Happy New Year! Bye Old Year.

Wow, 2011!!

Happy New Year!

I hope you all have a wonderful (and productive) year!

It's already started to look like a new city and a new year in Edinburgh.

The snow that once graced the tops of buildings and covered the ground



melted last week.

A few Christmas inspired things are still around, but they just don't give off the same enthusiasm as before Christmas.


The German Christmas Market with the awesome sugary goodies is gone.

For a brief day they were replaced with these:

Those food stalls are for the big Hogmanay (New Years Eve) party.

So is this huge screen:

But they too are gone, and now the lovely old city is back, ready for whatever the new year may bring.

Trip to the bead shop

Today I went to my Local Bead Shop (LBS?), The Bead Shop Edinburgh.

I don't bead, but I somehow went away with more than just necklace clasps.Lovely, aren't they? I thought they looked fibrous.

It's a nice and friendly store.
They also have wholesale discounts, if you buy enough of one item.

I couldn't help taking pictures of the beads. There were all these colors and shapes saying hey, look at me!


Maybe I should take up beading ...

Fibrous' Craft Fair Debut is this Saturday!

I'm a little nervous. Just a little :)

11th of September, 2010
10am - 4pm

147 - 149 High Street
Portobello
EH15 1AF

If you're in Edinburgh please stop by and say hi!

Map to the venue.

Empty(ish) streets

The Fringe Festival has officially been over for a few days now.

The great big banner on the Royal Mile has been taken down, and the billboards have been dismantled.


I have to say I'm a little bit sad to see the crowds go. Just a little. But I'm not sad to see the leafletters go. All those poor trees...

One of the good things about the decrease in crowds is that I can take pictures without someone walking in front of the camera. Like this one - look! there's cones of yarn in the display!
We can also finally get a seat at a coffee shop. It was J's birthday yesterday, so we went out for breakfast.

That was a vegetarian full breakfast (we split it).

I'll leave you with one last picture, which kind of sums up the whole festival.

Walk Around Leith

We brought out the 24 Great Walks in Edinburgh again today. This time we walked around Leith and the waterfront.

We saw the "Potters Stone", a copy of a 17th century stone depicting stingmen, the special name given to wine porters who used to carry the wine barrels by hand as you can see on the left (not roll them). The strange circle thing on the right is apparently a human-powered crane.

and Citadel Archway, which is all that is left of a fortification built by General Monck in 1608.
A model boat floating above our heads

A random painting

An Antony Gormley Statue

This is the only one of these statues we've seen, but there six others in this area. I remember reading in the newspaper last year, when they were first installed, that lots of residents got scared by them, and a few called 999 (911), thinking that they were an actual person stuck in the river and unable to get out.

This is an odd sign that is even more oddly placed in front of a primary school (elementary school).

And what's perhaps the most exciting thing in the whole trip for me:
New shoes! (The color is off in this pic, they're actually a nice blue).
You might think it's a bit odd that this is the highlight, but I'm very picky about wearing comfortable-fitting shoes. And I think my two feet aren't the same size. So the fact that I actually bought new shoes is a big deal. It's kind of too bad it has a big cat on the front of it, but so what, I really needed new sneakers.

Used Bus Shelter

This morning I walked to the bus stop and saw this:


Yes, that's a bus stop shelter. A bus stop shelter that wasn't there yesterday!

And look at this, my friends:
Yes, our neighborhood gets a used bus shelter.

I'm all for reusing and recycling, but this is just kind of sad. Couldn't they have cleaned off the graffiti and buffed the seats before they put it in?

Apparently not, as we live in the "bad" neighborhood. I hear it's a lot nicer than it used to be, and I feel safer at night than other places I've lived, but I guess it's hard to get rid of a bad reputation (the abandoned car park can't help matters I suppose).

...

Yes, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is still going on. There's less than a week to go though. Already the crowds are thinning. The leafletters more lethargic.

But look, you can actually navigate through the Royal Mile without feeling like you're at a rock concert.

Or rather without feeling like you're at an energetic rock concert.

This also means you can play "who's the actor" from a decent distance away.


Today we saw our second-to-last show, The Ukulele Project. Yes, I still think ukuleles are awesome. No, I haven't been practicing as much as I should.

And this picture doesn't have anything to do with the post, I just think it's cool.

r

Fringe Fest and Fisher Price walk into a bar

I just found out we missed a big parade today! But I hear there were tens of thousands of people who did not. So I'm kinda thinking we wouldn't have been able to see anything anyway.

Oh well.

On Saturday though we caught the tail end of a bagpipe parade. We didn't know that one was going on either. So we had to run alongside the parade to see it. Which ended up being kind of fun...Can you see the flags that these pipers are carrying?

Apparently they're from Canada!

And here's the requisite picture of the crowd, taken from a bus at 5:30.
The highlight of the past two days though was seeing this in a comedy act:


I very nearly went up to the comedian afterwards to ask if I could take a picture of it, but I was too shy. Turns out I didn't need to because Fisher Price is making them again!

