Edinburgh, Scotland

First of all, Edinburgh is an amazing, unbelievably beautiful and unique city. Everything about it is wonderful and I would recommend it to anyone.

It originally started as a Pic encampment on Castle Hill, and there has been a fortress up here since a couple decades before CE. 

Try getting up that cliff-face!

There are some great views from the Castle too. Wow.

The rest of the city sort of cropped up around the castle. This place where I'm standing runs down all the way to the bottom of the hill, and is known as the Royal Mile.

This is a view of East Edinburgh, less touristy and more urban but no less old-timey and mysterious. 

The city is full of grand, gothic buildings that hold ordinary things like offices and shops and apartments.

There are also very important pointy buildings, like St Giles Cathedral

Or the Robert Burns monument

 Edinburgh is one of the most expensive cities to live in in the UK--and it's easy to see why!

This was the view from my (freezing cold) hostel room. Worth it!

Edinburgh 

(pronounced ed-in-bruh by locals, ed-in-burr-uh by those in the know, and edinburrow or edinburg by silly tourists)

Impressive pointy building, also known as the Scot Monument.

Within the first few hours of our Scottish adventure, we spotted this fellow on the Royal Mile wearing a kilt and playing bagpipes. Scotland's stereotypes didn't let me down! 

Edinburgh is best known for and best characterized by its narrow windy alleyways, called Closes.

Each one is different, each one comes with a name like Murderer's Close and Bloody Mary's Close and Hangman's Close.

Each one gives that feeling like you're probably going to get murdered in it if you get lost there after the sun goes down.

But that ads to the cities charm. Right?

Well, if creepy closes aren't your thing, there are plenty of graveyards to explore.

Edinburgh is famous for its darker, more occult history and is inextricably linked to monsters, murders, and bodysnatching. You can see why I like it, huh?

Many graves had to put bars or heavy stones over the recently buried to prevent one of Edinburgh's famous rash of body snatching. You heard me--body snatching.

The medical schools of the time were constantly in need of fresh corpses to dissect, and would pay a fair fine for any corpse delivered to them--no questions asked.

You can see where the issue arose. Well, two men named William Hare and William Burke decided that it would be easier for everyone if, instead of digging up and derobing a freshly dead corpse, they just got a corpse while it was still alive.

Burke and Hare would target people new to the area or looking for solitary lodgings, buy them a drink, get them nice and plastered, and ask them up to their rooms. Then they would suffocate them to death so as not to damage the body for the medical students, and sell the body to the school. 

This inn is where they would pick up their victims. 

Edinburgh isn't all death and drear of course. This is Sara enjoying her first real snowfall!

And snuggling a plague rat. Because Sara.

It was a beautiful city, even in the bitterest snap of winter, and is steeped in a rich literary and historical tradition.

The city is full of unique and unusual bars and pubs; our personal favorite being the Jekyll and Hide, where we bought Deadly Sins themed cocktails and ate dinner with a skeleton companion. I also failed to snap a photo of it, so enjoy this cool lantern draped patio instead.

This is the Writer's Museum, giving tribute to writers like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns, and many others who called Edinburgh their home. 

This is a wall of poetry outside Scottish parliament. Each different colored block is a poem by a Scottish poet. Very cool.

Also I am going to make a photography folio titled 'hobbit doors in Britain' and fill it with instances of seemingly random tiny doors. They must be for hobbits though, right? What other use could they have?

All in all Edinburgh was an amazing city, 10/10 would visit again.