I flew into Edinburgh airport at night got a bus to a big train station where Elliot McDonald met me for the train ride back to his hometown of Kirkcaldy. Elliot had been my flatmate in San Diego for almost a half-year, and it was great to be see him in his native environment.
We got in kind of late so we just cooked up some food and chatted for a bit before heading out to pick up Elliot’s girlfriend Joanne from the local nightclub, Kitty’s. We got there just after closing and despite Kirkcaldy being such a small town, the club had a decent flood of people in the streets, to the point that police were directing traffic around the club.
The next morning we got the train into Edinburgh and made our tour around the whole city. It’s not a very big city, so we managed to walk around most of the major sights in a day, but we definitely had our fair share of walking. Edinburgh has a really distinct feel from every other city I’ve visited, and I’m writing this entry very near the end of my trip so that’s really saying something. Everything has a totally different look and feel, and the history of the place is right in front of you on every streetcorner.
We made our way up the Royal Mile to Edinburgh castle, which is built on top of a mesa with near-vertical cliffs on all sides but one. The castle is so well protected that it has only been taken over by taking control of all the land surrounding the castle and waiting until they run out of supplies. The castle is ridiculously old, but well kept and very iconic. You can see it from a lot of places within the city. We also hiked up The Crag which is a small mountain just west of the city, which gave us a great view of the whole city.
I was lucky enough to be in town during the Edinburgh Festival, which meant that a majority of the streets were alive with comedians and performers of all types. The festival is so massive that the show listings are grouped into 20 minute sections and sometimes even 10. There would be too many events starting between 6pm and 7pm to list them in one group, so you may have some idea of how massive it is, especially considering it runs for more than 20 days.
We got a couple beers and met up with Elliot’s girlfriend and her friends Steph and Emma, we started out headed for a big night out on the city, but got cut a bit short by our need to catch a train back to Kirkcaldy.
The next day we managed to catch a ride to St. Andrews, a tiny little scottish town that is well known for it’s university (which provides about half the population of the town). It was some beautiful countryside in the town and on the way there, but a 1-hour walk around the area was enough to see most of the sites.
The next day was a lazy day. We managed to get in some football, mostly just juggling and stuff, but it was good to get my heart rate up for awhile. Intense exercise has escaped me for most of the trip. At night we had some Haggis, a traditional Scottish meal that by description sounds disgusting, but by experience is a bit like spicy meatloaf. This was just one occasion among many where we came home to a delicious dinner prepped by Elliot’s mom. We also went and saw the new Tarantino film, “Inglorious Basterds,” which had a delightful disregard for historical accuracy, and was surprisingly funny despite being a film about WWII made by Tarantino.
The next day Elliot and I got a bus to Glasgow, the other big city in Scotland, and conducted a self-guided walking tour of the city. We stumbled across a free museum, and walked around Glasgow University which was amazingly epic. The city of Glasgow itself had too much of a “standard city” feel, especially compared to Edinburgh, but it was a nice city nonetheless. Perhaps the highlight was a most incredible busker who was just a guy juggling a football on one of the high streets. He was doing some seriously impossible stuff with this soccer ball for about 10 minutes straight without ever dropping the ball. Perhaps the most distinct part of Glasgow was the Glaswegian accent. There were a considerable number of people that I heard talking as we were walking the streets where I couldn’t understand a single thing they were saying. The accent is different enough that I would have been better off speaking German with some of them. Even Elliot couldn’t follow some of what people were saying. It was pretty hilarious.
The next day elliot and I played some 1v1 football and met up with some people including Sinky and Ali (two Scots that came to visit us in San Diego) to play some basketball at their old highschool. We also went into town and managed to pick up some tickets to a comedy show at the Edinburgh festival, and met up with Katie Dash, who I had seen in London, for an evening out.
I don’t know what exactly it was, but the last night in Scotland with Elliot ended up being a huge one. Some combination of weather and a lack of plans led to the purchase of 24 440ml cans of beer, which comes out to about 5 litres for each of us. With help from a playstation 2 (timesplitters and burnout) we managed to get through the whole case before heading out to Kitty’s nightclub. It was a strange night that led to an even stranger morning when I had to get up to catch my bus to Manchester (via Glasgow).