2 posts tagged “edinburgh”

So the next day, Thursday, we went on the bus tour of the northern part of the city.  It was kind of less exciting than the other one, but it was still cool.  We went up to the Firth of Forth and saw some really cool architecture.  For some reason I took almost no pictures on that tour.  Oh, I remember.  The first tour, we went on the top level of an open-air-top-level bus.  It was a taaaaaaad cold.  So for this one, we went on one where half of the top was covered, which was nice, but there were windows and poles in all the views, so I think that's why I didn't take many pictures. 

Here's one though.  I don't know what it is, I think it's gardens around Holyrood Palace.  The next one is the Queen's bath house, where she'd have to run from the castle in the cold to take a bath, or at least that's what our tour guide said.

After that tour we went to the Castle.  Here's the front, a view from the sort of walkway thing that's in front of it, and us:

A view from inside the gates, the entrance to the dungeon, and the inside of the feast hall.  And yes, that is snow.

A couple of sweet views from the castle walls, one of them I think you can see the water, all the way over New Town on a cloudy day.  Edinburgh really isn't that big, at all.

Then we went on this thing called a Vault Tour.  So the short version: The hill that the castle is on was basically carved by glaciers, like, hundreds of thousands of years ago.  There's the big giant hill made of rock, then what they call "the tail", which is what the royal mile is on, that goes out like the tail of a meteor from one side.  So going any direction from the Royal Mile, basically, you have to go down into a valley thing before you go anywhere else.  Somebody built a bridge south over one of those valleys hundreds of years ago.  The bridge was on pillars that made really tall arcs.  A short version and a sort of diagram is here.  People sort of filled them in and made this whole labyrinth of little rooms underneath the city.  They weren't really owned by anybody, so there were a lot of squatters, bootleggers, brothels, and other shady stuff.  And also parties.  Anyway they got closed up for over a hundred and fifty years and accidentally discovered by this ex-rugby player who bought a pub, and tried to knock out his walls to make more storage space.  The tour people were the first ones to go in and sort of clear them out in the late 1990s.  Now they do these tours and tell stories of murderers that lived or worked down there and the kinds of things that went on.  It was really interesting and entertaining.  The vaults, our lovely tour guide, and some cubby holes used for storing moonshine, children, etc:

This is this really cool-looking graveyard where Adam Smith is buried (and I just love old graveyards):

We also went to the Museum of Edinburgh that showed all these plans for the city and artifacts.  I kind of loved it for how smallish and podunk it was.  Especially after going to the Museum of London, which was extremely fance.  Dane's favorite part was the hundreds-of-years-old potential plans for the New Town, seeing the one that had won out, which is now a big chunk of the city, versus what it could have been.  It was really interesting.

Then we went to the Museum of Childhood, really briefly.  They just had all these examples of lessons or toys or games or clothes, all kinds of things from all different eras having to do with children and how they lived.  We got there with only about 30 min left 'til closing, so we didn't spend a ton of time.

St. Giles by day and by night (once again, basically right out our front door):

Fish, aged cheddar and tattie cakes, with greens, at Deacon Brodie's Pub and restaurant.  From there we had drinks at a little place I think called Tass?  They had live Scottish bluegrass, I swear like a 9-piece band, which was about 55% of the people in there.  It was so nice.  Dane tried Scotch (for the second time).  Fun fact: Deacon Brodie was this guy who was a successful businessman and widely respected town council member in the 18th century.  He was a cabinetmaker.  When working on people's cabinets, he'd make copies of their keys and he turned into a quite successful theif by night, to pay off gambling debts.  The dual-life aspect of the whole thing was Stevenson's inspiration for Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde. 

Some views and political art from St. John's Cathedral:

Friday we dropped off our bags on the other side of town after we had to check out of the room.  Then we went to St. John's Cathedral (above) and to the Dean Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, on the western side of town near the Leith River.  The Dean:

View from the MoMA, and a cool tree that we saw during the (short) walk between them:

A little walk along the Leith, just for grins:

St. Mary's Cathedral, on our way back, along with its cool doors (one of these is for you, Susanna):

Another REALLY cool graveyard:

And then that night, after a Wannaburger (which was like 2 more pounds to eat IN the tiny fastfood place as it was to eat OUTside the tiny fastfood place in the freezingness), we got on a plane and flew back to Heathrow and were picked up by an extremely friendly "broad Egyptian" guy friend of the Chadwicks', and then back to their place.  We'll pick up there in EPISODE 3.  If you can stand the suspense.

