20240523 Thursday May 23, 2024; A Very Rainy Day in Edinburgh
Breakfast at the Motel One Edinburgh Royal Market was very hectic at first because it was held in the busy lobby and bar area with a lot of people with their suitcases shuffling through and very little room for people to be in line for food items or the coffee machines, and limited seating. They had a decent selection of continental breakfast items including plain and greek yogurt, various granolas, instant oat meals, croissants, pain au chocolat, hard rolls, toast and hard boiled eggs. It wasn’t as good a breakfast as the St. Raphael’s full hot breakfast, but decent enough. The hard boiled eggs had little egg cups and spoons, but we proved inept at gracefully decapitating the eggs without having to peel a lot of shell fragments.
It has pretty much rained non-stop the entire time we have been in Edinburgh, and the intensity never really let up all of today. We walked up to the Edinburgh Castle where Janet chased down some of a drum corp band for pictures. We didn’t stick around for them to do their thing when the castle opened at 10am because we would have had to stand in the pouring rain for 20 minutes.
Instead, we walked down Victoria Street, which some guide books suggest had an influence on the design of Harry Potter’s Diagon Alley. Although there is a Harry Potter merchandise store along the street, aside from it being situated on a curved street, it bears no resemblance to the movie’s fictional location.
York’s Shambles is a much more believable design influence. We also walked past the Elephant House coffee shop where JK Rowling wrote the earlier Harry Potter books in a back room with an inspiring view of the Edinburgh Castle, but it was closed for remodeling.
We stopped in the drenching rain to snap a photo with Greyfriars Bobby, a life-sized sculpture of the Skye Terrier who guarded his owner’s grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard for 14 years before passing away himself. Kind of a Scottish Hachikō story. Fortunately, Greyfriar’s Bobby was right across the street from the National Museum of Scotland.
The National Museum of Scotland is like a Smithsonian Museum for Scotland. It is massive and has exhibits in one wing dedicated to the history of Scotland and it’s people from prehistoric times to the present, and another even more massive wing with artifacts from around the world and also items of scientific and cultural significance including things you would find in museums of natural history, anthropology, science, popular culture and industry.
There was a self guided audio “Highlights” tour hosted over the museum’s free wifi that highlighted 18 curated favorites of the museum’s staff which had us moving from one gallery to another in a sort of scavenger hunt. In the end, we sat still and got through the tour without running around to see what they had to say about each item, and then seeing them ourselves in a more logical geographically manner, rather than hopping from one floor and gallery to another on the opposite end of the museum.
Like the Smithsonian Museums in Washington DC, you could easily spend a few days exploring every gallery. Ben gravitated more towards the industrial and technological items while Janet gravitated more towards the exhibits on living in Edwardian and Victorian times. There are also galleries filled with items from all over the world including Salish wood carvings from British Columbia, a mummy from Egypt, and lots of Buddahs and artifacts from Asia.
We wrapped up our visit to the National Museum of Scotland to leave enough time to tour St. Gile’s Cathedral, the Scottish Parliament and have a look at Holyrood House Palace, which is Scotland’s White House analog. King Charles was off elsewhere, but because the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh (Edward and Sophie) had paid a visit, the grounds were closed to the public. We could only admire it through the wrought iron gate in the rain.
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We dragged ourselves back through the threshold of the Doric Tavern like drowned rats and had another pint of their excellent IPA, as well as another bowl of that delicious Cullen Skink soup to warm us up, and a Doric Burger and Shephard’s Pie to fill us up.
We then spent the evening trying to dry our shoes and clothes so we could get packed up to leave in the morning for England’s Lake District.
