Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Just a few hours after finishing clean-up operations from Thanksgiving dinner and after an all too brief slumber, I began my trek to the Scottish capital city of Edinburgh (EH-din-bur-uh). Scotland had always been high on my list of places to visit. Edinburgh held a special interest as the home of the Scottish Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, an intellectual movement that included the likes of personal intellectual curiosities David Hume, Adam Ferguson, and Adam Smith. By way of a series of flights that hopped between Madrid and London, I made it to Scotland in time to meet my friend Steve for dinner – a nice helping of haggis. Delicious! A few glasses of single malt for dessert made for heavy sleep.

As luck would have it, St. Andrew’s Day fell that weekend and more than a few blue banners with white Xs hung to commemorate Scotland’s patron saint. Saturday morning Steve and I made it to Edinburgh Castle well ahead of the crowds to find that entry was free for the day thanks to the new push on the part of Scotland’s recently devolved government to advocate a stronger sense of national pride.

From the castle, we made our way down the Royal Mile to find Adam Smith’s resting place at Canongate Cemetery and then on to the Her Majesty’s Official Residence in Scotland, the Palace at Holyroodhouse. Before lunch we were able to duck into the recently opened Scottish National Parliament (that’s Pàrlamaid na h-Alba in Gaelic, if you’re curious). One authentically-Scottish-meal-in-a-haunted-lodge later, we made to visit a few of the city’s finer purveyors of Scotch whisky – “liquor store” just doesn’t have the appropriate cultural resonance. Later in the day we managed to see a few more of the city’s main sites before meeting one of Steve’s friends for Indian food that evening.

Sunday morning we awoke early yet again to board a train across the bridge spanning the Firth of Forth, where the then snowcapped peaks of the Highlands were visible in the distance, to Inverkeithing-Burntisland-Kirkaldy and finally on to Leuchars in the County of Fife to meet Steve’s friend. From the train station, she drove us into St. Andrews in time to see the university students returning from Sunday mass in their brilliant red gowns. We ate lunch in the clubhouse overlooking the 18^th hole of the St. Andrews golf course with the strip of beach where the famous scene from Chariots of Fire was filmed in the distance and returned to Edinburgh in the afternoon.

On Monday morning we were able to walk Princes Street, Edinburgh’s main drag, reopened only the night before after months of work to complete the city’s new aboveground trolley line. Later that day, I began the journey back to Sevilla.