It’s been a while, but it’s been a busy week. Things were chaotic while everyone was in Basel which was followed up with a weekend trip to Amsterdam (plus a surprise A Team reunion). Now everyone is on their way home and I am hanging out waiting for my gate to be called for my trip back home to Basel.

But, let’s get back to Edinburgh. Did I mention that I loved Edinburgh? We really didn’t venture too far from the Royal Mile, but the city was absolutely lovely. We’re going to do a two-parter again. I think I could have done everything in one post if I wanted to, but I’m posting from my phone and I don’t trust myself to not mess something up if I do it all in one post.

I met everyone in Edinburgh after a very early morning series of flights. I didn’t get to Edinburgh until late morning and ended up getting off the tram several stops early due the fact that I didn’t listen to Chris’s very clear instructions. It was fine, though, just meant that I got to walk and take in some of Edinburgh. I met with Chris and Mia on the street, who then got us back to the apartment we were staying at. After all was said and done, we didn’t leave the apartment again until 1, which meant that we had a short day in terms of daylight.

Our first stop was (obviously) lunch. We were going to find a place to sit down and eat but then my hipster Spidey senses went off and we saw a line of people going out the door for a restaurant. We did the one thing we had to do and stood in line for some pulled pork. The restaurant, Oink, is pretty straightforward. They do pulled pork sandwiches that you can get in different sizes. You can get a topping and a sauce and the crunchy skin parts. I thought the food was good, but this also led to what ended up being a trip-long debate on the appropriate meat-bread ratio of a sandwich. Chris and I are on team more meat, which is why we enjoyed our sandwich. Apparently there are others who are not on that team and those people are wrong.

From there, we walked down Victoria Street to the Grassmarket area, where we found an open air market. There was some shopping and more food (although we didn’t eat the macarons we got until later).

We then went to the nearby Greyfriar’s Kirkyard. We did walk around the graveyard a little, but we went to see Greyfriar’s Bobby because that was the one thing I absolutely had to see while I was there.

Bobby was a small dog who was adopted by one of the night guards of the kirkyard (John Gray). He and Bobby were inseparable for two years until Gray’s death. Bobby continued to go to the kirkyard to stick by Gray’s grave and to do the night rounds every day. At first, they kept kicking him out, but he eventually became a regular fixture and stayed there until his death 14 years later. The story tugs at every dog lovers heart and it doesn’t help that he looked like Bruce. We somehow ended up at Bobby’s statue almost every day of our trip and left him sticks at his grave on our last visit there.

There are more interesting things to see at the kirkyard, though. For Harry Potter fans, you can see a number of names you can recognize from the books, including Thomas Riddle, a Moody and a McGonagal. We spent about a minute trying to find those graves, but ended up walking around.

Speaking of Harry Potter, though, we followed up Greyfriar’s Kirkyard with a trip to one of the many geek culture stores in town. We didn’t spent too much time in it because it was essentially ThinkGeek the store, but I definitely came close to buying an ugly Christmas sweater.

We shifted to the Royal Mile and made our way down High Street to Holyrood Palace, stopping along the way at various touristy shops in search of “SFC plaid.” We also got some incredible fudge.

At Holyrood Palace, we debated whether we had enough time to do Arthur’s Seat. The hike up didn’t look bad until we saw how small the people at the top were. There wasn’t much light left in the day, so we decided to save it for another time and ultimately didn’t do it at all due to time and not having the right shoes for that sort of a walk. Next time.

We walked back to up Royal Mile with the intention of making it all the way up to Edinburgh Castle. We didn’t make it to the castle. Instead, we stopped along some small exhibit and then decided to take a break at the apartment for a while. In retrospect, we probably would have gone up to the castle if we knew how close the apartment was. Oh well.

After a short break, we made our way to the Ediburgh Christmas Market to officially kick off the Christmas market tour of Europe. We got our hot toddies and mulled wine and walked around the market a while. We even split a sausage and some garlic mushrooms for a Garbagnati signature pre-dinner snack. I opted out of the mushrooms and almost got us raclette, before deciding the line was too long for something I could get back in Basel. Also, we were just about to eat dinner.

We then had dinner at the Greyfriar’s Bobby pub (told you we saw a lot of Bobby), where we tried haggis (actually pretty good) and ate meat pies.

On our second night, Chris, Mia, and I did an Edinburgh ghost tour after our Highlands tour (and after almost eating at a Frankenstein themed pub because we could). Edinburgh seemed like a good city for ghost stories and we felt like we’d be able to find a good ghost/creepy history tour (rather than a ghost hunting tour, which are almost always awful).

We went with the City Explorers tour, which was fun. I liked our guide Kenny. He also put Chris’s acting chops to the test when he needed someone to help demonstrate what the public forms of punishment looked like. I could have done with less late night time in a graveyard but that’s just me.

Fortunately, the tour didn’t end too far from where we were staying so we grabbed a famous deep fried Mars bar (meh), walked up a surprisingly empty Victoria Street (inspiration for Diagon Alley) and called it a night.

This is a good stopping point and my flight is almost boarding, so we will pick up later with the rest of our stay.