Day 3: Scotland vacation 2007

Even though we were staying in Penicuik, we didn’t spend much time exploring it because we were focused on Edinburgh. But on the morning of day 3, we missed the bus we had been planning to catch—n.b. the times on the bus schedule are “guides”, which came as a bit of a shock since we are used to the clockwork German bus system—so we walked a little farther into Penicuik until the next bus was scheduled to come.



On the way into Edinburgh, we made a little detour to get to Roslin, the home of Rosslyn Chapel. It was small but amazing. Unfortunately, our pictures didn’t come out too well, but here’s one of the better ones.



When we finally got to Edinburgh, we made our way through the Old Town a bit, where we spotted our first “This Belongs to Lionel Richie” sticker on the ground. We saw several more, including on the back of someone’s sweater, before we left Edinburgh.



We went to the National Museum to hear some music at lunch time: Sarah Naylor on the fiddle and Douglas Millar on the keyboard. They played traditional reels from Scotland and other English-speaking countries. A reel is a dance, and it struck me as kind of odd for people to be sitting fairly still to listen, as if it were a classical concert. A few songs in, a man with a cane standing on the edge of the seating starting tapping his cane to the beat, quite loudly. It didn’t seem out of place. After that, I noticed more people keeping beat with their thumbs and their toes. None of us were willing to commit a head or a whole foot to the rhythm of the music.

We walked around in the museum a little after that. John wanted to see the Lewis chess set, which he did, but his photos came out horribly blurry. Hannah spotted what she thought was a giant purple bouncy castle at the end of the street, but it turned out to be a giant inflatable cow on its back, complete with udders; it was at one of the Festival events near the university, and not at all for jumping on. After that we went to Greyfriars.



We weren’t able to go into the church because there was a concert, but we walked around the churchyard (aka kirkyard), which is really the draw to the church. It wasn’t crowded while we were there because it had been raining; we found it lovely and peaceful.



Then we headed for the Royal Mile and the freaks (a relative term for someone from Austin) at the Fringe Festival.



We watched a contortionist who squeezed himself through a tennis racket and had a pretty good comedy routine going, if a little risqué. I call it a learning moment: now Hannah knows about Jews and circumcision.

We saw a house that allegedly belonged to the family of John Knox, the Scottish religious reformer,



and peeked into alleyways called “closes”.



I remembered to wear my pedometer that day, and we walked about 3.5 miles before catching the bus back out to Penicuik for the night.