Edinburgh! A city I really love, but I've seen it only once in a month other than August.
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| The Festival Fringe |
In August of course the city is not really itself. Instead it is crammed with visitors and performers headed there to watch or participate in the largest theatre festival in the world, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. As many of you already know, since August of 2000 I have been taking groups of Ithaca College students to the festival for a long weekend just before they begin their fall semester at our London Center (ICLC). I am very familiar by now with the exuberance and madness of that festive season, and frankly I've grown more than a bit tired of it, or at least exhausted from it. I wrote about these feelings in a post for this blog last August, after I'd come down geographically and figuratively from my wonderful Highland Fling.
My only non-festival visit was my very first to Edinburgh or Scotland for that matter.
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| The Edinburgh Castle |
The purpose? To explore the city and get to know it before shepherding students through it, so as to provide them with the best possible time and equally importantly to not to make an utter fool of myself in the process! I took advantage of our week-long Thanksgiving break and flew to London, where the excellent director of our London Center, Bill Sheasgreen, and I strategized plans for the trip, where I first met Professor Timothy Kidd, the fabled teacher of the Interrelationships class taught at ICLC, and where I caught a train from King's Cross Station northwards for a few days in Edinburgh, a time spent learning my way around as comprehensively as I could in a very short period of time.
I only vaguely remember that first trp. Memory primo di Dotore Gianni" It was cold!
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View from the castle of the town
and, beyond, the Firth of Forth |
I stayed in a tiny room in an equally tiny B&B in the Broughton Street area, run by an Indian couple. The en suite facilities consisted of one of those miniscule shower stalls, obviously not part of the original structure, in which if the water went suddenly from hot to cold and back again (which it did frequently) there was absolutely no space to move away from the extremes. And god forbid you should drop your soap, becuase it was nearly impossible to lower oneself in whichever inventive way attempted to pick it up from the floor of the shower stall. But I have stayed in many such places and worse in my history of inexpensive lodgings throughout the U.K. and Europe. Even so, there was something extremely dislike-able about this particular B&B which made me eager to be out of it as quickly as possible for as long as possible.
Which meant heading out into the cold. I took an open-top bus tour to get a sense of the city on a day so damp and chilly that I was the ONLY passenger on the bus! The tour guide put away his microphone and gave me a great one-on-one introduction to the town. After that I visited the castle, walked up and down the high street, toured Holyrood, and searched out the theatres. I visited the Museum of Scotland and the National Gallery and
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| Holyrood Abbey, next to the palace |
and walked over as much of the "old" and "new" towns as I could. I still had some sort of memory back in those days, and I kept a journal as an aid in case memory failed, which it did then occasionally and does now almost whenever I summon it. I decided on that trip that my visits with students in August must include an open-top bus tour and a visit to the castle. Bill Sheasgreen strongly suggested a climb up Arthur's Seat as well. which I did not attempt in November and have accomplished only once since. But I sent students up every August, and they always claim it as one of the best experiences of the weekend.
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| The way up to Arthur's Seat, seen in the distance |
I wonder if I will make the climb again this coming weekend? I will probably be shamed into it, and it probably won't kill me. We shall see...I think that whether because I die on the climb to the summit or Arthur's Seat or for much less dramatic reasons, this will be my last trip to Edinburgh. You never can tell, but I have had my fill of it. I may well return to the Highlands of Scotland, as I've only just been introduced to them, but I thnk I've had enough of the great city known in the past as Auld Reekie, even though I think it one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.
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| Old Town Edinburgh |
Three! Dottore Gianni's preamble to his Edinburgh blog! More whilst on the trip itself!
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