Edinburgh and a Successful First Attempt at Couchsurfing

Fifteen hours, two plane rides, five movies, one trip through customs where they almost didn’t let me in because “random hostels and couches across the country” was apparently not a suitable address for “residence while in country”, and I made it safely to Edinburgh International Airport in Scotland.

I had a two hours delay between when my plane arrived and Em’s showed up and then an additional hour until our ride came, but a well-placed Costa Café in the baggage claim terminal was genius and provided a good place to chill and settle in.

Em had been busy the weeks previous to our trip arranging couch-surfing locations for us to crash at and had found us a home for the duration of our stay in Edinburgh. Couch-surfing is a hippie concept of opening your home to foreigners that are interested in staying with a local and learning more about a location than can be acquired through hotel or hostel living. The concept is that everyone that uses the service has to be willing to reciprocate in one form or another, whether it’s opening their home to fellow travelers as well or just being available to meet a guest at a local coffee shop and tell them about the town. It’s pretty awesome and for us turned out to be a genuinely great experience (at least in Edinburgh).

Our host for the first four nights of our journey was Dave, an older gentleman with empty nest syndrome, a giant heart, a habit of cooking for three times as many people as are staying at his home, and an all-around wonderful person. Dave lives in West Linton, a village about 25 miles outside of Edinburgh, but assured us that there were buses that ran to the main city daily and that he also drove in frequently. His home is cute and quaint, as one would expect in the country, and is surrounded by fertile green lands filled with sheep and super long haired cows (they look like the creatures from “Where the Wild Things Are”), and small town charm.

Dave, a British transplant, opened his doors to us and provided us with beds for four nights, as well as great dinners, whiskey lessons, driving tours of the country side, and a wealth of knowledge about the area and Scottish history which seemed to never run out regardless of the questions that Em relentlessly plied him with.

The Adventures of Grumpy and Evil really began the morning of our second day in Scotland as we’d arrived late the night before. Dave dropped us off in the city center after an informative drive in where he played tour guide and pointed out various landmarks and cultural references.

The main center of Edinburgh is divided into the Old Town and the New Town by the Princes Street Gardens and the train station. To the south is the Old Town, the more touristy area, which begins at Edinburgh Castle, perched high atop Castle Rock, and flows down the Royal Mile (a Scottish mile if anyone knows the difference) to Holyrood Castle, the Queen’s residence in the city. This entire area is filled with stone buildings and roads, buskers preforming acts and offering tours about the ghosts and history that cling to the streets like the perpetual grey skies and rain that greet its inhabitants, stores selling traditional wool scarves and kilts, hidden parks and tenement buildings, and the memories of a people that one guide stated “should have perish through their own stupidity centuries ago.”

Old Town was originally a one mile by one-quarter mile area that housed 60,000 people in cramped quarters. The main thoroughfares were connected by narrow passageways called “closes” or “wynds” that served as roads, shopping areas, sewage ways, and playgrounds. The closes were formed by some of the earliest (and least safe) versions of “high-rise” residential buildings, known as lands or tenements. These were typically 10 and 11 story- (sometimes up to 15 story-) buildings with 14 rooms to a floor and an entire family (between 14-16) people to a room.

The tenements were created to deal with the large amounts of denizens in the city and could be large death traps. Many of times there would be thunderous crashes heard in the middle of the night that signaled the collapse of one of these gems. Unfortunately, there is only one documented instance of someone having survived one of these lands collapsing.

In an effort to make the buildings safer, locals decided that building the top 6-10 floors out of wood would be better than the original stone that they had previously employed. The thing that builders didn’t take into account was that in a country where it rains a majority of the time, untreated wood is not very good as a building material. The wood soaked in the rains and expanded, causing the tops of the buildings to expand outwards and close in over the tops of the closes. Therefore, the people at the top of the tenements could pass sugar to their neighbors in the next building without even having to lean very far, but the people at the bottom of the tenements never saw light. Also, the wood became twice as heavy and the buildings continued to collapse. Although, the fact that Scots liked to add doors and windows wherever they felt like it and didn’t understand the purpose of support beams could have been the main fault in these tragedies.

