Goodbye Edinburgh

I hardly knew ye. Actually, I feel like I got a pretty good taste of the city for the amount of time I was there. Since the last two days were focused on Old Town, we decided to concentrate our efforts on Princes Street, New Town, and possibly Calton Hill. Thankfully, we had more than enough time to pretty much traipse all over.

Mom would be proud.

But first, I had to do a redo of spitting on the Heart of Midlothian. Yes, spit. It's a heart set in cobblestone on the site of the Tolbooth prison, and you're supposed to spit on it to ward off evil. And who doesn't need to ward off evil? J wouldn't spit on it at first - I don't think he believed my story about the evil fighting and thought that I was tricking him into spitting on a landmark. But right after I made him at least pretend to spit, a local streetworker came over and gave the stone a good hock. And then J felt okay with actually spitting on the cobblestones. I guess he finally believed me.

First off, we decided to head over to Always Sunday, a cute café on the Royal Mile, for a full Scottish breakfast, and to answer that unanswerable question - haggis or black pudding? Yet again, we encountered more shenanigans on the Royal Mile. We came across a strange obstacle course along the main road with bales of hay and people diving into giant inflated barriers with gusto and emerging with smiles all around. Definitely interesting to watch with your morning black pudding.

I swear I've seen this before on American Gladiator...

Wheeee!!!

Random bales of hay. Sure, that's not weird.

We then walked along Princes Street and checked out the Gardens and The National Gallery of Scotland, which had the Impressionists on exhibit. We took a quick gander around the gallery and wandered back to the gardens to admire the most excellent views of Edinburgh Castle. We also walked by the Scott monument, and it really does look like a gothic space ship. It is kind of amazing that this kind of monument would be made for an author. Think Danielle Steele has enough money to put something like this up in her 'hood in San Francisco?

I managed to convince J into walking New Town with me (or should I say I wandered there and J had no choice other than to follow me since I had the map), and it wasn’t as great as I expected. There are some great views of Firth of Forth just looking down the street, but nothing in particular to really marvel at. We passed by St. Andrew’s Square and Jenners, the veritable Scottish department store, but we didn’t really want to shop so we kept on going.

Even though it was a pretty cold day, we were game to trek up Calton Hill and check out the monuments up close. On the way, we popped into Calton Cemetery, which houses the bones of David Hume and some other not so famous people. It was very a propos with the gloom and doom weather we were having, and J made his peace with my fascination with cemeteries.

We finally made it up the Hill and checked out the various monuments and observatory, including Nelson’s Monument. Nelson’s this famous sailor that’s also got the monument in Trafalgar Square back in London, but I’m told that he’s much more important in English history than in Scottish history. Anyway, the dude’s got two more monuments than me, so he’s the clear winner here. The views are insane up there and rival those of the Castle, except it’s completely free. The place was pretty deserted since it was so windy out, and we wandered around while trying to avoid getting blown away.

The Fife and the Firth of Forth behind me. Seriously.

Arthur's Seat to the left. Dude had a giant butt. I mean Arthur, not J.

By the time we finished, I was completely frozen and J was pretty tired so we headed back to the hotel for some R&R. The hotel has this fabulous drawing room, and we cozied up on our armchairs with coffee and biscuits and some books we bought earlier from the Waterstone’s across the street until it was time to head to the train station to go home.

All in all, this was probably one of the best weekends I’ve ever had, and I fell completely in love with Edinburgh. The city is impressive and incredibly beautiful in a bleak sort of way. I hope we could come back one day and maybe see a highland coo. J is still determined to see a leprechaun even though I’ve told him time and again that they don’t exist.