A Dash through Scotland

"This is a city of shifting light,

of changing skies, of sudden vistas.

A city so beautiful it breaks the heart

again and again."

Alexander McCall Smith

Edinburgh

Anna and me

At the last minute my friend and flatmate, Anna and I decided that I should stop in Scotland to visit her. Brilliant! I had never been to the UK before and I was going to kill two birds with one stone as I was planning to see Ireland too, and before anyone freaks out at me for saying that Ireland is NOT part of the UK, I lump the two together when speaking about that part of the world. My sincere apologies but my stubbornness prevails on this one folks.

I spent less than 48 hours in Scotland; you can't call that as seeing a country but I jammed as much as I could into those precious few hours and was lucky to see quite a bit.

Glasgow

I arrived late into rainy Glasgow but I finally met up with Anna and we walked around some of the town before giving up as the weather was clearly trying to best us in seeing whose will was greater. Ours obviously wasn't; nobody likes being cold, wet and blown away. Fortunately though we found some refuge in the coolest temporary sanctuary; The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. It is one of Europe's top art galleries and, amazingly, it is free to enter.

Just chilling with the King at the Kelvingrove

Afterwards we caught the train to Edinburgh and I immediately fell in love with the city. It's the type of place I can imagine myself living in. I've only had a connection like that with a few places and Edinburgh definitely falls into that special category.

Greyfriars Bobby

The city has a smaller population than what I expected, with only about 450 thousand people but still makes it the second most populous city in Scotland. I think I forget that European countries aren't as big as South Africa sometimes.

I will have you know that during this trip I tried my utmost to master the accent of a true Scotsman and their odd (for me at least) way of pronouncing certain words. For example, 'book' is pronounced with an oo like 'soup'. They roll their 'r's and pronounce 'road' with an 'or' sound like 'board'. I became an irritating parrot; mimicking every funny sounding phrase I heard. The South African accent is by no means easy to learn but I was definitely not having much luck with the Scottish one.

The next day we adventured into the cold city and I was captivated by what I saw. We walked the Royal Mile; a succession of streets that form the Old Town that lead up to Castlehill with the Edinburgh Castle. Not that I even knew that the city had one of those; shows how much I know about the world. The walk is quite famous. Where else could you stroll down the tail of a long-extinct volcano?

Funny faces at the Camera Obscura

We stopped at the Camera Obscura and took some quirky photos of ourselves in the illusion mirrors.

We walked through the German Christmas market and ate traditional bratwurst and chatted in a coffee shop whilst drinking mulled wine, something I'd never fancied before. We visited the Writer's Museum which I thought was pretty impressive. The museum celebrates three well-known Scottish writers; Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. 

Quotes by various authors are captioned outside the
Writer's Museum

Two days is hardly any time at all in the grand scheme of anything so before I knew it I was off to Portugal for another whirlwind of an adventure but my Christmas trip would not have been the same if I didn't visit my dear friend in the land of the Scots; leaving more world wise and only bringing a love of a country into my heart.

Edinburgh