One last tidbit about the lands and the wynds: all 14-16 people that lived in their single room apartments had to share a single pail for a restroom and general refuse pit. By law, this buckle was only allowed to be disposed of twice a day, at 7 am and at 10 pm. It was the job of the youngest resident in each apartment to drag the bucket (usually filled to the brim) across the whole of the room to the window as the clock struck and then heave it up and with a cry of “Gaurda loo” (a butchered French phrase that actually doesn’t translate into anything but is a warning to watch out and find shelter fast) dump the contents into the close below. So if you remember that the closes are the small streets where everyone gathers all day, every day, note that it is usually covered in a layer of trash and sewage that can get to shin high. Great place to have a shop or play as a child, huh?

The excrement ran downhill and collected at the Nor Loch, which was created as a defense for the city but essentially became a shit pond (which I guess in a way is a form of defense). Sometimes it would get so cold that this would freeze over and people would walk across it to get to what is currently the New Town. The pit was also used as a way to dispose of bodies, sometimes already dead and sometimes as a form of execution. I can’t think of many things worse than to being sentenced to death by drowning in a giant pond of crap after being tortured. The Scots are apparently either a very creative people or just plain cruel.

The Nor Loch was drained between 1781 and the 1830 and filled in to create The Mound. The Mound now houses many of the important buildings in the city center and has the main train station running through the center of it. One of our tour guides told us that they used bodies dug up from over-flowing graveyards to fill in The Mound and therefore it is in and of itself one of the largest human burial mounds in the world (supposedly there are over 1,000,000 bodies under it). Don’t know if this is true or not.

Em and I spent pretty much the entire first day in the Old Town. We went on a free walking tour and learned about the different kings that Scotland had over time that had progressively sadder and sadder stories. One was kidnapped for 17 years due to the Scots refusing to pay the ransom and when the king was finally returned (because the country that had him decided they didn’t wanted to feed and board him any longer), the citizens killed him because he tried to reinstate his power and they had been content for the last decade and a half without him. Another united all the people but then got bored and decided to invade England. He took 35,000 troops and encountered 9,000 Brits and still lost because he used the same battle plan that the Scots had been using for centuries and his troops forgot their canons at home, while the Brits had theirs. The king then committed the greatest sin by dying in the battle. The next king then built a giant wall around the city to protect against retaliation from the British, but used up all the city’s money during its 49 year creation and when the Brits finally remembered to invade three years after the wall’s completion, there wasn’t enough money to staff the wall with security after night fall so the British army just waited for dark and then walked into the city and conquered it without any blood spilled or resistance.

Lastly, another king was beheaded for treason against the crown (how you commit treason against your own rule, I’m not sure). The funny thing about this one is that normally when a person was executed, their possessions would become property of the crown, but since it was the king and they couldn’t do that, they gave the crown and the rule to the man that signed the death sentence for the king. That man’s family ruled for years until the son of the king wanted the throne back and challenged the son of the original inheritor, who had since passed away. Since law dictated that the only way to gain the crown back was to have a trial against the original person and prove that they were at fault for something, the death man was dug up, tried for treason, and hung. Scots are awesomely weird.

After this informative tour that covered some amazing history, but only one physical block, we went exploring through the different closes and into the various shops (there is a large amount of Salvation Army type stores here for some reason). We later went on one additional tour through Mary King’s Close, which is an underground close. It was an original living area back in the day, but was closed off and boarded over when they filled in the Nor Loch and made the train station. The area has since been turned into a trip through time type destination where an actor dresses up and tells you about Mary King and how the people of Edinburgh lived centuries ago. You get to visit actual ruins of the Old Town and learn about the different plagues that waylaid the citizens a long time ago.

Thus ended day one.

Day two had us up at the crack of dawn (5:45 am) in order to catch a 6:30 am bus to get to town around 8 am. Little did we know that nothing in the city opens until sometime between 9 and 10 am (when we had mentioned our plan to Dave the night before his only reply was “Wow, you’re getting an early start!” I think, “don’t waste your time, nothing’s open then” would have been a bit more helpful). So lacking sleep, still slightly out of whack with the time zone hopping, and looking like zombies, we wandered the streets of New Town until we found an open coffee shop and enjoyed some breakfast while waiting for the city to wake up.

