My Scottish Memories: Edinburgh - Part I, Edinburgh, Scotland

The stories of Highland clans and whisky and kilts and friendly people came to my attention throughout the years so I decided to visit Scotland. I spent a week in Scotland in July 2012. Since I like primarily to visit the capital of a country and then explore a bit more (if time permits) I made a plan for my Scottish week which included Edinburgh and Glasgow and Stirling. Maybe not the obvious choices apart from Edinburgh, but I travelled with my boyfriend (now my hubby) and he offered a few suggestions that I took. He wanted to see Glasgow because of its football clubs Celtic and Rangers and he knew about Stirling because of William Wallace aka Mel Gibson in the Braveheart movie. Yup! I was an awesome girlfriend then and I’m now an even more awesome wife so not only did we visit Glasgow but we actually went to Celtic’s football stadium and he took a photo of its manager! I looked up Stirling in a guide book and was very happy to visit it. But the highlight of the trip was definitely Edinburgh. But I’m jumping ahead, so let’s rewind back to the beginning and start this story properly.

Of course, we flew to London Stansted and then had a few hours to spare at the airport before boarding our flight to Edinburgh. My first encounter with Scottish hospitality happened on the plane when a lady sitting next to me started chatting with me and gave me lots of tips. One of those was to visit the Edinburgh ZOO but we just didn’t have enough time for that. When we landed it was rainy and foggy and more or less remained that way during the entire week. Thus, unfortunately I don’t have a lot of beautiful photos due to bad weather even though it was July. Nevertheless, we had a wonderful time in Scotland. We stayed at a hostel in a street just off the Royal Mile. The location couldn’t have been better but our dorm room was small and smelly. Actually, that was the last time we had stayed at a hostel. Anyway after checking-in we went for a walk up and down the Royal Mile. It was so foggy and cold that everything looked spooky and yet so beautiful. If you didn’t know Edinburgh is divided into Old Town and New Town; both being pretty old and beautiful and both being UNESCO World Heritage sites. The Royal Mile is the main street of the Old Town leading downwards from the Edinburgh Castle at one end to the Holyrood Palace at the other end. So we walked to the entrance of the Edinburgh Castle and then retraced our steps back towards our hostel and then we ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).