When speaking to people over here, and telling them I hadn't yet been to Edinburgh most people would stare at me and say why not? And I would reply that it was on the to-do list, soon to be done, although I actually had no clue when it would be done. I pretty much felt like the only person who hadn't been to Edinburgh, and I was just looking for friends to go with me.
It turns out Marc and Renan were those friends, and we set out for Edinburgh at 09:00 AM Wednesday morning.
I believe I fell asleep on the way there, but I woke up to see when we drove into Edinburgh. When sitting in the bus and just driving into the middle of town, suddenly there is a big, beautiful castle presenting itself to the right-hand side of the bus, and it is gorgeous.
Gorgeous is the perfect word for Edinburgh. I had imagined a smaller city, not scaling up to Glasgow, but looking around the city from the castle it became obvious that the city is actually rather big. The realization didn't really kick in before we had scaled the steep, stony stairs of Arthur's Seat, and I felt like I could see Denmark. The view was so perfectly stunning. On the way down we decided on a nontraditional route, and it was tricky at times, but we managed to get down.
I am kinda sorry for the awful panorama to come, but the big white spot is actually the sun...
We walked past Holyrood Castle, which is where Queen Elizabeth stays when she is in Scotland, and on a whim we decided to go into the Scottish Parliament, which was actually interesting. It was nice to make some sense of the things I have read about in relation to exams.
The Scottish Parliament was actually a detour from our original plan to go to Carlton Hill, a place where there is a city observatory.
What is characteristic of Edinburgh is that they have a lot of "mountains", actually they're only hills, but coming from flat Denmark everything that has a steep set of stairs or a steep descent is a mountain, so I get to see a lot of mountains over here, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.
As much with anything else we saw in Edinburgh it was beautiful, stunning.
Also, I felt like I saw more than Edinburgh than would have under other circumstances, granted, a tour with Gary would have provided stories for a context, but I got to enjoy the city and the obvious differences between old city and new city, the small quirks and places that give you another view completely.
At some point we walked past a library and what I thought I saw was: "Game of Thrones" exhibition. Apparently, what it read was "Game of Crowns"...
The disappointment with this soon disappeared with the fact that I walked right past the place where Harry Potter was born. Lucky me.
I took too many pictures to put them all in here, so I'll get creative as to how you guys can see them.
You can see the pictures here: Edinburgh 2015 (link)
Exploring Scotland:
- Aberdeen
- Inverness
- Perth
Arbroath for to-visit-list?
ReplyDeleteThat could be :)
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