I’m sitting on a tiny two-foot-wide balcony over a side street in the resort town of La Baule, France, and if I lean dangerously over the flower box I can just see a bit of the Atlantic through the trees down the lane, past the heads of the stylish French tourists and their even more stylish dogs. It’s beautifully sunny but cool enough that we used the spot I’m sitting in as an open-air fridge last night for a chunk of Petit Breton and €0.67 worth of grocery store paté. But I’m not going to talk about any of that, because due to a mix of being tired and constantly panicked at the fact that no one around me would have any idea what I was saying if I suddenly shouted, “Help! My wife has fallen down a manhole!” I’m now a good two weeks behind on updating this thing. So the next couple of posts are going to be long attempts at getting caught up, starting with our 36 hours in Edinburgh.
So picking up where Sophie left off, we lit out from the Lake District for Edinburgh, a town I’ve wanted to visit for years, in a large part because its Fringe Festival is so famous that in my head I imagined it to be one giant East Village, if the East Village had been built in 800 years BCBGB (Before CBGB). Turns out that perception isn’t entirely incorrect. The city’s old and beautiful and cosmopolitan, but welcoming and accessible. While the Irish are warm and friendly but, through no fault of their own, leave you feeling remarkably uncool for simply not being Irish, the Scots are warm and friendly and exude an attainable level of cool.
Edinburgh’s laid out across a steep, comet-shaped glacial ridge that divides the city and leads to strange geography, like streets running across the rooftops of the buildings on the street below. On the Sandeman’s walking tour we explored the “closes” (small lanes and courtyards hidden behind the buildings on the main avenues), saw the inspiration for all sorts of Harry Potter characters and locations that meant nothing to me, and learned the story of how Scotland’s fabled stone of destiny was rescued from a centuries-long imprisonment in Westminster Abbey by a bunch of drunken college students from Glasgow.
More importantly, our guide gave us a coupon for 25%-off at a local pub where we could get haggis. Most Americans know what haggis is — a mix of minced sheep organs and oatmeal stuffed into a stomach and then boiled — but assume that it’s kind of like the Whaler: something that everyone’s heard of but no one has ever actually eaten. But haggis is as prevalent in Scotland as hamburgers are in the US. You can find it at every pub, it’s often the cheapest thing on the menu, and it’s actually quite delicious. Ours was served in patties and was drier than I expected, almost like black pudding. Note that I say “ours.” The lure of diced sheep spleen understandably proved too much for Sophie, a vegetarian for 20-plus years. She cleaned her plate before I’d finished. As she did I saw something change behind her eyes, kind of like the moment in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the ape learns to use a bone to kill an antelope.
Anyway, I was drawn to Edinburgh and found myself wishing we could spend an extra day or two getting to know it, but we needed to head out back down to Wales if we wanted to have any time to spend there and still make it to London in time for Kirstyfest.
More photos from Edinburgh on flickr
