Destination: Edinburgh, Scotland
Population: 500,000
Preface: Many a fun séjour has been taken before this trip on Pentecote to Edinburgh, that has not been documented in this blog, for this I give my sincerest apologies. Suffice it to say that around Paris there are many many exciting sites to see and events to take part in.
As for Edinburgh- a little break right before finals on a 3 day weekend. Left mid-day Saturday so I had ample time to sleep in, take a little run in the Luxembourg gardens, and go to a bookstore and buy some travel reading and the latest version of the Economist before heading out to Charles de Gaulle for the flight. Once in Edinburgh, I got right on the trail of exploring. My hostel happened to be literally int he city center, at the heart of everything, and it was anice big hostel with a huge common room/kitchen basement, tv, couches, wifi, great ambiance and very friendly staff. Everyone in Edinburgh was super friendly though. Impressions of the city overall before delving into details: 1. everyone is really friendly, 2. the city is actually not htat big at all, at least not the tourist section of it, there was the main street and a few back streets, a couple castles, lots of parks, but really it wasn't overwhelming they have no metro althought hey are installing tramways which made for lots of construction, but its a "manageably sized" tourist city if that makes any sense, nice and not too overcrowded but still bustling with activity, wide streets, ample eateries, a little culture a statue here and there. It's also one of the oldest "modern day skyscraper" cities, in the medieval time they built up instead of sideways as they were building on seven hills so the building turn out to be fourteen stories high in the old town with these closes, little alleyways with steep steps and great names, taking you from the top of the hill to the bottom. But now with the streetways that wind and descend and rise slowly on an incline it's much harder to discern where the hills stop and where they begin, you can take a close with hundreds of steps and be out of breath only to discover the next day there was a street slightly on an incline that you could have taken and avoided the hassle. Anyways, other impression is that things weren't too tooexpensive, granted you were on the pound and the conversion pound euro is pretty good right now, but living seemed to be quite reasonable. and other impression: the Scottish are way too proud of their bagpipes and kilts. Not only were there tourist trap excursions with guides in traditional dress at every corner, but even locals were out in full force for a wedding, for a parade, for the fun of it potentially? I saw a lot of kilts and heard a lot of bagpipes.
Okay back to play by play. So I get there, I have this little map, and the first thing to do is walk down High Street, aka the Royal Mile, downwards towards Holyrood Palace the house of the Queen when she visits for one week a year. Guess what? This was the week she was there! Which meant it was closed for visitation, but still cool. It was a pretty palace with lots of grounds, built in the 15th century Mary Queen of Scots lived there, Jmes V her son completely restored it, and...I don't know it's just there, it has this new additional part called the Queens gallery built in 2001 which has artwork and a nice café and gift shop. And there's an old abbey that used to be the site's main feature. Across from it find the new Scottish Parliament built in 2004, it looks very very modern/retro using steel and metal and wood and it's not the best design in my opinion, it also cost ten times as much as previewed, but it's there and you an get a free tour now which I sadly didn't do. Also in this area is HOlyrood Park, this huge open greenery with soccer fields and running tracks and people flying kites, and just next to it are the Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat, this extinct volcano that is now walking trails up to Arthur's Seat, seat of Arthur and the roundtable and all the myths. So the land was a volcano, then it was frozen over by glaciers (which went over the entire city and were over a mile high) and the Glaceires melted and formed the lochs and went into the sea and the earth is still rising in Scotland after the weight of the glaciers was removed millions of years ago! Arthur's seat was absolutely beautiful, a steep climb but the views were breathtaking you could see out to the Atlantic ocean and from the top you could see far out in to the distance of Edinburgh. It was really really windy at the top and hard to get down without falling on the gravel, me wearing sandals didn't help the matter, but it was a great sight and climb nonetheless. That accomplished, I wearily trudged back to the city center, St Gile's Cathedral right on high street, great renaissance architecture, for a ghost tour at nite. I was told I had to go on a ghost tour in Edinburgh. Granted, I might have chosen the wrong one, but we didn't talk about ghosts that much