Edinburgh Weekend

I spent last weekend in Edinburgh, Scotland. For some reason, it reminds me a lot of Ipoh. Both cities are surrounded by hills, are about the same size, and the way that the main city centre is laid out between two parallel straight roads, just seems so quaint. The main difference, is obviously the overbearing presence of the castle.

I took a noon flight on Saturday. Ray picked me up at the airport and acted as my chauffeur and tour guide for much of the weekend. He took me on one of his standard whirlwind tours on the first day. Mainly, we visited the castle complex, which was interesting. Then, we went to an OZ pub where I had some roo meat. I actually think that it tastes quite good. It’s a little tougher than chicken and much juicier than beef.

However, by the end of the day, I was knackered. So, I went back to my hostel to sleep. I checked into a mixed dorm and got put into a room with four other girls. After getting a shower, I quickly fell asleep but was disturbed many times by people chatting. Two girls in my room came back late and kept whispering away for an awful long time. But there were noisier kids in other rooms. At one point, somebody lost their cool and shouted at the people making the noise, and it worked.

The next day, was my own free day as Ray had to go help prepare and set up things for a wedding. And seeing that the weather forecast said rain, I decided to go visit some museums. The National Museum is really quite good. It provided the history of Scotland, from the time they were a bunch of mixed tribes all over, came together as Scots and got unified with England. Now, I can understand why there is so much talk of devolution. The Scots were never conquered and so, still retain all their pride as an independent nation.

Then, I met up with Ray and some of his friends from church. After dinner, we went off Musselburgh, which is outside Edinburgh, for some really good ice cream. The name of the place is S. Luca and it has been selling fresh ice cream for more than a century. There was a long queue outside when we arrived but service was quick. Then, we went to various beaches at Portobello till it was quite late.

After sending his friends back, we went off for some fish and chips where Ray introduced me to the Edinburgh sauce, which had an interesting taste. We then had some drinks at the pub and chatted for a bit about the frustrations of writing up a thesis. As we had a wedding to attend the next day, I went back to my room, and slept. It was a quiet night and I slept nicely till morning.

I’ll talk about the wedding in another entry, after I have post-processed the photographs. I got some really good ones and I might make a photo book out of it, for the bride. Post processing may take a while though, as I have to work on my thesis. And post-processing wedding photos can be quite a chore, as I need to make the photos exude love and happiness. Hopefully, it’ll be easy in this case.

If you look at the small gallery of photos I have on Edinburgh, you will see three that look a bit odd. These are more experiments with HDR photography. I really need to figure out a way to get rid of the noise in the sky. I particularly like the one of St Mary’s Cathedral and the Castle.