A weekend in snowy Edinburgh

Following the suggestion of Becca’s cousin and aunt, we headed up to Scotland last weekend for the second time, this time to the capital, Edinburgh.  Here’s a rundown of the highlights…

Day 1

Our train from King’s Cross in the morning stopped almost immediately after leaving the station and remained stopped for the better part of an hour.  But I didn’t mind too much, since Becca taught me to play backgammon.  She slaughtered me our first few games, but I started to get the hang of it.  By the point that Becca took this picture, I must have been on a bit of a winning streak.  I’ve started to think about backgammon a lot, so much so that I’m now pondering how to incorporate the doubling die into other games.  The bottom line: 6+ hours on the train to Edinburgh wasn’t so bad.

After our arrival we decided to climb to Arthur’s Seat, a decent-sized hill practically in the middle of the city.  It’s only 251 meters (823 feet) high and has lots of trails to the top, but that didn’t prevent us from getting a bit lost on the way up.  We opted for a more direct route down, scrambling down a ravine.  At this top we saw this bird, which has been expertly identified by our friend Bryan as a Carrion Crow.

We spent the rest of the evening wandering around the various Christmas markets in the Princes Street Gardens and enjoying a tasty dinner at David Bann, an all-vegetarian restaurant recommended by my academic adviser.  As usual, her advice was superb.  The highlight was the starters – I had a pumpkin and sage soup, Becca a tomato and blue cheese tartlet.  It’s always a bit of an odd experience for us eating at vegetarian restaurants; we’re used to searching the menu for the vegetarian option, so it’s a bit disconcerting to have to consider the entire menu.

Day 2

We woke up to snow, which heightened the Christmas-y atmosphere that was already permeating the city.  The initial plan was to pop into some of the Old Town churches for a look.  But, it being Scotland on a Sunday morning, we were generally foiled by services going on.  A rather friendly man at Greyfriars Kirk invited us to come back after the Gaelic-language service for coffee, but it wasn’t to be.

Instead of churches, we went on a short tour at the Museum of Scotland with a guide who, to our eyes, sounded much more English than Scottish.  But given how English a city Edinburgh is, it felt fitting somehow.  After racing through a few millennia of Scottish history (we made it to 1746), we’d had enough and needed some food, so it was off to the Elephant House café, where J.K. Rowling did some early writing on the Harry Potter series.

The afternoon was spent wandering around New Town, popping into shops every so often to warm up.  Once shops and museums had closed, it was back to the Princes Street Gardens Christmas markets for roasted chestnuts and hot mead.  The mead was our second hot alcoholic beverage of the weekend – the night before we had some mulled beer at the German Christmas market.  And the mead wouldn’t be the last…

After dinner at Henderson’s bistro, a vegetarian classic, we made our way to a cinema where we saw Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, part 1.  Becca had already seen it (of course), but she humored me by sitting through a second viewing (she didn’t need much convincing).  After a pretty serious misstep in the film version of Half-Blood Prince, this installment seems to set things right for the finale.

Day 3

The main tourist attraction in Edinburgh is the castle.  Our memories of our visit will always be colored by the fact that it was freezing up there, but it was well worth the freeze.  It’s a rather curious attraction, with a real mishmash of different elements: the Scottish National War Memorial, a tiny 12th-century, chapel, the crown jewels of Scotland (curiously and dubiously ‘lost’ between the Acts of Union and Sir Walter Scott’s ‘discovery’ in 1818), and the mock-medieval Victorian decorations of the Great Hall.  So it doesn’t really present a coherent tone or narrative (beyond, I suppose, some sense of Scottish distinctiveness), but it’s a pretty high-yield attraction.  And, as castles go, it’s awfully defensible, especially when the slopes of the hill are coated in ice and snow.  This photo is looking towards Arthur’s Seat across the Old Town.

Given how cold we were, you’d probably guess that a place called Chocolate Soup would fit the bill.  And you’d be right.  But just so you don’t get your hopes up too high, I have to tell you that the ‘chocolate’ and ‘soup’ refer to different sections of the menu.  Still, we left thinking that every city should have a place serving hot chocolate and soup this good, and with so many variations on hot chocolate.

In the afternoon we walked back up the Royal Mile to Mary King’s Close.  It’s hard to describe the architecture and layout of Old Town Edinburgh.  There are plenty of times when you think you’re at ground level only to reach an intersection and realize there’s another level of streets well below you.  Taking a tour of Mary King’s Close gives you a better sense of how the city is put together, with vertically arranged housing in tenements as the solution to the tricky problem of building on a steep slope – some buildings had as many as fourteen floors.  As you can imagine, this led to some rather cramped, dirty living in the pre-modern era, as the tour made apparent.  Thanks to Emily for the suggestion!

Day 4

As I mentioned at the top, Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland.  In case you’re confused about what it means for Scotland, part of the United Kingdom, to have a capital, you can refer back to Becca’s primer.  Since 1999, the Scottish Parliament has been responsible for certain devolved issues – things like education, health, and justice.  In practice, it seems as if the actual amount of legislation passed by the Parliament is pretty limited – between May 2009 and May 2010, 18 bills were introduced and 15 acts were passed.  Still, every so often there are decisions that garner international attention, like the decision last summer by Scottish justice minister Kenny MacAskill to release Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi.

In any case, the important part for our visit is that the Scottish Parliament, as parliaments typically do, has its own building.  Designed by Catalan architect Enric Miralles, it was completed in 2004.  Here’s a photo of the debating chamber, remarkably informal, I think.  The upper gallery that’s visible here is open to the public.  As it turned out, the main floor also turned out to be open to the public (or at least two slightly confused Asian tourists) while we were there, but that was more a breach of security than actual policy.

As you might recall, the British transportation system ground to a halt on Tuesday.  So while we anxiously waited to see whether we’d be able to get back to London (we did, on a train that cut over to the West Coast Main Line), we made one last stop at the Christmas market to warm up with Glühwein, apple strudel, waffles, and potato noodles [UPDATE: We’ve been informed by a reliable source that these noodles are called Schupfnudeln – a specialty of southwestern Germany.  Thanks Maike!].  Let me tell you, the Germans know how to stay warm at Christmas-time.

For more pictures, you can see our facebook album here.