There’s a few things I’ve really wanted to do since moving to the UK, and visiting Scotland and seeing snow were a couple of them. I was lucky enough to be able to see both on the weekend as we flew to Glasgow Prestwick airport and drove to Edinburgh to spend friday and saturday night.
OMG, Snow!
Before Friday morning, the most snow I’d seen in my life was summer sludge in the mountains in Canada when I was 12 years old, so this was awesome. After I got over this monumentous event, we quickly got on our way to Edinburgh, with a couple of sneaky detours to check out the snow covered landscape.
Note to self, “When driving in snowy, icy conditions the car (quite obviously) does not stop, or handle as well as it would on a normal dry road, its more like driving a boat, ‘Oh, you want to go that way, waaaaiiit a second’, and so on”
Edinburgh is a small-ish city (Yes, even by Perth standards) , of around 400,000 people, even though I’ve been told this balloons out to over 800,000 during festival time in August. I didn’t hear this until we were about to leave, but was shocked by this, as walking down the main street on Friday afternoon (admittedly it was peak knock off time), was possibly worse than walking down Picadilly in London in the same time period, in regards to pedestrian congestion anyway. What was also interesting, was that the way we approached the city was from the south, saw the first sign alerting us to the fact we were approaching Edinburgh City Centre (at this time we were still in snow covered farmland), and within about a mile we’d gone over a hill and were suddenly smack back in the city centre. I found this odd, as I’m used to the usual suburban sprawl for kilometres and kilometres in directions from the CBD. We did notice, however, that leaving the city in the other direction on Sunday there was a much larger distance to the cities edge, so basically its just a strange shape.
The really striking thing about Edinburgh though, is the amazing amount of things you can do within walking distance from the centre. The entire city is overlooked by the Edinburgh Castle, and there’s at least two or three other palaces/castles in the immediate area, as well a host of cathedrals, churchs, museums, galleries, etc all within minutes of each other.
The view of the castle from the Street just outside the Hotel
Looking back toward the hotel from the street below the castle
On the second day we went straight to Edinburgh Castle in the morning, the castle itself is absolutely amazing, perched so high above the city. The rooms and apartments are nothing like the English castles I’ve seen or Versailles in France, as they were very basic, but the rest was definitely worth seeing, and the Audio Guide is packed full of useful tidbits and stories about the history of the castle and how it survived so many seiges by the English over several centuries.
Awesome, isn’t it?
I’d highly recommending seeing this fine example of a city if your in Scotland, or the UK, its small enough to do most things in a few days, its got a whole lot of history, and a whole lot of character, and appeared to have a good night life with a feel good attitude toward getting horrendously pissed. Enjoy!
A few facts (should be much longer and more interesting, but this is me):
- Haggis is especially tasty, I’m just annoyed I didn’t get to feast on Black pudding again.
- Scottish Beer (Tennants, McEwans, Caledonian, etc) is sold with a number designation in shillings, like McEwans 60/- or McEwans 90/-. This apparently was a the traditional measure of alcohol content by the monetary amount worth of grain that went into each bottle (I hope I explained this right)
- King James VI of Scotland (Mary, Queen of Scots, Son) became King James I of England a year after becoming king of Scotland. This is significant as he was the first King to rule over England, Scotland and Wales. Why they allowed him to take the English throne considering how much the English and Scots were at battle I’ve no idea. I can do history, really I can.
- Edinburgh to Glasgow Prestwick airport is about 60-90 minutes drive away, though surely its just easier in future to fly straight in to the cities airport.