Does this make anyone else feel really old? I'm guessing they are making them again because the kids who grew up with them now have their own kids! Eeek!

And 30 years from now the kids in the future will have little toy cell phones which will be all quaint and nostalgic. Double eeek!

So that was today, I wonder what things I'll miss tomorrow...

The Fringe Festival has started!

Or at least it's started for me. I went to see two comedy shows, both free, today. One featured four comedians, each doing about 10 minutes of comedy each. It was worth every penny.

The other was Aaand Now for Something Completely Improvised. And yes, the actors did improvise. The audience reluctantly suggested plot points and then a story was then acted around the suggestions. Now that was worth the one pound donation I gave them. Actually it was worth more than that, but for some reason I was feeling miserly today.

Oh, and this is what Royal Mile looked like in March.

Now here is what it looked like today.

And the festival hasn't even officially started yet!

Movies, pearls, and tents

I hope you had a nice quiet weekend.

I had a lovely weekend where lots of uneventful stuff happened, which I consider to be better than nothing happening, and much better than stressful events happening.

On Friday we went to eat at a cheap Malaysian restaurant that had Pearl Tea. I haven't had pearl tea (boba) in a while, and this was the first place I'd come across in Edinburgh that served it so that was exciting. I also picked up my knitting again. I didn't get much done - only picked up some stitches around an armhole - but hey, it's something.

On Saturday we looked at some art at a gallery and on the way we saw a film shoot. We had nothing better to do, so us and like 50 other people stood around and watched these poor actors (I don't think they're famous) running up and down the stairs for like 15 minutes. The stage hands seemed quite amused that such a large crowd had formed.
The city is also getting much more crowded! The fringe festival is next week and tents are popping up everywhere, including a block really near to my house!

The flyers outside are for a circus, so I guess it's a temporary circus tent!

In the upcoming weeks you can probably expect lots of photos of crowds and blog posts where I whinge about being jostled and elbowed as I try to cope with sharing Edinburgh with an extra 400,000 people! It better be worth it ...

Almost Arthur's Seat

Yesterday J wanted to go for a walk. I wanted to work on the computer. An hour later ...

Here we are at the bottom of the hill, about to walk to the top of Arthur's seat.





Harrumph. Tourists.



Found out later that this called the Salisbury Crags:
When we got to the crags we were surprised to see it level off.

And even more surprised to see the path go downhill.
Turns out what we had thought of as Arthur's Seat is actually the top of Salisbury Crags, and that this hill top in the distance is actually Arthur's seat.
Hmmm. By this time we were tired and weren't really up for more walking. Maybe next time we'll get there ...

The Statues of Princes Street

I was riding on the bus the other day when I noticed a statue that I had never seen before. It was sitting in the shadow on a tree. A branch was near it's head, threatening to cover his face as if nature was slowly erasing the remembrance of this man.

No one wants to be forgotten, so here's another .15 seconds of fame for some of the statues on Princes Street in Edinburgh.


Wellington. Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington. 1769 – 1852. A statesman and one of the leading military and political figures of the nineteenth century. He is often simply referred to as "The Duke of Wellington".



Livingstone. 1813 – 1873. As in, "Dr, Livingstone I presume?". Born in Scotland, David Livingstone was an explorer and missionary.




Sir Walter Scott. 1771 – 1832. A prolific Scottish historical novelist and poet. Famous titles include Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of The Lake, The Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor. He was born in Edinburgh and not only has a huge monument on Princes Street, but the Waverley train station which stands not far from this monument is the only train station to be named after a novel.




Adam Black. 1784 – 1874. Born in Edinburgh, he was a publisher, and founded the A & C Black publishing company. Twice Lord Provost of Edinburgh, and represented the city in parliament from 1856 to 1865.



John Wilson. 1785 - 1854. A Scottish writer who was for a time the principal writer of Blackwood's Magazine, a magazine printed from 1817 to 1980.



Allan Ramsay. 1686 -1758. An Edinburgh poet and publisher who was involved in the early 18th century revival of Scots vernacular poetry. Best remembered for his five-part work, "The Gentle Shepherd." The statue was unveiled in 1865.




Memorial of The Royal Scots Grey. Commemorates the Royal Scots Greys who left Edinburgh in 1899 to fight in the South African War.




Thomas Guthrie. 1803–1873. A Scottish philanthropist who was one of the most popular preachers of his day in Scotland.
His statue reads: An eloquent preacher of the gospel. Founder of the Edinburgh Original Ragged Industrial Schools, and by tongue and pen, the apostle of the movement elsewhere. One of the earliest temperance reformers. A friend of the poor and of the oppressed.




Sir James Young Simpson. 1811 – 1870. A Scottish doctor and an important figure in the history of medicine. Simpson discovered the anaesthetic properties of chloroform and successfully introduced it for general medical use.



Maybe I'll take pictures of the statues on George Street soon ...