Edinburgh, Scotland, one of the greatest, and gorgeous cities in Europe.  It has a castle on the highest part of the city, (you can say it is the castle in the sky) and on the first day there, was the celebration of the largest preforming arts festival in the world, The Fringe Festival, with a small fireworks show, welcoming us to the city.  I have so many things to say about this city, that I don’t know where to start!  I was in the city from August 6-8th 2010.

The Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Edinburgh is a very cultural city.  This festival is the largest preforming arts festival in the world. It is a month long event in the city in August, and we were fortunate enough to come to the city on such an event.  People from all around the world comes to Edinburgh for the festival, so the population of the city doubles during the month of the festival.  I saw a few shows, a really bad free comedy show on Saturday, and 2 decently good shows on Sunday. The show I saw on Saturday was not worth mentioning (maybe because it was free, it was awful), but on Sunday, I got sidetracked by a street performer, who was very good, the volunteers from the audience tied him up in a straitjacket, chained him and locked him in 3 padlocks, and he got out of it in 3 minutes exactly.  He was actually staying at our hostel for the first night we were there, and he was very good at making balloon art/animals.  The second performance I saw was called The Second Star to the Right. You can find a review to the performance on the link.  It was about Wendy’s return to Wonderland, they had a good series of dances during the performance, and the atmosphere feels like we were actually in Wonderland as well, it was cool since the actors were in character the whole time, like when they led you in to the performance area.

The last performance I saw was called Death of a Samurai (link to the review), which I thought was brilliant!  The actors are natives from Japan, and the whole performance was preformed in Japanese, but I knew a bit of the language to make out what they were saying, and I caught a few words that I knew the meaning.  But they threw in a few English lingo to help the English-speaking audience understand.  You could probably understand everything from all their vivid expressions and acting anyways.  The performance combined music, comedy, Shakespearean drama along with Japanese manga, myths, and video game action.  It was about a girl named Kinoko, who has a special ability, and a samurai, ninja, assassin seeks to take her powers away.  She is guarded by her father, who is also a strong fighter, and action unfolds at a quick pace, as well as some comedic scenes for relief. Setup, costumes and acting was excellent!  The actors were very enthusiastic, that they were practically splitting everywhere when they were speaking. 🙂 I  really enjoyed it.

Castle Rock Hostel

Our hostel was smack down right in the middle of the city, right next to the main street of the festival and across the street from the castle.  It was an ideal location, in the center of everything.  It had a beautiful view from our room too (right):
Here are photos from the interior of the hostel. It was very cultural!

The Elephant House & Harry Potter’s Origins

The Elephant House is an epic place for Harry Potter fans (AHHHH!!! =D), because it was the cafe where J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book!  I had lunch here, eating a quiche and drinking the most popular soft drink in Scotland, Irn Bru. (below).  If you go into the ladies restroom (toilet EU), there’s Harry potter graffiti all over the walls recruiting for Dumbledore’s army, and how everyone loves Harry Potter.  We also saw Tom Riddle’s original grave, and tomb stone.  The Muggle Riddle family was taken from this graveyard in Edinburgh (see tombstone below).

Edinburgh City
So here’s the part that everyone wants to hear about. Edinburgh is a city of many deaths, yes I did say deaths. Apparently the whole city is haunted, there are city ghost tours for the tourists lol. No really, it is the city the largest amount of witch burnings, and it hard to say if they still believe in witches or not. Only recently in the late 1950s or something, that they put up an apology for all the witches they burned for the past few centuries. Also if you committed any crime, you would be publicly executed by getting hung.  Any crime, whether it was graverobbing, murder, stealing, or hiding a pregnancy.

So there’s a story that the tour guide told us was about Maggie Dickson, a lady who’s husband died, and she was pregnant.  In those days, to be pregnant without a husband is a disgrace, and to hide your pregnancy, is breaking the law, therefore, you will be hung.  So Maggie had her baby in secret.  Someone found out so she was sentenced to the gallows.  After she was hung, they were preparing to bury her when they found out she was still alive, decided to take her back to the gallows to hang her again.  But someone said, you can’t die twice for the same crime, because she was announced dead after she was hung, so techically she already paid her life for that crime, and to be hung again was unreasonable. She lived on, and died of old age, and had another child, and lived in the same building this pub is in.  And also in those days, the gallows were right on the Grassmarket Square, so she would stick her head out of the window during execution and tell people that she died once, and it wasn’t so bad 😛  They named a pub after her.

I actually recorded more stories told by the tour guide, so I’ll upload them to this post later.

Here are some more pictures of the city:

The city has many great stories to tell… Probably needs 2 blog posts to talk about… because I can’t fit it all in one post.  And I’ve been meaning to post this for a while already.