from both famous and less well-known artists.
The Royal Mile is a stretch of road in the middle of the busiest part of the city. It's lined with shops and restaurants, and during the Fringe Festival, hundreds of street performers and people passing out flyers or doing various attention-getting maneuvers to get people to come to their different shows.
Some of the sights we saw along the Royal Mile over our 3 days in the city:
There was a whole bunch of them advertising a comedy show in the rain in their underwear...they must have been cold!!
Needless to say, the city loves this festival, because they get HUGE revenue off all the tourists! Nearly everything was booked and we were lucky to get the place that we did.
We spent three lovely nights at this gorgeous B&B a 15-minute bus ride from the main part of the tourist center of the city. The quiet neighborhood was very welcome after long days in the streets packed with people!
The street our B&B was on.
Our first day was spent getting settled at the B&B and then taking a bus around town and trying to get a feel for the area.
Here's me relaxing and disrespecting public property on the double decker bus into town.
We got off the bus at a few random places and then wandered around a bit down the gorgeous Princes Road which has great views of the city as well as a nice grassy lawn to enjoy the sun. We took the photo opportunity seriously.
A view of the ornate Assembly House.
Scotland immediately started fitting its stereotypes--there were pipers EVERYWHERE (not very good ones, either) and lots of tartan. And people in kilts.
I shamelessly asked these shop-people if I could get a photo of them in their outfits--they were very sweet, and that guy talked to me for a while about the significance of the purple tartan (which represents the Scottish national flower, heather). He was...very...nice ;D
Everyone enjoying the sun. The temperature was perfect!
We had linner and a glass of wine at the Elephant House cafe, which is where J.K. Rowling did most of her writing on the first Harry Potter novel. Very exciting for die-hard fans like me!
On the walls of the bathroom there is tons of HP-related graffiti that very much warmed my heart.
etc, etc, etc....
While at the cafe, we sat with two Americans (from L.A. no less) and a very nice Italian guy who was around my age. One of the Americans had planned to stay in Edinburgh only for a week or so, but loved it so much here that he ended up renting a room and has no plans to leave even two months later. I really understood where he was coming from! The Italian guy, Jacopo, was very friendly and was leaving that night to go back to London where he lives right now. We're going to visit him when we go there at the end of our trip. We all went to check out the peaceful cemetery nearby, where it's said Jo (JK Rowling) got inspired by the names on some of the gravestones.
Here's me and Jacopo enjoying the spooky vibes.
(...I couldn't resist hopelessly over-editing at least a couple cemetery pics)
See for yourself, here's who we found:
McGonagall
Moodie
And of course, Thomas Riddell (his son, same name, is also buried there :D)
A school nearby that Hogwarts is semi-based on, or so we heard. I was fangirling hard :D
The next morning, we had breakfast at our B&B (gotta love that second B) and made our way to the famous Edinburgh Castle in the rain.
My first European castle was not really what I was expecting. When I think castle, I think big stone halls, drafty corridors, hidden passages, dungeons, majesty, the whole King Arthur setting. What this was was more of a small village inside the outer wall. Today they have a few museums, a chapel, a cafe, the armory, and then the courtyard on the top of the hill which has small, mostly unfurnished rooms where the royalty would have actually lived and underground POW cells. Not being very into military history, we were kind of blah about the museums, and the normally stunning view of Edinburgh from the walls was heavily obscured by the rain and fog:
We still had fun climbing around and listening to the tour. Every day at 1'oclock they set off a cannon, which gave us heart attacks. We enjoyed tasting some Scottish whiskey at a shop they have there:
Although perhaps "enjoy" is too strong a word XD
After the castle, we hung out on the Royal Mile for a bit and then caught free comedy shows the rest of the day. I managed to get my hands on a booklet that had a listing of all the time of the free shows that the festival offered, and so we would check the time and see what the closest venue was to where we were and then go to see whoever was performing around then. The venues were small and intimate, and we got to hear some great comedy, although some of the humor was lost on us due to the culture gap (most of the comedians were British). At a couple shows, we got interacted with because we were American, which the performers loved. A few of them would "translate" the humor for us, which was the rest of the crowd thought funny. They also often mentioned that they loved performing for Americans because we're so into audience participation and aren't afraid to be loud and whoop and give a lot of feedback, while English audiences are a lot harder to impress, lol.
There was this amazing 4-part a capella group from South Africa whom we saw perform twice called Soweto Entsha. We ADORED them: they were amazing, fantastic, inspirational, uplifting...you name it. Here's a video I took, but it doesn't do them justice to how great they were live:
Click to viewOn our third morning in Edinburgh, we were ready to stay out of the city for a little while, so we decided to climb Arthur's Seat, a hill right behind where we were staying. It was only a 30-minute walk to the base of the mountain, and we decided to take the "easy" way up, which involved walking to the other side and climbing up a steep grassy slope. It was much clearer out than the previous day and the views were breathtaking--at the top of the mountain we had a 360-degree panoramic view of the whole city and the North Sea.
The road to the trail head.
Halfway up.
The view to the south--you can see the shadows of the partial cloud cover.
Almost at the top and being dorky about it.
View of Edinburgh from Arthur's Seat: you can see Edinburgh Castle in the middle and St. Giles Cathedral to the right of it.
After a nice couple hours of hiking, and a bit of an adventure when we tried to go down the harder side of the mountain, missed the path, ended up doing some amateur rock climbing, and almost got stuck, we headed to the north side of town where we hadn't yet explored. We walked around for a while (there were a lot less people on that side of town), heading for something called "Royal Gardens" that we'd seen on the map and thought sounded pretty. We got there and it was indeed gorgeous, only it turns out you need a key (that you have to pay for on a yearly basis) to get in. Oops.
We ended up finding a cool cobbled street (Rose street) lined with lots of shops and had fun exploring there and getting some coffee and a truffle. After that we walked back up to Princes Gardens and back toward the center of town, where we caught another comedy show and had a glass of wine. We ended the night with a ghost tour (the atmosphere was ruined a bit by the hordes of crowds around us while we were hearing the stories) which ended in the ridiculously creepy vaults beneath the city. Thanks to whichclothes for the recommendation :)
The ghost tour getting kinky.
We loved Edinburgh. I will definitely be back some day, possibly to see more of the Fringe Festival (I was sad to miss Margaret Cho, Tom Lenk, and Amanda Palmer, who were going to be there later in the month!). The Scots are lovely, (although 90% of the people we encountered there were tourists!) the city is fantastic, and the whole area is great.
What not to miss:
...really, you can't go wrong in Edinburgh. Whether you spend all your days here people-watching on the Royal Mile or hiking in the country, you are pretty much guaranteed a great time.
Rock on, Scotland!
