Edinburgh

the story of Edinburgh starts with a bus ride to the airport. i got stuck sitting next to this Indian guy how kept asking me questions, but i had absolutely NO idea what he was saying. i had to asked him to repeat it a million times. but i think he was incredibly dodgy. the questions i did understand were 'can i buy flight to Rome at airport i don't have ticket' and half way there he said 'how much longer until airport' which made me think, why is this guy in such a rush to get out of the country. then he said 'immigration? will they check immigration at airport?' i think he was smuggling curry or something... THATS RACIST!! sorry, bad joke. then on the flight i fell asleep and i woke up with some strange hippy girl asleep on my shoulder. scared the shit out of me!

anyway, i finally got into Edinburgh and luckily i had got in contact with my Scottish friend Corrinne, who i worked with in Brisbane, a few days before i arrived to asked her what to check out while i was here. she was good enough to get in contact with her friend Viv who was kind enough to let me stay in her spare room for a couple of days. Viv, who is originally from NZ, works as a producer in advertising (mainly TV i think) and is a real character. her apartment is really cool too, its in Leith which is right near the docks, where the Royal Yacht Britannia is docked. and she has this great collection of old radios and gramophones, which are brilliant, i was so jealous! she has some really interesting friends too, which were really great to meet.

Edinburgh is a really beautiful place. i kind of have to kick myself sometimes when i get to places because its hard to believe i'm there. one of those moments was looking up at the old castle that has so much history attached to it like Mary Queen of Scots and all that Jazz. i went up and had a look around and saw the crown jewels and the stone of destiny. The stone of destiny is a really big thing to the Scottish people, i was where the first king of Scotland sat when he was crowned. to put a long story short, it was taken by the English and kept at Westminster abbey until in the 1950's where some Scottish students stole it and brought it back to Scotland. but after they got it all the way to Scotland it was taken back again by the English. but it was eventually given back to the Scots in the mid 90's. another thing about the castle is at 1 o'clock they set off a cannon. they have done this for hundreds of years so that the ships down at the docks in Leith know what time it is. i really enjoyed walking around old town, its so beautiful walking around the small lane ways. i didn't like the New town as much but i liked its design. it was designed so it looked like the union jack, but it turned out more like the Scottish flag.
at the other end of the Royal Mile is the the Palace of Holyrood House, which is where the Queen comes to stay when shes in Scotland, but shes not such a hit around here. in fact the Scots HATE the English, so, needless to say, she doesn't visit very often. but right near there is Arthur's seat which is quite a climb, i think i deserved some kind of medal for getting to the top. i was exhausted! but the view was truly worth it. amazing to say the least.
not too far from there is Calton Hill which i think is a funny part of town. on top of the hill is this big Greek half finished Parthenon kind of thing which seems a bit out of place. it was put there because Edinburgh was considered the Athens of the United Kingdom and began to build this thing, but ran out of money and never finished it because one one liked it.
I really enjoyed walking around the botanical gardens too, they were really beautiful but best of all there were heaps and heaps of squirrels! they are really cute, i couldn't get over how close they come up to you and check you out.

i really enjoy the Scottish humor too. for instance there is a wine bar called 'the last drop' and most people might think it was named that because of the wine. but actually its because in front of the bar is where they would hang people. hence the last drop. also there is a statue of a guy named Hume. and the story goes he didn't believe in superstitions so the Scottish people tell tourists to rub his big toe for good luck!
in the UK, national museums are free to check out so i went a bit museum crazy. i saw a Rembrandt, Monet, a couple of Van Goghs and a Lucian Freud which was quite cool. also in one of the museums they keep Dolly the Sheep. you might remember Dolly, she was the first mammal ever cloned. and did you know they named her Dolly after Dolly Pardon. why? because she was cloned from the breast of another sheep. (theres that Scottish humor again!)

I'm a sucker when it comes to terms and phrases and where they come from. a heard a beauty while i was here. at one stage before it plumbed people would throw there waste outside on the street. as you could imagine it caused a bit of a mess as well as a bit of a smell, so the government passed a law so that everyone at 1opm had to go to there window and yell out something along the lines of 'watch out below!' then throw the waste out the window. the only problem with that was a lot of the pubs closed at 10pm also. so, if your a little bit drunk, stumbling down the street on your way home and you hear someone yell something out the window above you, your most likely going to look up. except if you did on this occasion you would get a whole lotta shit on your face. hence this is where the term 'shit faced' came from.

There are some really amazing stories in Edinburgh. there was this really when known locksmith in Edinburgh who was known for being really trustworthy and he did the locks for all the people in town, especially the rich, but the truth was, he would keep the spare key and rob people without having to force entry. it baffled the police for years. and it ended up being the inspiration for the book 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'.
another great story is of this woman called Maggie Dickson. she had a baby out of wedlock (or something like that, i can't fully remember) anyway, it was enough to get get here hanged. after she was hanged and pronounced dead, put into a coffin and started hauling the coffin up to the cemetery they heard some knocking. they opened the coffin and found her alive so they went to hang her again and as they put her head in the noose some lawyer yelled from the back 'you can't actually do that, you can't hang someone twice for the same crime' so lucky for her she got off. then opened a bar right across from where they she nearly died in an area called the Lawnmarket.
another is of these two guys called Bourke & Hare. the story goes, one of them had a girlfriend who was a landlord and she was upset because one of her tenants died penniless and owed here £3 (which was a lot of money in those days) so old Bourke and Hare took the body up to the university to be used for medical purposes. and got £7 in return for the body. which made the two men think, if they kept getting bodies they could make a lot of money, so the two went on a massive killing spree and killed somewhere between 15 to 35 people until they got found out. crazy. with stories like this its no wonder that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's brain started ticking over and created a character by the name of Sherlock Holmes to fix some of the crime going on around the town. living in Edinburgh there would've been plenty of inspiration around, the stories would pretty much write themselves.

The national dish here is Haggis so i had to give it a go. and to be honest it didn't look exactly as i thought it might but it tasted pretty good, it was served with neeps and tatties which in plain English turnips and potatoes. while i'm on the topic of how things are pronounced, i know that i'm in an English speaking country but sometime i really don't think i am. the accent here is so strong, i'm forever going 'pardon?' or 'could you repeat that?'. anyway, i think the national dish here shouldn't be Haggis, it should be the deep fried mar bar! thats right, a mars bar, battered and deep fried. its actually really tasty. i believe its more of Glaswegian thing so it should be interesting what else they deep fry when i get to Glasgow.

Something that i really like about Edinburgh is there commitment to being Carbon Neutral by 2020 and are at the moment putting in a tram system around the city. its causing a bit of chaos, because of the road works, but good on them for there forward thinking i say! anyway, off to Glasgow to try all there deep fried treats. more soon!