Edinburgh

So Edinburgh is my new favourite city. I flew up there for the weekend, and met Luke who has been working in Glasgow for the last few weeks.
Edinburgh castle we didnt actually go into. It's a stunning castle to look at, which you can see from almost anywhere in town, but the weather being lovely while we were there, we decided our time was better spent outdoors.
The Royal Mile is the road the runs down the middle of the medieval part of Edinburgh - from Edinbugh Castle down to Holyrood Palace (which is the Queen's residence when in Edinbugh). It's a lovely cobbled street with little alley ways and closes, most of which lead through to various accommodative buildings. I believe a lot of it is university housing, or just amazing properties that the families arent letting go of any time soon. The Royal Mile also has its fair share of tourist shops, of course. At the far end of the road, which slopes gently downhill all the way, is the new Parliament building, which is very very contemporary in design. Apparently when it was built there was a bit of an uproar about the fact that 1. It had been so bloody expensive, and 2. It looked terribly out of place on the Royal Mile amongst gloriously old and aesthetically pleasing buildings. But you can't please everyone can you.
Just further on from Holyrood Palace is Holyrood Park, a beautiful city park (also, massive!) which has an extinct volcano in the centre of it - Arthur's seat. So Luke and I, ambitiously, decided to climb to the top since the weather was good, and get a few photos overlooking the city. My goodness it was tiring... it looked deceptively easy from the ground. And once we were at the top, the wind threatened to knock you over every time you tentatively creep out from behind whichever rock you chose to cower behind. But we did get some nice photos. And some nice leg cramps.
On the way back down the mountain, the sun came out, and there was a very picturesque rainbow to enjoy. (Again, for photos of all this, I'm afraid you're jsut going to have to join facebook.)
After we crawled back into town, and had a lovely scottish lunch at a pub, we decided it would be best to check in, and finally get rid of our luggage (yes, I know. Stupid to carry it up the mountain). And have a rest. We had tickets to a comedy club for the nighttime, so we went out, had a nice dinner, laughed till we wet ourselves just a little, then walked back to the hotel. Lovely and tiring day.
The following morning, as I whimpered out of bed (both because of the temperature and my aching legs) we decided that something a little less strenuous was in order. Our hotel was right next to the royal botanic gardens, and we have fairly recently bought a digital SLR camera, so we decided to stroll around there, generally just mucking about with the camera. And it was brilliant. Another beautiful day too. After we'd finished with the gardens, we headed back into the old part of town to do a walking tour that was in my guidebook on Edinburgh. It had explanations on a few different medieval landmarks - the corn exchange, where corn used to be exchanged. The grass market, which was a market. There was 'cannonball house', which actually had a cannonball lodged in its outside wall (not due to conflict, it was a marker for something when they were first installing plumbing), and the witches well, where they used to burn witches. Heartwarming stuff. The tour ended in "Greyfriar's Kirkyard", which is a graveyard. Very atmospheric. There's a statue and a grave there for "Greyfriars bobby", which was a dog (named bobby) who was so loyal to his master, that once his master had died, the dog basically guarded the burial site, until his own death. And that statue is the most photographed statue in Edinburgh. I've now added to that statistic.
And so a brilliant time in Edinburgh was cut short by the need to go back to work.