"This Vanessa Girl": Scotland trip: Edinburgh

This is the first of the separate posts about my recent Scotland trip. I just decided to ignore any chronology of events and pictures taken, because that would probably be a mess. Due to the fact that we didn't arrive in Edinburgh together but one after another on three different days (Friday to Sunday), our sightseeing wasn't exactly well-organised. I think, Olaf, who arrived first and left last, actually went to most places multiple times. ^^

Anyway, I will start with buildings and so on - the landmarks of Edinburgh and all that stuff. Most of them were covered by one or more of the three tours we did, but we also visited some of them on our own.

Of very high importance was, of course, the Edinburgh Castle:

On the day after my rainy arrival, it was quite nice again, obviously.

Hordes of tourists in my picture ...

I didn't go into the castle due to the price and the queues, but Sirkka and Laetitia actually did a Castle Tour. Meanwhile, Olaf and I went to more museums. But more about that later on.

From the Castle, you have a good view of the Royal Mile, which is the main way through the Old Town of Edinburgh. Well, usually, you have a good view:

The festival, remember?

If you're interested in what it should look like, just consult Google Images. :-P
On the Royal Mile, you cannot only find Tron Kirk (the converted church), but also a real church, "St. Giles' Cathedral". I'm putting that in quotation marks, because it's not a cathedral, to be precise, but a church, the High Kirk of Scotland. (Kirk is Scots for church, just in case you're confused about that.)

Tron Kirk

St. Giles' Kirk!

Next to St. Giles', there's also the Mercat Cross, where official proclamations were made:

(The red-haired guy at the Cross is Greg, one of the tour guides.)

As you might have guessed, mercat is Scots for market. And you might have spotted it already, but here's a close-up of the unicorn on top of the Mercat Cross:

Fun Fact: the unicorn is Scotland's national "animal", while Wales has a dragon. xD

If you follow the Royal Mile - which is not only one street, but multiple streets, or one street that changes its name several times, if you like - until the end, you will pass several museums, ahem, and eventually end up at the Palace of Holyroodhouse. That's the official residence of the Queen when she is in Scotland. Again, we didn't really feel like paying to go in, but the Palace is also quite nice from the outside. So we took a few sneaky pictures from behind the fence. :-D

Of course, there were also unicorns to be found:

But Edinburgh consists of more than the Royal Mile. For example, in actually two tours, Greyfriars Kirkyard was covered (you'll see it again in another post of mine). We already learnt that kirk = church. So this is in fact a churchyard, which is the graveyard around a church, in this case Greyfriars Kirk, i. e. Greyfriars Church, of course! ^^

Not only the Covenanters' Prison (yes, quite macabrely, there were actually people imprisoned in the graveyard in the 17th century) can be found at Greyfriars Kirkyard, but also a memorial stone for Greyfriars Bobby. Bobby was for sure a very loyal dog, the stories just differ in the minor detail of whose dog he was. Leaving the graveyard, we could first find a bar named after Greyfriars Bobby and then a statue of the dog:

(Greg, our tour guide again.)

I just looked up on the map of Edinburgh I brought with me how to bridge these sights properly: next to Greyfriars, you can also find Grassmarket, the market place of medieval Edinburgh. I don't have any pictures of Grassmarket as a whole, but Google Images will kindly help you out. However, there were some interestingly named pubs:

(Greg said he actually saw smaller ones somewhere in the Highlands, I think. ^^)

Where convicts had their last drink before they went to the gallows.

Not too far from Grassmarket, there's also Usher Hall, a quite impressive concert hall:

However, we never ended up at Usher Hall coming from Grassmarket, but the other way round. Before that, we had had a nice, although a bit rainy, walk through New Town. Just to get the facts straight: up to this point, all the pictures in this post show Old Town, the original part of Edinburgh. But there's also New Town, which was constructed in the 18th and 19th century only. Today, both of them are UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Since all the tours only covered Old Town, we decided to explore New Town on our own. Twice, actually - once during the day and once at night:

Waverley Station and the Balmoral Hotel ...

... a highly "prestigious" (= exorbitantly expensive) hotel.

West Register House, part of the National Archives of Scotland

Scott Monument (the picture I took when it wasn't raining)

Well, and when you're already there and want to do something else than looking at buildings: the National Gallery of Scotland is just around the corner! Just in case somebody wants to look at paintings at some point - but maybe that's just me ... ^^

The National Gallery: also nice to look at at night.

Before going to the National Gallery, I had already been to the National Museum of Scotland and the Museum of Edinburgh, both of which are in the Old Town. (Of course, I hadn't been to all of them on the same day.)

The National Museum of Scotland is "bigger than a country of our size deserves", according to Free-Tour-guide Greg. :-D

I didn't manage to fit this big building into the picture. xD

In the museum, there are lots of different exhibitions, not only about Scottish history, but also about science, like astrology, and natural history. Even if you don't have a lot of time, the really cool animal galleries are definitely worth a visit!

The Museum of Edinburgh is - in comparison to other museums, especially the Museum of London and the National Museum of Scotland - a rather small museum telling the history of Edinburgh.

For example, they also explained the "Gardy Loo!"-story:

That was really an issue in the Old Town - lack of space and running water. There was a lot of waste thrown out of the window, since the houses had a lot of storeys. (Skyscrapers were supposedly invented in Edinburgh.)

The lack of space conveniently brings me to another place to visit in Edinburgh. Just in case you don't only want to visit the "normal" Edinburgh, you can also go underground! Of course, people couldn't just add more storeys to houses until infinity. At some point, the constructions would get instable. So they eventually went underground, to the Vaults. In these chambers, people used to work in the first place, but there were also underground pubs, and later on, people even lived there!

Just saying: there are not only historic tours, but also ghost tours, because allegedly, Edinburgh is the most haunted city in the UK or so. I didn't know something like this was measurable, but well ...

However, if you don't feel like meeting ghosts, you might want to get out of Old Town for some time. That's not so hard to do: you just need to walk past Holyrood Palace and then continue walking for a bit longer and you will eventually end up at Arthur's Seat, the highest of a group of hills.