Edinburgh, day one

In Edinburgh we finally changed the camera battery.
Edinburgh is amazing. In York the friendly museum guide told us that if you were king and got to create the perfect city, you would create Edinburgh, and I see what he meant. We got off the train and after some confusing moments trying to find our way out of the mall that’s attached to the station, we spilled out onto Princes Street, which is the major shopping street in Edinburgh. It’s part of the “new” section, which means it was created post-Dark Ages. Our hotel was just beyond the castle, so we walked to it.
The castle dominates the skyline. This was the view on the way to the hotel.

After we checked in, we went and had lunch or dinner at the Mussel Inn (enthusiastically recommended by the York museum guide). I had the famous kilo of mussels, of course, with the blue cheese sauce. My god they were good. Vance was cautious and got scallops, they being—so he tells me—the least risky thing on the menu for someone in his still delicate condition. After we ate we walked about the Royal Mile for a while. I noted the location of several Christmas stores. We went into St Giles Cathedral, and then we toured Mary King’s Close. Since the Royal Mile is at the top of a ridge, people used to live along alleys (or “closes”) that ran sharply down the hill from it. In 1753, when the city fathers decided to expand the Royal Exchange, they shaved the tops off of a bunch of these houses and used them as foundations for the new building. All the old buildings were forgotten for a while, but now there are tours. As with the exhibits at Jorvik, there was an emphasis in the tour of the Close on the lack of sanitation back in the day, with frequent reminders that if this was 1400, we’d be standing ankle deep in sewage. The guide assured us that that was why the flowers in the castle park gardens grow so large, even today.