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I’m back at the bar and here comes the promised entry: As I told you in my last message, we’d arrived at our destination outside Edinburgh well and tired. Sunday night went by with BBQ and canned beer and everyone retired to their tents and sleeping bags around midnight.

Before I come to the part where we actually went into the city, I have to make a small anekdote about camping right next to a busy road: Don’t. There are some sensations I just can do without, this one being included. You can’t imagine the feeling of something big, heavy and fast seemingly aiming straight for you and trying to run you down in your sleep. That is, if you can actually manage to fall asleep in the first place. Here’s a tip: try learning to fall asleep in as short a time as possible. You don’t get many breaks longer than 5-10 minutes where there are no lorries or maniac car drivers on the road. Those are the opportunities you get. Still, exhaustion will help you along in due time. Also prepare for some rather unusual dreams though…

Monday morning we all managed to get our collective act together. People started to rise and prepare for the day’s worth of things to see, things to do. Breakfast, coffee and a morning shower later we were all ready to start the day’s first trip to the next bus stop. Fun fact about England: The laws of physics must not apply to double-decker buses. Or at least that’s what you think sitting on the upper floor and constantly worrying that the bus you’re taking will topple over, if not in this corner, than certainly in the next one.
We rode the bus into the city’s centre, stopped along a wide, stretched road, sided with shops and stores. As we got off, the dominating view was that of Edinburgh’s castle, sitting right atop a medium size hill in the city’s centre. All the slopes around it looked pretty much vertical from my point of view.

And so we started to climb… down. Not so much that the castle has to be atop a hill, there is a park (and the city’s train station) beneath it in a kind of valley. Our host and tourguide told me that this “valley” once used to be a lake, or, when in Rome, do as the romans do, loch. Obviously, it had been drained to make space for grass, trees and some sort of open amphitheater. The climb uphill turned out to be not so bad. There were small trails and to be honest, it wasn’t all that high.

Once we arrived at the top, we were greeted by a smell I at once associated with a military grade chemical attack on the city of Edinburgh or the tourists at its castle. Turned out I was only half wrong, too. There apparently had been a military marching show in the castle’s court. There were stadium-like seats built all around the court and the smell came from the truck pumping out dozens of chemical toilets. Talk about shitty jobs…
Some wretching and deep breaths later, we were standing upwind and looking at the entrance to the actual castle building. You can see it on the picture below. Notice, the metal guy to the left of the portal is not Mel Gibson… although it does represent the original character portrait by the actor in the movie Braveheart.

We decided against taking the tour of the castle’s insides, as it cost 8 pounds. Instead, we took a big gulp of breathable air and hurried past the awful smell towards the university. As it happened, there was the one-week International Comedy Festival in town. Actors and groups from all over the world doing a 24/7 comedy program on 5 stages. I don’t know about you, but I certainly pitied the staff responsible for building and taking down the stages every 2 odd hours. We went for two plays, the first one being a 90 minute blurr of music and weird images played on stage. I can’t tell you what it was all about as I a) have no idea if there actually was a point to it or b) just didn’t get it.
The second play was a very good and funny mixture of good-old-fashioned British humor. It was called Bill Shakespear’s Italian Job. For those of you unfamiliar with the 60s or 70s movie The Italian Job, it’s one of those few world-famous movies of British origin, centered around a big-scale robbery of gold in Italy’s industrial heart. It involves a widely stolen scene of the robber crew making their get-away in three modified Mini Coopers, best known for its scenes of them running down stairs, jumping over roofs and finally escaping through a sewage tunnel. There is a Hollywood remake around, showing in theaters in 2003.
For those of you who don’t know Shakespear, I can’t help you. Where have you been for the last 200 years? Anyway, they crossed the plot of the movie with figures and sentences from several of Shakespear’s plays, Romeo and Juliet being the central plot.

After taking in that much culture, the need for some substance in the form of food called out to us. With the advantage of having a local amongst us, we were led to an indian restaurant right next to the university. You could see it was making a lot of its business with students, as was apparent in the prices and policies of “no reservations, no liquor licence, no stylish location”. The last of those policies however seemed to have been abandoned as the restaurant had only recently been renovated, looking all gleamy, bright and in. The food certainly proved anyone wrong who ever said something about the UK not knowing how to run a proper cuisine. I had some fabulous chicken curry with rice, indian style, medium. That was on the conservative side, as it turned out I could have gone for the hot version, which turned out to be not as badly damaging as I’ve known from Ken’s cooking. There was only one person in our group to complain about the food being too hot: Juli, the indonesian wife of one of the groups members. It nevertheless certainly made for some fun watching her squeam. There’s more funny stuff from her but I’ll tell you about that in another post…

As we went back to our bus we came by one of the most stunning pictures I’ve seen in the city of Edinburgh: The main building of The Bank of Scotland. To properly comprehend this, you have to remember that the city is in a rather wet climate with the sea being right next to it. There is also the history of steam-driven trains that didn’t exactly help to keep the buildings clean. Most of the old buildings (and that really means: most of the buildings) were rather dark and covered with the black residue connected with burning coal. But there was one building recently cleaned, much like the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin.
It certainly stood out like a shining diamond amongst the other buildings. Here’s the picture:

In the end we went back to our tents and the torrent of dreams about the different ways one can be run over by vehicles. Not to mention the growing impression of someone sawing down a big forest right inside the tent next to us…

Next update: The Falkirk Wheel and a study in useless but brilliant engineering.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 28th, 2003 at 11:23 pm and is filed under 2003 - Scotland, journal.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.