Category Archives: Tourism
Lothian Road had a port?!
I did not know until last week that Lothian Road, right where the Odeon Cinema now resides, was once home to a port (Hopetoun), this the start/end of the Edinburgh and Glasgow Union Canal. Nor was I aware that Burke and Hare were among the navvies who built the waterway. Cracking article here in The Scotsman: https://www.scotsman.com/heritage/when-passenger-boats-could-dock-at-lothian-road-in-edinburgh-s-city-centre-1-5036076
A 13-hour journey quickly supplanted by the railway, imagine being sat on a barge for that long without the internet.
P.S. No midgets were harmed in the taking of that photograph.
Further reading:
https://canmore.org.uk/site/52712/edinburgh-port-hopetoun-union-canal-basin
Fountainbridge, Edinburgh.
Famous for being the birthplace of Sir Sean Connery, and that’s about it as far as historical significance goes. The area has gone through such transformations over the past decade or so it’s unrecognisable from the Noughties. The pub ‘The Fountain’, for example, was in recent times popularly compared to Vietnam in the age of Presidents Johnson and Nixon; today it is thoroughly hipster and you need to venture elsewhere to witness a glassing.
Tragedy.
Inverurie getaway.
Secluded Aberdeenshire bantz this late January, which was another excuse to sit in Guinness pants and watch a batch of movies with a side order of multiple episodes of The Chase, intermittently knocking back ersatz Baileys sourced from Lidl. Every cottage/lodge on my ‘adventures’ up north I ascribe the moniker ‘The Palace’, and this was another plush compound I’d gladly return to.
Doing nothing in the middle of nowhere is a treasured pastime of mine; I’ll never understand bungee jumping or snorkelling or any of that stuff. The perfect trip I would define as sitting on my arse and not having to smile through silly activities, so this jaunt ticked all the boxes. I was even mildly active in my own limited way on this occasion, conducting daily jogs to ’90s trance and ‘conversing’ with some local sheep.
I said to myself, “It must be awful to be a sheep.” But then I concluded they don’t know they are sheep and this is a universal metaphor. It was my profound thought of the expedition. Other highlights include smoking a Cuban cigar, alphabetising by title the dwelling’s book collection, snapping a rainbow, and operating binoculars for the first time in two decades. I spotted a bird which wasn’t a pigeon or a seagull but I don’t know what it was.
A good time was had.
New Year’s adventures in Germany – Flughafen München-Bad Bergzabern-Straubing-Flughafen München.
Autobahn.
I’ve not been in a car this much ever, Munich Airport to Bad Bergzabern to Straubing to Munich Airport, a goodbye to the 2010s in a most chilly and mostly plastered Deutschland, with a soundtrack of the decade’s tackiest pop hits.
Bad Bergzabern in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate took in the delights of this wooden bad boy, which I presume was an observation tower to view troop movements as its vistas overlook the border with France. I climbed up the fucker and left a wee mention at the top, carving ‘Nuuuuu’ into the floor with a pocket knife. I am very proud of that. One day some random will scratch their head at the … ‘word’ and then hit Google. A lovely wee town, it even had a heaving club which was visited just after midnight, where locals sparked up inside. Flashbacks kicked in to a pre-2006 Edinburgh when you could smoke a cigar and not get chased off the premises by their interior ministry.
Midnight fireworks.
Straubing – not a lot happened in Straubing. I did my usual morning run/descent into death followed by a supermarket jaunt, and rounded off proceedings by watching Dragons’ Den clips for three hours off a tablet, contemplating the decade ahead and hoping that one day folk in airports will just fucking learn how to distinguish between the arrivals and departures screens (this also applies to the denizens of train stations).
Freezing run action in this park.
Goodies.
Other delicacies included the outrageous wearing of Crocs and the sighting of that ‘big pile of shit’ from Jurassic Park (1993).
All in all, quite the splendid wee trip. A civilised affair (for once).
St. Andrews ‘bantz’.
I’d never been here before until this weekend yet have lived in Scotland (on and off) for more than two decades. Apparently they play golf in this bubble and some ‘Royals’ got into the local university despite possessing mediocre academic qualifications; is this what they call ‘privilege’? I once lived in student digs with a stripper from Wigan and we had a spare room; this geeky fucker from St. Andrews turned up for a flat viewing. The pole dancer looked at him and within four seconds concluded he was a cretin. He didn’t get the spare room. That’s most likely the reason I didn’t visit until now.
Anyway, it was a nice wee place. Nothing special. Nothing bad. Just politely bland. It reminded me of Last of the Summer Wine but without Compo and Nora Batty. I was fucking raging at the £15 train fare back to Edinburgh. I once purchased a flight to Stockholm for £2.
Welcome to Britain (it’s fucked).
The Edinburgh Christmas Market is back with a vengeance.
This Xmas market is an addiction. I don’t enjoy a single second meandering about its gruesome stalls, yet I continue to do so every year as it gets worse and worse in its lumbering pointlessness. The only parallel I can think of is watching Manchester United play football these days.
One day this is going to end. Best to savour it while it’s here.
Further reading:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-50446733
Six days in Barcelona.
Barcelona was fine. I couldn’t be bothered seeing Las Ramblas or the Camp Nou, preferring the boulevards of Gràcia and its surfeit of supermarkets and bars – the district didn’t strike me as a ‘tourist trap’ even though it might have been. Most of my time was spent either there or ‘exploring’ the metro system. I am a geek for anything ‘Trainy McTrainface’, especially of the underground variety, so this pursuit I found most arresting.
The holiday apartment building, however, was the noisiest place; someone inhabiting a room on the floor above would turn on the shower and subsequently the building would shudder. I barely got a wink of sleep because of the noise. In addition to this din, renovations were being done all day. I almost expected a wrecking ball to crash through our living room. Absolute fucking racket.
Trip highlight – a midget sold me a cheap bunnet.
Trip lowlight – Ryanair at Barcelona-El Prat charging me €25 for a too-big bag, even though it could clearly fit in the overhead locker. I’ve been on almost 50 flights with that bag (I call it the ‘Big Bag’), and this is the first time it’s been picked out in the queue.
Fuming.
P.S. Here is Homer and Marge Simpson in Gràcia.
Edinburgh’s own winter wonderland.
Meadowbank/Abbeyhill is drab and dreary for much of the year, and during the summer months approximates ‘peak chav’ when they all crawl out of the woodwork and luxuriate in the sweltering heat.
Winter on The Ranch is tolerable, however. The season has a calming effect on the locals as ‘Cloud City’ acts as the temporary backdrop.
Environmental determinism is real.
Edinburgh congestion is torture.
Leith Street purgatory.
The traffic in Edinburgh is a sadistic abomination, something that would drive Michael Douglas out his car à la Falling Down (1993). Every fucking day there is a jam of jams, caused and compounded by traffic lights with a five-second gap between green and red, omniscient roadworks, never-ending tram extensions, a 20 mph speed limit, tourist questions to the bus driver as if he were a tourist information office, and Edinburgh’s much-vaunted position as the prime location for filming chav fodder (Fast & Furious, Avengers) in, which brings about all manner of diversions. The city is a conurbation of the slow.
Whose doing is this? I don’t know but I can tell you that Edinburgh Council are, in the words of John McEnroe, “The absolute pits of the world.” So I blame them whether it’s their fault or not.
Further reading:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-35812226
https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17682291.edinburgh-named-as-worst-uk-city-for-traffic-jams/
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 