in bullet form
[old fucking news.]
- we stayed at a hostel which was kind of gross. (Wet carpets in the loos. Wet floors are not ideal, but still ok. Wet carpets, which make the whole little room permanently smell of damp fabric, not so much when the room is steamy, but when it’s cold? Brave people shudder.) The people running it were cool, though.
- We fell in love with the Royal Mile, like good little tourists. (Very pretty - even the millions of souvenir shops, awful though they are, can’t kill the atmosphere, that’s how healthy an atmosphere it has.)
- Instead of pigeons as the feral urban bird, Edinburgh has seagulls. Good idea, right?
- I drank a Caledonian Brewery ale, which I’d never done before - it was very tasty. It was a seasonal one called ‘Nectar’ and had honey in it.
- Suzana had some haggis (from a Wetherspoons, I don’t know how real that is, I’m not sure how to gauge haggis authenticity). She approved of it.
- We did a lot of aimless wandering
- We aimlessly wandered into (well not completely without aim, we’d seen people sitting on the roof of a building, and so we walked inside and took the lift up) what turned out to be this really expensive posh restaurant called Oloroso, and ordered tea, which came to 60p each (still, that’s a lot for not-life-changing tea. We paid for the view). The staff didn’t look impressed by us. We were stared at.
- We aimlessly wandered into the Museum of Musical Instruments at the university. There was an elderly caretaker there who opened it for us on a Sunday out of the goodness of his heart. It was small but packed full of amazing stuff with the histories and workmanship written up. And a database of sounds you could listen to. I didn’t see a sitar! But there were lutes. And lyres. And it told you the difference between a concertina and an accordion. We wrote good things in the guestbook.
- Burns is EVERYWHERE. His picture, I mean, in all the tourist trap spots. Everywhere we went, he watched. The writer’s museum was ok. We (aimlessly) wandered onto a bit of a literary pub tour, in which Burns/Scott/Robert Louis Stevenson’s lives and relationships were being enacted by two men. It was pretty intense.
- I bought some whisky for Nando.
- There were medieval re-enactment people doing some of it with swords and battleaxes and, a Morningstar? I think, in the Meadows, and Reshika jumped in and they taught her lots of moves.
- The Museum of Scotland is great. It’s filled with lots of patriotic rhetoric. Robert the Bruce is ok by me.
- Suzana befriended vagrants.
- When we met someone, we introduced ourselves as being "from Canada and London", which isn’t strictly true, and as always (why do I ALWAYS) the question “where are you from” prompted a mini internal existential debate.
- In Holyrood Park we climbed a small hill, then went down it. Then you had to climb another, slightly taller (and so highly treacherous and dangerous and evil, I guess) hill to get to Arthur’s Seat. We omitted the second hill and sat on a rock as we are lazy/unfit. There were large black slugs, who I didn’t mind. Slugs are our friends, I’m told.
- There were lots of bookshops and we looked around every one we saw. (including a Fopp. I’m not sure if Edinburgh is the home of Fopp, or whether this is Glasgow. I’m grateful that Fopp exists, so thank you, Scotland.)
- We went to a place called the Bongo Club. I wouldn’t’ve minded a club of the rock/alternative ilk, but the Canadians weren’t that way inclined - plus, my public library guidebook described this place as being ‘pretentious, artsy’ so that was boviously[sic] the place for us. It was all funky/reggaey that night. For a while it was us sitting and 5 people dad-dancing. It got progressively better as more pretentious people filled up. I guess walking back to the hostel amid hordes of drunken people was an eyefull for the Canadians, with their 24/7 alcohol availability.
- There was some ‘Resist the G8’ graffiti about. It wasn’t so much graffiti as scrawled several times on a wall in the Meadows. We did consider re-writing/paraphrasing it onto another surface, with better design and colours. We didn’t though, which is the thing I regret most about the whole Edinburgh experience. Next time I go anywhere, spray cans will be packed.