Holy Fuck I Love Edinburgh

There’s highs and lows to my travel style – that being unannounced arrivals at unresearched destinations – but one of the best aspects is the astonishment of stumbling across something I wasn’t expecting.

After my nerdy hopes were tempered in the tea of Dublin’s demure charm, I rolled into Scotland’s hoary capital ready to dig deep for the history and feel of the place, not expecting it to slap me in the face.

Looking out the front window of a double-decker transfer bus, the first thing you see on arrival in the city centre is Edinburgh Castle soaring above the old town on an extinct volcano protruding 80 meters in the air. Along with the centuries-old, ten-storey buildings of the Royal Mile, Edinburgh’s ancient heart claims the skyline unlike any city I’ve ever seen. It’s the kind of place that inspires every bespectacled little boy’s dreams of knights and dragons and King Arthur and David Bowie in the movie Labyrinth…

Edinburgh is the blessed combination of an elaborate M. C. Escher sketch, a sandstone quarry, and an unlimited supply of your favourite medieval Lego sets. The city centre broods, solid and looming, on a rolling topography of hills that exaggerates Edinburgh’s three-dimensionality – massive bridges house stately buildings like the National Library; winding stairways lead up and down between city tiers, squeezed between towering walls scoured by centuries of brushed shoulders; black tunnels quietly drip a constant patter, drawing your gaze upward to capstones bigger than most vehicles; tiny shopfronts open into medieval halls that must exist in their own pocket dimension, else where did they find all that space? Your perspective is regularly challenged by a layered vista of stonework, towers and spires and merlon-bedecked keeps, undoubtedly contributing to the early development of neural networks in Scottish infants.

I would hesitate to call the city beautiful, and it shares the flaws of most European metropolises. The architectural style is almost brutish – square and simple and solid – but it is at least a unified theme throughout the city. The Royal Mile is made up of the usual strip of tourist traps and trinket shops, and is overly crowded with selfie-snapping bus tour groups. Everything is expensive. There’s no actual Scottish people anywhere. American chain restaurants and tacky/faux Irish Pubs tragically claim historical real estate. But just ignore all that, look up, and let childlike glee seep into your cold black heart.

With only 48 hours in the city, I didn’t get much more than a superficial taste. I zig-zagged the cobbled town centre, ducked into dusty book shops, had a pint or two, climbed every high vantage I could find (Arthur’s Seat, Calton Hill, the National Museum, Chaophraya), explored leafy parks, and day-dreamed about running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign somewhere in the bowels of an ancient pub. Superficial though it may have been, my first impression of Edinburgh was striking enough that I’m considering looking for a job there when I inevitably run out of money.

Scotland has nice, mild winters, right? …