After being in Scotland for roughly 5 months, we finally made it to our neighboring city, Edinburgh. When you mention Scotland to someone, I usually find that they recognize the name Edinburgh before Glasgow, mostly because of it's more popular castles and history (as well as the fact that it's the capital of Scotland). We hopped on a train in the mid-morning and headed on the 50-ish minute ride to the center of Edinburgh. The train station is so centrally located, we were able to hop off and immediately walk around some pretty cool sights.
We then walked to the what's called "The Holy Mile", which is a long stretch of road that makes up central, downtown Edinburgh and leads up to Edinburgh Castle. It's filled with churches and shops and all sorts of cool things! We walked up to the castle via this road, stopping occasionally for pics, to see street performers, and peek into shop windows.
The castle is beautiful (although, I'm pretty sure I like Stirling Castle better). It's filled with mostly war/military museums, and even has a room with the last known Royal Scottish Crown Jewels! They wouldn't let us take pictures of the crown jewels, but I was able to snap some shots of their bronze look-a-likes. There's a giant sword, a crown, and a scepter. We walked around the castle for a few hours, even catching lunch at their cafe (which was surprisingly delicious) before heading back down the Holy Mile to walk around town a bit more.
We ended up finding a few really cool stores, like a comic books store full of comics and pop dolls, and a pop culture store (I think it was called Galaxy?) filled with a bunch of Harry Potter, Marvel, DC, and Star Wars stuff! As silly as it sounds, it was probably my favorite part of the day. I bought a Slytherin beanie and some Harry Potter stickers for my laptop.
After perusing a few more shops we decided to head back up the Holy Mile to a really popular illusion museum near the castle, called Camera Obscura & World of Illusions. We also snapped some pics of the churches on the way back up, and even went into one with some really cool stained glass. Camera Obscura was pretty crazy, containing roughly 7 floors of interactive illusion exhibits. I got quite a bit of it on video, so you'll see some of it in the video at the end of this post. At the top of Obscura I got a really great picture of Edinburgh Castle at sunset!
After having some fun with the illusions, we walked back down into town for some dinner at a Japanese joint and grabbed a milkshake from a nearby shop before heading back to the train station to head home. All-in-all, Edinburgh was pretty awesome! I'm sure we only scratched the surface of things to do, so we'll try and go back again soon!