Mark Sees Scotland

My young person’s railcard expires forever on Thursday. This is sad as this means that a) I am no longer a younger person and b) I’m going to have to pay full fare for train tickets outside of the network railcard catchment area (I got a free network railcard as part of my annual travelcard for the tube). While the network railcard area is quite large, and includes basically all of south east England, it does not extend very far north. So, to say good-bye to my railcard in style, and as someone had never been, Mark and I went to Edinburgh for the weekend.

We caught the 5pm train Friday afternoon, requiring us to work through lunch and then make separate but equally frenzied mad dashes to Kings Cross from out workplaces. It was a so-called ‘fast’ train, stopping only at York, Doncaster (I’d never heard of it either), Newcastle and Edinburgh. It was 4 hours and 20 minutes. While this seems long, it’s really about even in total travel time with flying only much more relaxing! We took some food on with us as well as plenty of reading material and soon enough we were in another ‘country’.

As it was around 10 by the time we got to our hotel (via a pleasant walk through old town), we just slipped out for a couple of drinks. We were staying in Best Western a bit south west of the castle, near the University of Edinburgh. Thanks to some information hanging on the wall, we were able to discover that the building originally housed Edinburgh’s first custom built maternity hospital, opening in 1879. It was called Simpson Hospital after the obstetrician, local university man, and innovator of using chloroform for general anaesthesia, Dr., um, Simpson. His first name doesn’t matter. I just thought the history gave the building a good twist, and it was a nice old stone building.

On Saturday we got an early start. We are ruined career types now who wake up at 7am on the weekends, meaning we were out the door by 8:30. Nobody else is up this early in Edinburgh on the weekends, and the local Starbucks didn’t even open until 9am. Luckily we found a little café that was open and able to give us breakfast. We arrived at Edinburgh Castle about 5 minutes before it opened, bypassed the ticket line as we’d bought fast track tickets on the internet the day before, and were on the first (and therefore uncrowded!) guided tour of the day. Our next stop was the Scotch Whiskey, um, place, that was right next door. We were hesitant to go on a tour that involved alcohol tasting before noon, but it turns out they offer a 35% discount on admission in the mornings and so it was well worth it! I found the tour very interesting and I learned lots about scotch! There was a whiskey barrel ride advertised as part of the tour, which I thought sounded exciting. However, the ride moved at a speed of approximately 1 mile an hour and I can assure you this is too slow.

After a quick lunch we ended up spending a really long time at an antique map store chatting with the owner. Mark ended up with an old school replica map of Hampshire. Still being only early afternoon, we went down to stare inquisitively at the Scottish Parliament building and then hiked up Arthur’s Seat to induce sweat and of course to see the views! We then regrettable decided to go to Our Dynamic Earth, a museum detailing the history of the planet in a not good way. After a quick nap (we were pooped!) we went for bangers and mash for dinner, then went down to the Grassmarket (old market and site of the old public gallows!) for some drinks. While there we discovered that Edinburgh is densely populated by groups on ‘stag’ and ‘hen’ parties. I’ll have to discuss these in a separate entry, they’re really quite strange!

On Sunday morning we got a slightly later start, arrived at Starbucks during opening hours, and went to the Museum of Scotland. I’d like to say we went there to learn about the history of Scotland and its peoples, but really we were just motivated by the fact that they have costumes you can try on! I’ll have to get those pictures uploaded for general amusement! We grabbed a quick lunch and then headed for new town, quickly finding ourselves on a double decker bus tour of the city. While we had seen much of it already, we still learned quite a bit from the tour guide and it was a generally enjoyable experience! With our train time still a few hours off, we went and sat in a park and ended up doing a bit of shopping, then had to walk hurriedly to catch the train! Unlike the journey up, things didn’t go smoothly and we ended up arriving half an hour late into London.

This was my third trip to Edinburgh and I must admit it continues to grow on me! While still managing to be quite a compact city, it’s got the amazing old town, which is just a highly concentrated area of surprisingly tall stone buildings surrounding the castle (some are 8 or 9 floors!), and then just a few minutes away you have the cleanly laid out new town with open parks and plenty of shopping. While the new town seems to have been sadly damaged during WW2, the old town managed to remain relatively untouched, and you can tell the planning laws are extremely (and thankfully) very restrictive in the area. All in all, I would say that Edinburgh is definitely my second favorite city in the UK (behind London, of course!).