We went to Edinburgh this weekend for the Edinburgh Tattoo, which we’ve wanted to visit for several years (roughly since we moved to England, in fact) but never gotten around to. And since we were going anyway, we took some time to see Edinburgh itself too, as well as some of the events offered by the Edinburgh Fringe.

The tattoo was more or less – but not quite – as I had expected. The pipes and drums and marching were there, although I had expected more pipe music and less of other music. And I definitely hadn’t expected the more exotic parts of the programme, which this year included a children’s choir from Uganda and singers and dancers from Chile and Easter Island. However the pipe music was great, and the marching impressive, with a Swiss group of army drummers outclassing everybody else in terms of pure technical excellence.

When we checked the weather report the day before leaving, the forecast was for three days of unbroken “light rain”. It didn’t turn out quite that bad, but the first day was quite wet. Luckily the rain stopped before the Tattoo (which takes place outdoors, in the courtyard in front of Edinburgh Castle, and has no roofing) and while we got some rain after that, it stopped far from what the weather forecast had led me to expect.

The day before we left I took a quick look around to see what else one could do and see in Edinburgh, apart from just walking around, and realised that the Edinburgh Festivals were going on. (That’s Festivals in plural: I knew about the main festival and the Fringe, but it’s grown far beyond that now. All of central Edinburgh was taking part in some festival or other.) Read some reviews, did some Googling, and booked tickets to two pretty randomly chosen shows.

The first one was Sclavi: Song of an Emigrant – a piece of physical theatre / dance descibed as “gushing torrent of polyphonic songs punctuated by raw physicality”. That sounded sufficiently weird to be interesting, and indeed it was. There seemed to be a story there, but most of it was completely incomprehensible because it was in Czech – which didn’t really matter, because the singing was wonderful and the dancing beautiful. (Review by The Guardian.)

The second one was Jim Henson’s Puppet Improv: puppet improvisation theatre. Found by pure luck through The Edinburgh blog, this turned out to be even more hilariously funny than I expected. (Jim Henson is the guy behind the Muppets.) They had a daytime child-friendly version, but the ““adults only” label for evening show that we saw was definitely appropriate! Improvisation theatre doesn’t really lend itself to written descriptions… The show contained everything from the inevitable George Bush jokes to speed-dating aliens. Absolutely the highlight of the weekend!

We also popped in for a quick visit to the National Museum of Scotland. This was a bit of a disappointment: beautiful things in a beautiful building, but presented without any coherent order or story, so that we felt confused and lost rather than informed or enlightened.

Edinburgh is grayish-brown

The rest of the weekend was spent simply walking around and up and down Edinburgh. Edinburgh is a very pedestrian-friendly city and much more pleasant to walk around than London – or rather, a much larger proportion of it is pleasant for walking than in London. It looked like a nice town to live in, too. One thing that struck me was the uniformity of colour: 90% of all buildings in central Edinburgh were made of the same dark gray stone, which felt rather oppressive, especially in rainy weather.

The controversial parliament buildings were even uglier than I had expected, looking like a concrete bunker with bars in front of all windows. The only good views I’ve seen of it are from above (an angle from which few people will see it) although we were told that it looks better on the inside.

Scottish Parliament

We concluded the weekend with a nice climb to the top of Arthur’s Seat, which is a little (250m) extinct volcano about a mile east of the city centre: a pleasant piece of highland with excellent views of the city. (The photos here are not from the hill but from the Walter Scott monument in the middle of the city.)