at all. We talked about life in the medieval ages and how they'd do public floggings and tortures at the Mercat Cross (Mercat being gallic for Market) on the weekends to entertain people, how even today public elections have to be announced from the Mercat cross its inscribed in Scottish law, we talked about how people would empty their buckets of waste from the top stories of their high rise apartments and call out Gardiloo )a derivative of the french prenez garde de l'eau) before chucking the bucket, and how all that waste flowed down into the city lake because the pavement was made from the ignatius rock of the volcano so it didn't absorb anything, and how this lake was subsequently the city's water source for most of the middle ages (problematic no?) and it was drained and is now the Princes Street Gardens (very, very well fertilized as our guide said) and from that the drinking of whisky was preferred since the water was so horrible. umm, we also covered the St Gile's cemetery (which is under a carpark now) and then we went into the underground vaults which are these chambers underneath South Bridge, initially designed to be a market but not waterproofed so it turned out too difficult to conduct business in them and they were vacated, leaving way for prostitution, gambling, and houses of ill repute to fill them , including bodysnatchers who sold corpses to the local medical school via the dark and dim proceedings/dealings under the bridge. They were then filled in completely around Napoleonic times and not excavated until the late 1900s, and now tours go through them and tell ghost stories of eerie sightings in all of the various rooms. I would have liked to know more historically about the vaults and more historical ghost stories (ours were all since 1996 when the tours started going down there) but it was interesting to get to go in the vaults and learn what little I did about them. Apparently the walls are made of mortar and rock of course but also oyster shells which were ground up and put into the walls to make them stronger. That done, I headed back to the hostel and settled in, getting very little sleep because of snoring roommates -unacceptable and intolerable! then I woke up, ran around edinburgh which was pretty fun I ran down Queen street to the National Archives and then down to Queens Street Gardens, which are these huge gardens that are private and covered in growth so you can't really see inside, then during the day I took a tour of the Highlands and the Loch Ness! again I learned one million things that I will probably soon forget about the Scots and their history and the highlands versus lowlands and the masascre of glen coe (we visited the glen) and all of the lochs in scotland and how there's only one lake (loch means lake in english) and how the queen has a summer house up in the highlands somewhere and we passed Dune castle the castle filmed in Monty Python, it has coconuts to clack with for visitors, and we saw Hamish the highland coo (cow) who as it turns out is actually a vegetarian for as huge and imposing as he seems, and the highland coos used to be black but the scots bred them to be orange in line with a change in taste, and they don't have any protective shell/skin for the winter which is why they have an extra coat of fur which makes them super-furry for warmth. And we passed Stirling castle and probably some other castles and learned about Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites who were the closest anyone came to overthrowing the king from Scotland in 1745 but he was crushed for various reasons and after that wearing a kilt, speaking gallic, all the traditional nationalist stuff was banned and there was a massive exodus of scots out of scotland and the territory is still underpopulated and in some regions, like the Isle of Skye for example, never reached the population it had in 1745. But the highlands, essentially most of northern scotland, really were pretty empty, beautiful but very little human life. Our final destination was Loch Ness, way up north, where we looked for the loch ness monster! So the loch ness monster was first recorded in 545 by Saint Columba who was in Scotland to convert everyone to Catholicism, he saw the creature and blessed it and that's recorded in the Vatican archives. Then you get various reports of the creature/species and in the 1930s the infamous photo of the dinosaur like head was published in the local newspaper, taken up in the UK paper and then seized by the international press where the idea of the monster entered into the universal imagination. Monster is an inapropriate title because the creature has never actually been recorded as having harmed or threatened anyone or anything. So the loch ness is one of the biggest lochs, 24 miles long with 3 trillion cubic tons of water which is more than all of the water in the UK and it's big enough to fit the world population three times over in it, which means its huge, also the bottom 30 meteres are covered in mud and the visibility