I love this city

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Welcome back! It's been quite a while since I last wrote, so I'm guessing it's been quite a while since anyone bothered to look at my blog. I know I've done a bad job of putting up something about Edinburgh in a timely fashion, but I've just been completely engrossed in exploring this city and love wandering around and getting to know it. Luckily, I've had my camera a couple of the times I've gone walking and have a few pictures.

I don't know that I could have picked a better city for myself to live in for a semester, considering my lacking skills in any language besides English. Edinburgh is completely amazing. In some ways it's very similar to London, but there are loads of differences as well (all good, I think). The city is old, really old, which I love. The city itself is a UNESCO World Heritage site, due mostly to the unique architecture Edinburgh exhibits. The city center is made up of two parts. First is the Old Town, with its medieval style, castle, and tiny "wynds" and "closes" that lead down off the main streets into random little courts and such. The second part is the New Town, and is made up of (relatively) modern Georgian architecture.

The geography of Edinburgh is complicated and kind of hard to explain, but I'll give it a shot because it's one of the things that makes it such a cool place. Basically, the defining aspect of the city is an extinct volcano crag that juts up and creates natural cliffs in the city, and its gradually descending "tail" that slowly fades the cliffs down into level ground. The top of this crag is where Edinburgh Castle sits, surrounded completely by cliffs on 3 sides, while the fourth is the side looking down the tail of the crag. At the very bottom of the tail is Holyrood Palace, the Queen's residence when she comes to Scotland (which is apparently pretty much never). The Castle and Palace are connected by a street winding down the crag which is called the Royal Mile. It's an extremely touristy street, and I don't particularly enjoy walking down it too much... it just doesn't feel authentic to me now that I'm living here. There's ~137 shops called "Authentic Scottish" which sell cheap kilts and cashmere scarves and family history books.

The Royal Mile runs east-west, and if you go south from it the city gradually slopes down into the rest of the City Center (this is where I live and where the University is). To the north are cliffs, which are now covered in buildings, and another street running parallel to the Royal Mile but at the bottom of the cliffs. The cool thing is that the buildings are between the two streets - so they start at the bottom and then literally are built all the way up above the Royal Mile, often being 10+ stories tall. It's really fascinating and unfortunately I don't think I really have any pictures that properly illustrate it, so I'll have to work on getting some.

So to continue, past the road at the bottom of the cliffs are the Princes' Street Gardens, a really nice park that stretches for a long ways and is pretty much constantly looking up at the castle. The Gardens then climb back up another hill into the New Town (the Gardens used to be a sewage area, which explains both their sunken location and their exceptional fertility). The new town is where all the shopping in Edinburgh is, and where the residents of Edinburgh would be more likely to spend their time. Princes' Street is the main road of the city and is filled with shops, while 2 blocks up is George's Street, which is where all the expensive shops are. And then about a 30 minute walk past George's Street is the Sea. There's quite a bit more to the city than that, but I'm afraid my attempt at describing it is already a little too boring so I won't force any more details on you.

Actually that's a lie, I have one more which is pretty relevant to my stay here. Right next to Holyrood Palace is Holyrood Park, and inside of the park sits Arthur's Seat. Arthur's Seat, remarkably, is another rock formation from the extinct volcano Edinburgh resides over, only Arthur's Seat would be more accurately labeled a hill/mountain instead of a crag (although there are also crags in the park - see pictures) as it rises up about 850 feet. And it's right in the middle of the city. Coincidentally, if you were to draw a line between Arthur's Seat and Edinburgh Castle, my flat would be on it. So I like to describe my location as in the city center right between a castle and a mountain. I also use words such as awesome, unbelievable, sweet, and impossible to match in the US.

Okay, that's really enough about the layout of the city... now about my experience so far. I share my amazingly-located flat with 4 other guys. Three are Scottish and one is English, and we all get along extremely well. We ended up spending most of Freshers' Week with each other, and are pretty close as a result. My best friends here are definitely my flatmates, which is really fun. Between the 5 of us we have some pretty cool experiences - one of the Scots lived in Australia for 6 months playing rugby, the English guy traveled around Asia for 6 months before coming here, and another Scot is a certified skydiver. I get points for the novelty of being American, which is kind of fun. It's sort of like how in America we love people with British or Irish accents... here they all think my accent is cool because I sound "so proper, but not English posh-proper."

