Edinburgh is a very beautiful city. It feels more open and big than Glasgow, though it may not be. The roads are bigger, and there are more things to see. Not saying it’s “better” than Glasgow, but overall it just feels more like a big city.
Edinburgh Castle
I saved the pdf file of the ticket on my phone, which I bought online, costing me ￡18. The website said that as some part was not opened, and the price was reduced accordingly.
The castle itself does not have a lot to show actually. You just wander around the structure, take some photos of the city in bird-eye view, walk into some prisons, and that’s it.
The things that you spend most of your time on are the display rooms. Almost every building is occupied by a small museum, each with a different focus.
The little museums are pretty well made, with very informative and polished displays. There’s one for the history of the placement of Scotland in the British empire in terms of war, one for the dragoon guards (heavy calvary regiment), one for the prisoners, one for the ownership fight of the castle between the Scots and the English, and so on and so forth.
This is obviously a pretty smart way to use these castle buildings, but at the same time, visitors cannot wander around in these structures in their original flavor, which is a bit of shame.
Overall a recommended visit. I spent like 4 hours including lunch at a nice cafe inside.
National Museum of Scotland
A very unfocused and unpolished museum.
The museum is divided into several parts with different focuses. The nature part feels like a normal museum the most. The other parts, however, are pretty crappy. It’s like a huge house with some unimportant meaningless displays throwing into it with minimal planning and decoration. If you give me a blind test, I would have guessed it’s a museum in a random third world country.
Sure it’s free, but so is Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, which is much more polished than this museum.
Holyrood Park
I left the museum in disappointment in less than an hour. Not having any other thing planned, I just walked towards the massive park shown on Google Maps.
Surprisingly, the park is a huge rock! I entered the park from a small path, chose the right path at the 1st fork, and then a huge valley full of low grass was there. I was not expecting something like that at all.
There’s a bunch of people walking and playing with their dogs. In the end of the long road of the wilderness, there’s another fork. You can leave the park from there, or head to the summit area and Arthur’s seat, the peak of the park, also an extinct volcano.
The summit area is nothing but short grass and a huge fog.
It was actually quite hard to find the path at times because under the huge fog, everywhere looks the same. Sometimes I would be wandering on the grass field and then pick up the correct path with the help of Google Map.
I climbed up to Arthur’s seat area through a semi-hidden path, and then got down from the main path, only to find out that I was back to the same grass field. I had no idea how to get to the other side, so I just headed back.
It’s like 陽明山 but less than 1km from the city center. I would probably frequent it if I live there.
Transportation
The main public transportation here is bus. There’s also tram in the city center, but only 1 or 2 lines I think.
The bus charges at a flat rate, so it’s not economical to travel within the city center by bus. Actually, even if I don’t care about money, it can still be hard to find a bus stop at times.
To get back to my hotel in the suburb from Holyrood Park, I had to walk like 2 miles to the bus stop, which was not a big deal … except it was, considering I’d already been walking for 3 hours straight with significant elevation beforehand.
Coming from Taiwan, it’s really hard for me to imagine not having a bike or a scooter for a short-yet-not-so-short distance transportation. Taipei is one ugly smelly shithole, but at least going around the city is super easy, barely an inconvenience.