The Bartulla Way: Edinburgh in August

Perhaps its just my background in civil engineering, but it seems like a really bad idea to have construction throughout a city like Edinburgh during your most busiest tourist months! What a mess! Roads were closed for the Fringe Festival but even more so they had lots of roads closed due to construction. It was absolute chaos to try and drive in the city and even more so to find parking. So needless to say, after our first attempt we decided that it was best to take either a taxi or bus into town and walk about while we were there. We met a friend of mine and her father there as well, and they too had the hardest time moving about by car in Edinburgh. Hours I tell ya..............spent trying to get around to where they needed to be and find parking. And they are from the UK......so it wasn't just the "crazy American's". LOL

The drive down to Edinburgh was really nice. We had great weather for it and the drive from Inverbervie is only about 2 hours. We stopped for lunch along the way and just took our time.......enjoying the view. We took the bridge over to Edinburgh and it was really neat to see the bridge. The nerdy bridge person in me was fumbling fast to get my camera and took a picture through the bug infested windshield.

So all that aside, after we figured out the best way to get to city centre was by bus or taxi.........we had a fab time! Friday night we had dinner at a really great little sushi place called No 1 Sushi. Yeah cheesy name but fab sushi. At least the best we've had since we've been in the UK. Which we've not found much in the way of sushi since we've been here.

Saturday morning we woke early and had breakfast at the hotel and set out to figure out the best way to get to city centre to meet up with friends. So we got down there and meet up with them and set out walking toward the castle so we could visit inside. Wow..........talk about a castle up on a hill in the middle of the city. You simply can't miss it!

Edinburgh Castle from the park

A view from Edinburgh Castle

At 1:00pm every day they shoot off a canon from the castle. Back in the day this was how people could keep the hour and knew that when they heard the canon that it was 1:00pm. So we stuck around the castle grounds so we could hear the canon at 1:00pm. That was pretty neat. And of course there were lots of bagpipers all over the place..........due to the touristy season. So any Scots that read my blog.............forgive me for what I am about to say............but really............I've had enough bagpipes after my day at Edinburgh castle. ;)

1:00pm canon/gun firing

One of many bagpipers seen and heard in Edinburgh!

Our friends were going to the Military Tattoo on Saturday night, so the grounds leading up to the castle had a lot of bleachers and seating for that. Jeff and I were headed to a ghost tour of the underground city vaults later that evening. But in the mean time we were all hungry and looking for something good to eat. We headed off down the Royal Mile to see what we could find. We weaved our way through all the Fringe Festival street performers and finally came upon a nice Italian place. It was yummy!
So lots of performers all over the place doing street acts. Everything from people dressed up as statues and not moving an inch, to people doing tricks and acts, passing out flyer's for evening acts and just lots of activity going on in the streets. So while we were just walking about we stop off to check out a street performer. This street performer is quite comical and eventually goes on to tell the crowd that he can solve a rubiks cube in less than a minute. So he ask for someone from the crowd to have a stop watch or a second hand on their watch. No one says a word or volunteers EXCEPT MY HUSBAND. :| So there he is repeatedly letting the performer know he's got a stop watch on his watch and the street performer not only moves him up to the front of the crowd, but ask his name and where he was from. So my loving husband very loudly announces that he is Jeff from Houston, Texas. Do you have a visual of this and a visual of me standing in the back of the crowd covering my face? LOL
So the street performer goes on to ask Jeff to shout out every 15 seconds that passes. And of course he ask Jeff to shout........makes him practice a bit. It was really quite comical and the street performer did in fact solve the rubiks cube in right at a minute or so's time. And my friends of course were cheering Jeff on. LOL See.............I can't take him anywhere! ;)

Jeff helping out the performer and shouting out the time at the 15 minute interval

The street performer desperately trying to get the rubiks solved!

Okay so on to the Ghost Tour. Wow............okay I won't say that its scary as much as its just eerie! Its truly very eerie in the underground vaults and the stories they tell even before you get down there, just around the city is really on the eerie side too. The vaults are eerie in themselves and while I didn't experience anything ghostly while I was down there.........I will say that there are a lot of small rooms and when they put 30 people in one of those small rooms to tell them a story.............its creepy! Afterwards they allowed a couple of minutes to walk through all the vaults if you wanted. Jeff took a walk about and said that at one point he was the only person around and it was a bit creepy and eerie. So not to disappoint, as we didn't see any ghost or experience one............we did however get that eerie feeling while we were down there.

Street performers we watched while we were waiting on the Ghost Tour to start

So Saturday was a super long day and we were exhausted. We slept in a bit on Sunday but then had to get going to check out of the hotel on time. We took off headed back home and stopped off at Deep Sea World to see their shark exhibit. They are suppose to be the Aquarium with the largest shark exhibit in the UK. It was pretty neat. They have an underground tunnel that you can walk through and the sharks and stingrays and fish swim over and around you. They've got several sharks and while most are fairly small, they did have a pretty big one. And lots of stingrays. They have a seal exhibit too and lots of other things like frogs, crabs, octopus' and even perranias. Eck! Its right by the North Queensferry Heritage Trust bridge. And this is significant because this bridge was built for railroad and there was some bad engineering done on it and when it opened for the first time and the first train went across it, it collapsed. Several lives were lost and of course it was shut down. It eventually was re-opened after a great deal of engineering and repair went into it. While we were there they were doing some more work to it. It looked as though they were refurbishing it, but its hard to tell for sure.

This seal was just chillin. He looked up once......other than that no human was gonna disturb his slumber unless it involved food!

This one was swimming laps, popping his head up ever so often to make sure he still had an audience!

A very small portion of the North Queensferry Heritage Trust bridge

Okay so the thing I forgot to mention above is that on Friday, when we got to Edinburgh and checked into our hotel, we set out to find Rosslyn's Chapel. You know the Chapel that is said to have an underground vault that contains the bodies of the Knights Templar in their full dress armor and the Chapel that Dan Brown says that the Holy Grail is in that same vault. Well we went there. That was pretty interesting to see. Right now they are refurbishing the Chapel so there is lots of scaffolds and such around the Chapel, so its hard to really see the full thing. However you can walk around the scaffolding that's around the roof right now and see it up close. That was really neat. And while you're not allowed to take pictures on the inside of the church, its really amazing. LOTS of carvings, lots of detail and its really a true sign of the age of the Chapel because a lot of it is starting to kind of dwindle away (for lack of better word). I never realized how much carvings were in this church or what they all mean. And they do address Dan Brown's theories in their tour but they simply say that it's rumored that there are several different things in the vault including the dead sea scrolls, the holy grail and the Knights Templar in their dress armour and that the Sinclair's still have full rights of the Chapel and do not want to open the vault and disturb their ancestors. They do however know that when they did a sonar of the underground fault it did in fact show a great deal of metal!