As for school (or Uni as it's called here), I'm pretty happy with it so far. I never have more than 12 hours of class in a week (compared to the 28 I had last spring at ISU), and never have class before noon (though usually it's not until 2). I'm in 3 courses here: Spanish, Classic Literature, and History of Art (to my lab friends - hopefully I'm not too rusty with sciences when I return). I enjoy them all so far, but one that's especially worth mentioning is History of Art. Once a week we meet in a tutorial, which is just a small group of 12 students and is focused on discussion. The reeeeeeeeally cool thing about it is that we often meet in the National Gallery of Scotland, a really nice art museum. So I get to look at the actual paintings themselves as we discuss them... and it's awesome. I'm really not in any way an art person, but I think it's so cool.

Ironically, I'm actually a morning person, so I spend a lot of my mornings either going running, doing schoolwork AKA reading, or wandering around the city. It takes about 4 minutes to run to Holyrood Park, so I pretty much always just go running around in there... running up Arthur's Seat is a pretty good workout. Otherwise I like just getting to know the city more. Edinburgh has one of the most unique cultures of any city I've been, and I'm not exaggerating that just because I live here. There's so many different sides to the city it's hard to accurately give it a label. On one hand it's filled with ooooold buildings and architecture (I always think as I walk to class that I'm walking by buildings which are all older than my country), and to that extent it has a lot of rustic atmosphere - there's pubs all over the place and loads of hole-in-the-wall places to grab some good Scottish food. There's also more cafes around where I live and go to school than I think I can possibly visit before I leave, which is definitely a contrast to the medieval feel. Moving up the money chain it also has a very ritzy side to it, with tons of theatre and other cultural events going on all the time, and plenty of upper class shops so everyone can look good when going out. And then to add to the collage Edinburgh is also one of the most cosmopolitan places I've seen, with so many international people and destinations (like restaurants) in it. It makes for a city I don't think I'll ever get tired of, and definitely not before I leave.

So... this entry is getting pretty long, and I haven't really even talked about anything specific I've done yet. In the interest of keeping this readable, I think I'll stop here and save the rest of my thoughts for a little while. Next time I write I'll talk more specifically about sights I've seen and things I've done. For now though, I'm calling a quits to my writing. I'm getting tired, and tomorrow Scotland has a football (soccer) match against Norway, so my flatmate and I are going to find a place to watch it. I'm half Norwegian, so I should probably be on their side... but I don't really fancy sitting in a pub full of Scottish people and cheering for Norway. I'll probably go for Scotland. Should be fun though!

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Photos

Edinburgh Castle
View of the north side, from the Princes' Street Gardens.

Edinburgh Castle
Ditto.

City View
View of the city, including the castle, from Calton Hill.

Holyrood Park
View of Holyrood Park from Calton Hill. Arthur's Seat is in the distance, with the crags in front of it. If you look really hard to the far right there's a building with a blue stripe running up it... that's my flat.

Royal Mile
View from the bottom of the Royal Mile looking up.

Royal Mile
View from near the top of the Royal Mile, looking down.

Royal Mile
Church on the Royal Mile (I can't think of the name right now)

Royal Mile
This is St. Giles' Cathedral, which is actually no longer a cathedral but is the headquarters for the annual Edinburgh Festival.

Street View
This is from the street below the Royal Mile. The buildings on the left would probably only be about 3 or 4 stories on the Royal Mile side, but here they're more like 9. Also, on the right is the New Town, with a bridge leading over to it.

Scottish Parliament
Scotland just got their own Parliament in 1999, after centuries under the English Parliament. This is the ridiculously modern/abstract Parliament building, built in 2004. You would think it would seem out of place in a medieval/Georgian style city, but it really just accentuates the feeling of the city - both medieval and modern. And yes, for some reason they randomly put lattices over some windows. I have no idea.

Scottish Parliament
Each one of those windows is a tiny little cubby that Parliament members can go sit in and do some serious reflection before he makes any bad decisions.

Scottish Parliament
Parliament with Holyrood Park in the background.

Scottish Parliament
It's a pretty random building.

Holyrood Park
View of Holyrood Park from the Meadows, a park right by campus. On the right is Arthur's Seat, the peak, and then to its left are the crags that trail off from it.

View of Calton Hill
This is the view out the window of my flat. We look out on Calton Hill, another random hill in the middle of the city.

Edinburgh Castle
View of the south side of the castle.

Calton Hill
Monument along the way up Calton Hill.

Cemetery
View of a cemetery from Calton Hill

Calton Hill
"The Shame of Edinburgh"
Edinburgh was the center of the Enlightenment in the 18th century, giving it the name The Athens of the North. In order to commemorate this, the city decided to build a Parthenon-esque building on top of Calton Hill. Unfotunately, funding ran out, and this is what they got instead.

Edinburgh Castle
Twilight view of the castle from Calton Hill.

City View
View from Calton Hill.

Street View
Random street.

For Jason
It's nerdy, he'll understand.