Fortune Favors the Bold

On this leg of the trip I've been rereading Hart's Hope. Every time I read it, I get something different out of it. This time instead of something new within the text, I am overlaying Inwit with elements of Edinburgh and getting an entirely different view of the (fictional) city.

We ended up at a Thai restaurant, Phuket Pavilion, our first night that was pretty close to the hotel. I had a wonderful ginger and seafood hot pot which included scallops. Scallops in this country are so well prepared that it's hard not to order them every meal. As I said to Bill, “they cook meat until it's tasty, not until it's safe.”

Yesterday, we got an early start on making our way up the Royal Mile before most of the stores had opened. and into Edinburgh castle just before 10 AM. I got the audio tour with my ticket and took near constant advantage of it. The castle is beautiful and eccentric, with many different architectural styles glommed together as different times increased fortifications or added new buildings. We got to see the Honours of Scotland (The Scottish Crown Jewels). They're at the end of a winding tunnel of exhibits about their history. Several people passed us in a great hurry to get to see the Honours. I found this history to be a lot more interesting than the actual items. The castle houses several different small museums and we managed to walk through almost all of them before the tour bus passengers started making the place unbearable.

After that, we wandered around some shops in Grassmarket. Most notably Mr. Wood's Fossils, which had trilobite cuff links and other interesting jewelry in addition to fossils and rocks from all around the word, and Transreal Fiction, a scifi- and fantasy-centric book shop that I could have spent a lot longer in. They had a version of Wolves in the Wall that included a CD of it being read by the author, and the first two volumes of the Long Price Quartet in a single binding. It was tempting to do some serious damage to my bank account, but I somehow left empty handed.

Lunch was Indian at a place called Khushi's that wasn't nearly as expensive as the décor would suggest. The highlight of our three excellent dishes was definitely the meat samosas. I could go back and eat those again. And again.

We spent the afternoon ensuring that, regardless of name or window display, all the souvenir shops near the castle carry the same crap. We also visited a cool whiskey shop, a kirkyard with several ancient, and unfortunately graffiti, headstones and vaults, a museum with a copy of the covenant, and Bow Bar before returning to the hotel for tea. The afternoon was spent wandering down Princes Street and failing to get to the Impressionist exhibit at the art museum early enough to bother going in.

So far all I have purchased for myself are stockings and Scotch.

Dinner was at a Spanish tapas bar. I love being in a large enough metropolitan area to support so many different cuisines within walking distance. It was called Cafe Andaluz and we were drawn in by the paellas. The tapas menu proved to be too tantalizing, though, and included a mini paelle. Tapas was the correct choice as the fish in the paella was salmon and there were a lot of peas, neither of which Bill eats and both of which I enjoy. The prevalence of peas in meals is something else I'm really enjoying.

Today we trekked up to Aurthur's Seat, which is exactly as high as it looks. Once you get near the top you see that if you'd just walked further around the park, you could have taken a much easier way to the summit. Obviously that is for suckers and doesn't get you anywhere near any ruins. I'm glad I already had that day long death hike through Stone Door under my belt this year or I might have called it quits half way up. After a brief rest and a lot of pictures, we took the easy way down so as to be closer to a pub Bill wanted to visit. I'm wearing shorts and a t-shirt today. This morning, I think I had enough sweat running off of me without heavier clothes to help.

For lunch, we sought out a Scottish place where Bill had some tasty, tasty haggis and I had whole sardines. His meal was only marred by the awful smell of mine. Mine was awesome.

We went to the Fruitmarket Gallery and saw some strange stuff I'm not convinced was all art. Opera for a Small Room was a cool exhibit and the Killing Machine was well worth seeing in operation, but the exhibit where you got to reproduce the experience of being in a movie theater for a bad film where the people behind you won't shut up and the cheesy haunted house seemed more like the work of people with too much time on their hands than art, or even innovation. There was a House of Books with no Windows that I'm on the fence about. I'm not convinced the lack of windows is symbolic. It may have just been easier to construct that way.

We spent the early evening doing laundry and the late evening eating Chinese. I had cuttlefish, which tastes like generic Chinese fish cake as far as I could tell. Being a Friday night, the streets and bars are packed. We've decided we're too tired to be out and about and have instead settled for the quiet, wifi enabled hotel bar.

That's what we've been up to, but it doesn't really capture what it's like to be here.

I'm enjoying the wide variety of styles we're seeing in dress and in hair. I'm especially enjoying the variety amongst high school girls. It's a refreshing change from every one having the same blond hair in the same long cut with the same overdone make-up like odd lots from the Rose Tyler automaton factory. Bright pinks and maroons are hair colors of my generation and older too. I kind of wish mine was still purple.

There's fairly extensive public transportation in town with bus routes throughout the city. So far, nothing we've wanted to get to has been so far that we didn't just walk it instead of standing around and waiting for a bus, though.

There's a lot of traffic and the crosswalks tend to take forever to change. On our second day here, Bill declared, “Avandra says, 'fortune favors the bold!'” and ran across the street. This has since been shortened to “Avandra!” when we see a break in traffic large enough that we think we can make it. So far Avandra has rewarded our worship. That is to say: neither of us has been hit by a car.