12/31/2015

We started the last day of the year climbing Arthur’s Seat, the highest point near Edinburgh (according to Robert Louis Stevenson, “a hill for magnitude, a mountain in virtue of its bold design”). Regardless of how you classify it, it’s pretty…

Except that it had been raining so much (remember how I said a few posts back that it was the rainiest month on record)? And the trail was mostly mud. Without any grip on our shoes, it was a real struggle to make it to the top. This mountain was between our apartment and the city center, so it was a convenient hike.

It was insanely crowded, though – I guess because it’s close enough to the center to walk, and because of all the people there for New Year’s Eve.

Having gotten a late start and taken our time climbing, we finally made it into the city proper. Since we’d be spending the whole evening outside, in the middle of winter, we had to prepare… I mean, buy whisky. We visited a highly-recommended shop at the end of the Royal Mile, Cadenhead’s Whisky. I think we talked with the owner, who didn’t blink when we said we wanted whisky for that night (you’re not supposed to smuggle drinks in). We got three small bottles, slightly larger than nips, including some of the house whisky.

I’d developed something of a taste for whisky while in Edinburgh. Not the blander styles that taste like alcohol, but the peaty kind – a super-distinctive taste (my favorite kind was Laphroaig). It’s not something I’d drink every day, but was fun in Scotland.

Further up the royal mile was the Toy Museum, another (tiny) free museum good for 15 minutes of looking at creepy old toys.

After some more walking, we entered the New Year’s Eve area. This required ticket entry – it was all fenced off around the entire center of the city. There were three or four stages for music, and one additional one that required special tickets. We actually managed to get very close to the stage and saw a memorable performance by the band Rura (guitar, bagpipe, fiddle) – we were in the second row from the stage. Our biggest mistake in Edinburgh was leaving this area before the next band came on (there would be 3 on each stage before midnight).

We left to get a look at the other stages, but just weren’t impressed by anything else. There was some metal (screechy) but by this time the entire 5-6 block area was getting tough to move around in it was so crowded. We danced a little at the back of some crowds, but were mostly waiting. I’d say that this part of the festival just wasn’t for me – too many people, too tightly packed.

After tracking back and forth and drinking our whisky, we settled in for the final hour of the year: we had a good, unobstructed view of Edinburgh castle from a slightly raised streetcar embankment in the middle of the street. They’d put up a bunch of huge TV screens with funky music video type animations playing. A few minutes before midnight they paused the animation and a British astronaut came on (Tim Peake, from the ISS) to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

Then it was midnight, and another year was in the books. We got to see the best fireworks I’ve seen in person over Edinburgh Castle (here’s an aerial video of the fireworks from the year before). It was a wonderful way to usher in 2016: with a beautiful girlfriend in a warm and welcoming country halfway around the world.

12/30/2015

What happens when you set tens of thousands of people armed with torches loose in a city? We wanted an answer to this burning question, and it basically determined the schedule for our whole Britain trip. Rather than doing London and Paris, or London and Wales, we knew we had to see Edinburgh, because of Hogmanay.

Hogmanay is the Scottish New Year festival, but what really sets it apart from other New Years festivals is the torch parade the night of December 30. We left Newcastle fired up and ready to see what all the fuss was about.

I’d heard good things about Edinburgh from pretty much everyone who’d visited, so I would have been excited even without the torches. We arrived in a cold mist and picked up our Hogmanay tickets, then rushed to our AirBnB outside the main town (we were staying East of the city, past the end of the Royal Mile and through the huge Holyrood Park. It was a pretty intense walk and the rain picked up. We caught a bus back into town after the checkin, and from there we walked up the Royal Mile to see Edinburgh Castle, which dominates the city’s skyline. Basically the city center is like a doorstop with the castle perched on top and the Royal Mile extending down the slope.

From there, we did some meandering in the direction of the National Museum of Scotland. I think both of us would have preferred to see more of the city, but the rain just kept coming down. We briefly went into Greyfriar’s Kirkyard, an old cemetery with good views of the castle before being forced inside.

I loved the Scottish aesthetic: huge old grey bricks, brown-green grass, rain-swept sky. It felt completely different from England, even though Newcastle was a short train ride away.

After the cemetery we escaped the weather in the Scottish Museum. It’s free and huge, with large sections devoted to Scottish history, world history, natural history, and so on. The Scottish history section was great, but just too big to take in at once.

I think my favorite was the big natural history hall, in which you were surrounded by taxidermied animals and skeletons.

The natural history hall was a good chowcase of both the exhibits and the building itself, which felt both modern and Victorian. The building was big and airy inside, with white metal fencing along the sides and big skylights.

We still had some time to kill after the museum, so after having some Nepalese food, we continued to mosey around town – and then we stumbled on an amazing bookstore, Armchair Books. It was open late and had a nice selection of secondhand books, but what most stood out to me was the selection of antique books, which included a lot of editions from the eighteenth century, tons of Victorian books, and a whole lot more. We actually came back to this place the next day, because it was so cool.

It was getting a little late, so we wrapped back around to the area of the torch parade. We’d decided not to participate in the parade itself, which in the end was definitely the right decision. During the day we’d seen a lot of people out either collecting their torches for the night or carrying them around. Each torch was 2-3 feet of some wax substance with a stick in the middle. There was a small paper waxguard, but you had to accept that whatever you were wearing would almost certainly get wax on it.

We found the start of the parade, just off the Royal Mile on Bank Street. People were penned up waiting as far as we could see. At this point, I still didn’t really know the scale of the whole thing. It looked like a lot of people, but I couldn’t see how many. Nobody had their torches lit just yet, they were just waiting in the cold.

We didn’t wait, but grabbed mulled cider just past the start, then claimed our spot with a good view over the central park where people would be marching. This park seems pretty inconvenient for people who live in Edinburgh, but it was festive, with a huge area of amusement park rides and gardens.

Then the parade started, with bagpipes out front and the first of the people with torches rounded the corner in front of us. These were pretty serious torches, and the people were naturally walking at different speeds, so they naturally spread out – all the roads were closed and fenced off. In total, the walking route was about a mile long, and I don’t doubt that at one point the entire thing was filled with people walking. After about 20 minutes, we worked our way to the starting area.

That’s when I really understood what was going on. We’d seen about 20 minutes of people walking, which is a fair amount of people. But the pens of people were still completely full. I think it was two columns of people, each column 2-4 across; the columns extended for about a fifth of a mile, and everyone was standing, waiting to walk, with their torches lit. We continued past and around the corner, and there were still more people, just waiting to get into the pens to start walking.

After this, we wanted to wrap around, away from the crowds, to the end of the marching route. I think we probably could have taken a much shorter route, but in the end we did a huge loop around the whole city and around the back end of the finishing area (it was finishing on Carlton Hill and we looped around London Road. We were really booking it, wanting to see the fireworks on time. And we just made it – to the back of the firework display!

This meant that we missed the ground displays, but the fireworks in the air were directly above us – bits of cardboard tubing was falling around us. It was a pretty short display, and then we continued on to merge in with the crowd, who were milling around at the end of the parade route. They had some big buckets of water where people were supposed to put out torches, but there was just general confusing and chaos.

We managed to sneak into the parade, so we were surrounded by people with the torches, though we weren’t holding any ourselves. This meant that we’d seen pretty much everything: the start of the parade, people walking, the full extent of people in pens, the line outside the pens, the empty city, the fireworks, and been in the parade itself.

It was a great way to celebrate the end of one year, and the next day would be the last one in 2015.