New Town was created in the 18^th century to help with the population issues of the crowded Old Town. It was designed in 1766 to be a rigid, ordered grid, which fitted in well with the enlightenment ideas of rationality that were prevalent during the time as the chaos of the Old Town got to the residents. Most of the buildings were of Georgian design and created for a more comfortable environment. Now-in-days, the New Town is a premiere shopping district and many of the original buildings have been renovated or converted into posh shops and cute cafes. Em and I spent our morning wandering through this area.

In the early afternoon, we headed to Holyrood Park in order to hop on a free tour about King Arthur (possibly the same one of legend) and the archaeology and history of the place. Turns out that it’s not rain that cancels events in this city, but visits from the Queen of England. We showed up for the tour and were told by the ancient park ranger that it had been canceled due to the Queen’s Tea. Sad, but not to be deterred from out outing in the rain, we set out to hike up the hill to “Arthur’s Seat,” a towering volcanic formation that overlooks the whole of the city. When we got to the fork in the road we chose the smaller hill and hiked it. This turned out to be part of the Salisbury Crags (one of the volcanic outcroppings), but not actually Arthur’s Seat. The lovely Scottish couple that we met on the edge and we agreed that it’s the thought that counts and snapped our picture of the gorgeous view.

The couple also informed us that it might be a lovely experience to go take a tour of the Parliament building, so we did. The Scottish people of Edinburgh only decided to reintroduce the idea of a Parliament in 1996, at which time they held a competition to design a new Parliament building. The winner of the competition was a Catalan architect, Enric Miralles, who wanted to incorporate various themes of Scotland heritage and beliefs into its design. Miralles passed away four years before the completion of the building and it was up to others to interpret his designs. The end result is a building that looks like a modern version of a Gaudi (must be a Catalan thing), with atypical lines, mixed wood and concrete materials, subtle motifs and pieces with double meanings. Overall it’s definitely interesting and is one of those types of designs that you either love (as I did) or hate (it definitely causes quite a stir in Scotland).

We finished day two with a Haunted and Hallowed ghost tour. This tour was supposed to be spooky and take you through a haunted graveyard and to parts of the Old City that were underground. In some ways it did live up to its brochure as we went to a graveyard and we went to a room underground, but it wasn’t very scary and it didn’t really talk about ghosts that much. The tour guide was a young woman that would walk at a fast clip (heedless of the speed of her followers) to random spots where she would tell a story about Edinburgh or Scotland. Most of the stories were more macabre than ghostly and were different renditions of what we’d heard on the free tour we’d taken a few days beforehand. The graveyard was niffy but we didn’t spend more than five minutes there and the underground city was really only a room in the basement of some tenement building. I had been on a great ghost tour in Barcelona a few years ago and therefore had held out high hopes for this one, but it didn’t live up to the expectation. Oh well, can’t always win.

Day 3, our last in Edinburgh, was spent mainly wandering the town at a leisurely pace. Dave gave us a ride into town via the scenic route. He drove Em, Jules (a Canadian also staying at his residence), and me around the countryside surrounding West Linton. We visited a castle that’s on a random side road and is currently lived in and maintained by a family (so just the grounds around it are open to the public and not the actual castle itself), saw some sheep in the middle of the road (one of the things on Em’s check list), and stalked some long haired cattle for a photograph. It was a lovely detour that landed us in the city around noon.

As for the city, we meandered the streets of Morningside and through the central park and up into the Greyfriars area. We didn’t really have an agenda and took our time looking in stores and wandering aimlessly before settling down in a coffee shop for a bit to write our blogs.  

On a random side note, I wanted to let everyone know that since I was in Scotland and my host felt compelled to introduce us to Scottish fare, I tried Haggis. I bet everyone is now going, “but you don’t eat mammals!” So true and yet I still had haggis….David got the vegetarian version. Besides the shape and spices in it, I’m not sure it really is all that similar to real haggis, but it was really tasty (taste a bit like lentils and falafel mixed together) and was sweet of David for making.