is so poor most research teams can't get any work done, meaning the creature remains a mystery. There was a boat tour on the loch and it has sonar on it that has recorded over 700 sightings of objects over 6 meters in the last 17 years, although they can't tell if they're living of dead like tree trunks so it's not really a form of proof, just more speculation. So the tradition and the beliefs continue. One of the locals just got his degree from MIT and he claims to have proof that the monster exists but he says he won't publish it because he doesn't want loch ness to be invaded by scientists and to take away the mystery (from all of my lore and movie watching I thought this already happened but I guess not?) So we were there only for an hour and ahalf, not long enough to see the monster unfortunately, but I know she's out there. And then we came back and stopped in Dunkeld to see one of the earliest cathedrals built in Scotland in this little prairie next to a beautiful river known for salmon fishing in this quiet little town of Dunkeld, and returned home by nightfall. Tired, I just walked around a little, saw parts of the New Town and walked into the Old Calotn Burial ground where David Hume is and theres this huge obelisk and a turret which I htink is now part of the governor's house just next door, but on the skyline they are pretty noticeable and then I get to the cemetery and there was no one there and it looked pretty unkept. Also went to St Andrew;s square which is this little park with the lawn covered in people during the day. Tried Scottish tablets, candy essentially mde of butter, milk, and sugar, and not good at all, and Cadbury chocolate, a must anytime you go to the UK, and stayed away from cornish pasties which were their version of fastfood and haggis, because I know that I wouldn't like that at all. And anytime I leave paris I automatically miss baguettes and cheese, so of course for lunch the next day I found a baguette place and got a sandwich, yum. I already know that will be a hard adjustment come August.
Oh also this weekend happened to be the weekend of the Edinburgh marathon, so the next day I saw tons of people with their white shirts from the marathon and heard everyone talking about their times on the bus to the airport and in the common room of the hostel. But anyways, last day in Edinburgh-start off early go to Calton Hill where they have various monuments not really well arranged around the hill and a walking path that was made to access the newly built penitentiary built into the hill back in the 1800s, no longer in operation. The National Monument in the shape of the Parthenon is up there the columns are standing tall, except they ran out of money to finish it so it's really only some columns in the front and a few on either side with an open back. The monument oddly enough is to the soldiers who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, interesting choice for the grand national monument. Oh sidenote one cool thing on the tour from yesterday, we passed this tiny tiny cemetery in the middle of nowhere lowlands and President Eisenhower's relatives were buried there, apparently his mother's ancestry descends from the Scottish lowlands. And also we talked about the movie bravehaert and its historical faux pas, and I guess the lowlanders didn't wear kilts back then it was just a highlander thing and the guy who is named Braveheart, the king in the movie, in real life was just a solider with a cool nickname. And they didn't paint their faces that was the ancient ancestors the Pecs (who disappeared with no traces and no good reason for disappearance back in the day). Okay but final day in Edinburgh, see Calton Hill, pack up my stuff, walk down to Grassmarket and Westport where there were lots of bars and restaurants, its the cheap going out district at night, walked up George IV bridge where I saw the Elephant House, a pub known for hosting JK Rowling as she wrote harry Potter on napkins and looked out the back window towards Edinburgh Castle, and I walked up to the castle which is on top of a big hill and had lots of different parts, the 1 o clock cannon which fires everyday at 1 and used to be used to tell shippers when it was high noon, the crown jewels are there, there are the dungeons and the apartments of the royalty and all that jazz. Also did a little shopping in the Princes Mall whcih was half empty but the stores they did have were cute. And with plenty of time to spare I headed to the airport and came back to paris, only to find news reporters from everyinternational channel you can think of in the airport filming themselves on tripod cameras reporting the disappearance of an AirFrance flight from Rio to paris last nite which, as I write this, still hasn't been found and is the largest crash in AirFrance's 75 year history. Very horrible. As for Edinburgh, however, I loved it, the town and the surroundings and everything, a great little sojourn into Scotland.
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