Edinburgh - day 1

We got up at some ungodly hour, but the up-side was that, having found a bed&breakfast, dumped our things, and grabbed some food, we were ready to start exploring Edinburgh by lunchtime! We decided to invest in a ticket for those hop-on, hop-off open-top bus tours, which allowed us to catch any of 3 different city tours plus one which included a ferry trip in the Firth of Forth (to the non-Scottish world, the river Forth's estuary) and was valid for 2 days. The tickets were well worth the price: the trips with live commentary had excellent guides, and the one pre-recorded one had a brilliant kids' version (as well as 9 different languages), written by one of the authors of the Horrible Histories books, which was wonderfully full of gory silly jokes!

From the top of the bus we got our first glimpses of Edinburgh castle, which, if I remember correctly, is reputed never to have been breached - and if you look at it, you can see why!

All tours start at the Scott monument - not a nationalist symbol but an homage to the 18th-century poet and novelist Walter Scott, so we went from virtually never having heard of him to not bearing to hear his name in one afternoon... Truth be said, however, the tours were very good in the sense that they made a point of telling different stories about the sights that were covered by more than one tour, and pointing out different things along coinciding routes.

All routes afforded glimpses of some of the city's churches. There are said to be hundreds of them, but most no longer function as places of worship. Notable amongst these is the one that now houses the Edinburgh Festival information centre and ticket office (pictured below), but there are many others serving all sorts of different uses, including, in true Scottish style, a pub!

Curiously, one of the churches that does still function as a church has a mural on which there is always a painting relating to the time of year. On the face of it, this may not seem all that curious, but the curiosity factor lies in the fact that, apparently, more often than not the paintings are quite controversial. We thought the one that was up when we were there was quite simply brilliant:

We got a brief peep at the haymarket in amongst the building-work, and I learned its name arises from the fact that it was where grazing animals (i.e. cows, sheep, horses) were sold in the olden days.

Of course, we insisted on sitting in the open part of the top decker of the bus, so that we could enjoy the journey properly and take photos... and there was the occasional short flurry of snow, much to my delight... but this means the temperature was not exactly high... Let's just say that when we got off the last bus, we walked around for a quarter of an hour with no feeling from the knees down - never mind details such as toes and fingers!

We (literally) tripped off in search of a nice warm place serving warm food, and ended up at a pub which promised a live jazz band that evening. It was lovely and cozy, the food was delicious, the desserts were divine, and the music was brilliant - all in all a nice end to a nice day. Until we had to step out into the bitter wind and walk back to our B&B!