“Should I go to Edinburgh?” (yes)
When travelers talk about their favorite cities, the conversation can get boring pretty quickly. Because each person has her or his subjective favorite places, of course. And also because folks just naturally want to “out-do” each other with obscure cities that happen to top their lists at a given moment. Consensus is almost never achieved in talks like this one. Unless Edinburgh comes up. Which it often does with Village students, who might be doing JOURNEY to either London or Dublin and looking for a perfect place to explore for VisionQUEST.
Edinburgh is that place, or at least is can be for many Village students. A huge part of Edinburgh’s charm is just the flat-out hauntingly romantic beauty of its natural setting. Salt water is nearby. Mountains are too, or at least very, very large hills seem to surround the place. And for lack of a better word, there’s something cloyingly gothic about the city and how it snakes around itself, the water and the mountains (hills). Then of course the Scottish people enter the equation and the game changes altogether for the better. Because as lovely as the city is and as quickly as a person burns through a digital camera battery trying to track the almost midnight sun’s slow massage of the place over the course of a long summer’s day, the Scotts still steal the show in terms of why the city and its surroundings are so charming.
Without doubt, our students who visit the city comment year after year on the incredible friendliness, generosity and humor of their Scottish hosts. They make you laugh with jokes that sometimes require a second telling, depending on the thickness of a person’s accent. And they make you blush both by what they say about liking American so much and about disliking the English. (William Wallace of Braveheart fame? His countrymen today are still hearing the broadswords just a wee bit.)
Edinburgh is a city that unfolds gently. So taking the train north brings it only gently into view, after numerous sightings of the rugged North Sea have already set the table for awesome viewing. So as the Flying Scottsman makes its final turns toward the old city and Waverly Station, the city’s spires of stone and brick jut starkly and finally into view. A lovely place. A place that calls out for even a bad ghost story. A place with a cadence and gurgled way of delivering the language that feels two parts pure joy and one part mocking. From station to the Royal Mile and then Princes Street? Just a short stroll.
While over it all looms the city’s great castle and the weaving way to get to it, past as many cashmere and tartan stores as the rest of the world has ever had. And past some pubs that quite frankly the rest of the world should have tried hard to get years ago. (Pubs so good that even the Irish recommend them? That means a good pub.) And then finally from up on high, the city and its watery and rugged environs stand still and calm. Not even the ghosts whisper up there. Arthur’s Seat in the distance, and the weaving way back toward the city center is it’s own joy.
The sound of pipes isn’t heard as much in Edinburgh as one wishes. The pipes are there, though, and so are the tartans and the kilts. Look around the churches on any Saturday in the summer, and the sounds and sites of Scotland abound. Young men marry in their best kilt. And their mates stand to support them in the same. And before any reception starts, the pipes issue in the party and its celebrants. And before any newlyweds leave their big splash, the pipes are replaced by The Proclaimers’ anthem pounded out in a hollering and almost frenzied 4–4 time. The same song closes down many an Edinburgh pub on weekend nights.
And hate it as we Yanks might, the song climbs into us and sits there for awhile after we’ve left Scotland. So do the memories of reading Hamlet by candlelight outdoors. And the look of the summer sun in Scotland at midnight, when there’s still light to be had. And the ocean and the lakes and the roughly grand scenery. And the sound of some Wordsworth or Coleridge poem being read aloud. Or just the sound of the cows in the morning, on any walk outside of the city.
