Walking up hills.
We walked up Raeburn Place into the Edinburgh centre. This really is an incredibly beautiful city. I read today that there are more than 16,000 historically significant buildings in Edinburgh. The houses, in this area at least, are uniformly beautiful, the streets sweeping, cobblestoned (even many of the main streets) and ancient and there are walled or fenced green areas everywhere. All of the shops have old style shop fronts and there seems to be a real effort put into preserving the character of the streetscape. There is a distinct absence of parking or other street signs- although this took me a while to notice- and even traffic lights seem to blend in. Parking is marked by painted lines on the road.
We walked up some more hills in to the city centre and came up to Princes Street which is the street which roughly divides the old town and the new town. High on a lush, grassed hill above us was Edinburgh Castle. Over that hill is the old town. To our left at the east end of Princes Street was Nelson’s Column and a couple of other big churchy kind of buildings that I haven’t identified yet. The whole scene was a stunning sight against the blue sky but there was no way that we were going to climb that hill today! We walked a little up Princes Street then back south to find something to eat. Rose Street is a long, shady pedestrian street running parallel to Princes Street and it is packed full of bars, pubs, cafes and restaurants. I highly recommend it.
We were both pretty tired by now so it was back to the pub -at least this trip is downhill- and to bed early. How long does it take to get over jet-lag?
On the way back, we tried to get into one of the fenced gardens but all of the gates were locked. We could see children playing and people lazing on inviting shaded lawns behind the gates. Damn them! We asked a passerby how we could get in and she told us that these, and most of the other walled or fenced gardens were private and open only to local residents who had a key. She said that the owners of the houses around a private garden would pay a hefty fee for this privilige and the fee would cover the wages of a full-time gardener to maintain the gardens. Although this seemed very unfair at first, I decided in the end it was actually not a bad system and ensured these very old and beautiful gardens would remain forever. But Tricky and I still wanted to jump the fence and go and lie on that manicured grass and maybe spread some leaves around-give that gardener something to do. The free Botanical Gardens for us tomorrow. We are spending way too much money and need some free stuff to do!