This will likely be a couple of parts, because PICTURES!  I have a lot more pictures that I'll probably put in my Kodakgallery but it's just not really feasible to put them all here.  Like, pictures of almost every single meal and of like a skillion buildings.  I can email those albums to anybody who asks. 

First of all, this is all we took for 11 days, two people, in the winter:

Flight was long but not too bad.  We got to Heathrow at like 8am and had an 11am flight to Edinburgh.  I think it hit Dane harder than me.  Watched Doubt on the flight, interesting movie.  Not quite what I expected.  Also I read a book called Neverwhere over most of the trip, by Neil Gaiman.  It's a silly fun adventury book, but it's set in all these specific places all over London and kind of either describes or assigns these really fun atmospheres/personalities to them, mostly the Tube stations.  So it was a good London trip book.

 Day 1, sprinkly-weather-hair, our first glimpse at old town and the Castle:

First lunch, this sandwich was amazing. At a place called Pret A Manger, which it turns out is this huge chain of sort of semi-organic freshly made sandwiches and stuff.  Corned beef, mustardseed mayo, pickles, spinach, on a baguette.  Delicious.

 

Me on the bridge in front of Old Town:

 

This is the back of Dane, the sort of back/side of the National Galleries, and a decent view of New Town from near the Castle Hill (the real one, with the castle on it, not the one in Carrollton, ha ha.)

 

This is Dane hauling our stuff up two lengthy and super-windy flights of stairs to the apartment we stayed in while we were there.  Literally like a 3-minute walk from the castle gate-thingie, on the royal mile.  Also: the stairs, and the view from our balcony:

 

Our bedroom (with not-all-that-Ltd Edition Jetlag Dane), and our living room:

 

Out our building and onto the Royal Mile, take a left, maybe 10 more feet and here's your Royal Mile view, including St. Giles Cathedral:

 

So that first day we walked around and then moved into our apartment, then went and had dinner at the Filling Station (which, as it turns out, even though it's right in the middle of all the quaint little pubs and super historical stuff, is a chain.  One that happens to be sort of Friday's-esque, and also themed around the US and Route 66.  Disappointing.  Good fish and chips, though.) 

Then we went to this tiiiiiny pub that was literally right below our apartment, kind of tucked into one of the little archways a few feet off the main road, the Royal Mile.  It was called the Jolly Judge.  There, we had our Guinnesses.  They were good.  And also, Dane got the wi-fi password from them, which just so happened to work in our room, as long as you hung your arm off the right side of the bed at just the right angle.  You can thank them for most of our tweets from the first part of the trip.  If you go to that link, the entrance to the pub is down the stairs, but the entrance to our apartment was right behind those picnic tables.

Then we went home.  I slept for 13 hours.  Yeah yeah, sue me.

Wednesday we took a bus tour of Old town and first New Town, or whatever it's called.  There are, like, phases.  Kind of the main stuff.

This is St. Andrew Square, in New Town:

 

Edinburgh Castle from below the hill.  You can tell why they put it there:

 

Entrance and some tour bus pictures of Holyrood Palace, which is evdidently where the Queen stays when she comes to Edinburgh:

 

After the tour we went to the National Gallery art museum.  I wrote down some of my favorite stuff, but I don't have it with me right now.  Oops.  This particular gallery kind of said it was impressionism but also it had about a skillion of the Madonna-and-Christ-and-hairy-baby-John-the-Baptist paintings, Titian etc.  I think every museum in Europe like has to have a bunch of those unless they're specifically Modern Art.  It was really sweet though. I have to be honest, we went to a lot of museums, some history and some art, and I can remember very vividly certain things about artworks and artists but I can't really remember which of the museums they were in.  My favorites, I think, were the Dean Gallery and the MoMA near the Leith.  Those come later.

We went and ate at the World's End, which used to be the end of the city.  You can still see remnants of the old wall there from like over a thousand years ago.  I had steak and ale pie, chips, and a beer.  It was goooood.  Those following me on twitter will remember my beautiful Scottish scenic view as well.

 

  Then, (THEN!) we went to the Elephant House, which is where a near-destitute Joanne Rowling first dreamed up Hogwarts and Voldemort and little Harry Potter over coffee and a gorgeous view of Edinburgh Castle.  The nerd in me freaked out and squealed a little.  The outer me had a really good latte and shared a piece of cake with Dane.