Edinburgh

The whole process of getting from London to Edinburgh went pretty smoothly, with our pre-booked tickets and accommodation all being recognised and going through, so we got into a cold Edinburgh Station around 9pm on Saturday night. It’s still light here until 10pm or so, so there were no real troubles in finding the accommodation which ended up only being a five minute walk away anyway.

The accommodation here is a few pounds a night each cheaper than London – (in the low 40’s a night, Australian, as opposed to high 40’s), so it’s helped our finances a bit. The general food prices around here a lot cheaper also, so we’ve done pretty well in Scotland. Glasgow looks to be even cheaper still although, with cheaper prices, there is a bit of a drop in the surrounding area/social demographic and so on.

Edinburgh is a lot smaller than I thought it would be – there’s just under 500,000 people that live here, and the city reminds me a bit of Perth in the way the streets and whatnot are laid out… it’s kind of hard to explain.

Anyway, Claire and myself explored a bit of Edinburgh while Ben and Sarah relaxed in the hostel, which wasn’t as promising as hoped because, unlike London, everything isn’t open to all hours of the night (like Perth), so we settled for a burger/chips type place for dinner and made our way back to the hostel. It’s cool here, not overly cold as such, but definitely jumper worthy – especially if you choose to wear shorts which I made the mistake of doing on our first night out here.

After a bit of minor exploration and a ‘scoping out’ of the sights nearby, we headed back to the hostel and slept as well as we could with hundreds of loud drinking people in the downstairs bars.

We slept in a bit the next day, unawares as to the time, so felt we better get a move on in exploring the city. Heading up what is known as the ‘Royal Mile’ – essentially the main ‘tourist’ drag, we had a bit of a gander at the many street performers (including an amusing American magician Todd Various) and various stalls and whatnot, before ending up at Edinburgh Castle. We also sampled the infamous local dish Haggis – which we all came to the conclusion tastes like chicken stuffing.



Outside Edinburgh Castle










Edinburgh


There's a crazy amount of cool stores in the U.K. & so so many tshirts and sneakers and jeans etc I want to buy. Luckily my suitcase is pretty full and I can't bring myself to throw out any of my clothes, so I've saved a bit of money due to my distinct lack of room to spare. CD's are also incredibly cheap here... the new Sigur Ros album (amongst many other new releases) are all of £7 ($15AUD) - and I'm sure it would be close to double that in Perth. We found a cool store called Avalanche records which had a nice collection of stuff I couldn't find in Australia... but seeing I have no discman or stereo here, there was really no point in me buying CD's that I can't listen to.



Avalanche Records


After seeing the Castle and the local shops, we decided to go on a tour of Real Mary King's Close, a sort of 'underground (but not)' series of streets and buildings. It was okay, and I managed to ruin the group photo for everyone else ahaha. So incredibly smug as I emerged and saw the group photo - even more so when I was told off for taking a photo of the 'preview' photo that they expected us to pay £6 for. Owned.



We were making our way back to the hostel afterwards, when after a bit of thought we decided to keep exploring for the day. In an arguably stupid move, we thought we would attempt to conquer the hill which towers over Edinburgh, which is known as Arthur's Seat. Ben and myself rated our fitness pretty highly, so decided to take a shorter (and considerably more steep) route up the first section of the hill, which was much more of a struggle than originally planned. Despite a bit of an arduous trek up, the views up the top were well worth it, and we were all glad that we braved the freezing wind to get up there.











Arthur's Seat


After walking through Hollyrood Road, past Scottish Parliament and so on, we made our way into the hostel, and decided to head out for dinner to the cafe downstairs which was incredibly disappointing (gross, overpriced). We ended up getting a few drinks and just relaxed for the night in our room.

Having explored an insane amount of the smallish Edinburgh the day before, today we did a lot of stuff that we had put off for a while - namely washing clothes and organising accomodation for Glasgow. We almost booked a flight to Dublin, which was fine (and cheap), if not for the 15kg baggage limit and £12/kilo excess baggage charges. Ben and myself may have juuuust scraped in under that, but the girls would be pushing 20kg's of baggage, so had we booked the tickets they would have been stung nearly £60 each. After looking at various other modes/routes of transport, we established that going to Glasgow would be a better, albeit longer way to make our way further south.

After getting all of this sorted, we experienced another 'Amazing Moment' on tour - by eating at an Edinburgh burger chain known as Wannaburger. So amazingly awesome. Best burger of my life.

We're just chilling before going out to dinner tonight... and then onto Glasgow tomorrow. Yeow.