The Road Goes Ever On

Fringe Scenes, 1

I couldn't hope to write anything definitive about the Fringe. A previous post conveys something of its scale, and the Fringe's own media release at the close of the 2019 edition sums up both the numbers and qualities. Obviously, we couldn't take pix inside the many musical, dramatic, and other events we attended. So I'll just post some of the outside shots and some of the posters, in part to comment on shows we saw and in part to further convey the scale of the thing.

A street performance, here at The Mound, outside the nation gallery of art

Just about every venue in the central city is involved in the effort

One is apt to see pretty much anything

Parody is big, as is satire

One venue was the Johnny Walker House; alas, no free samples

Ticket office at just one of the venues

Many shows of interest were sold out before we could get
tickets

HP is still fair game in the parody business

Note show posters outside Frankenstein's

One of the very best we saw was this one-woman show,
Clementine Churchill's reminiscences of her long marriage to
Winston

In the Fringe office, a wall of past-edition covers of the Fringe guide...this
year 450 pages; stacks of them at lower right

Jazzed-up piping

Typical venue...and line to get in...churches very much providing venue space

Aforementioned...all kinds of peripheral events

Even major cultural institutions getting into the act(s)

Another of the shows we very much liked was The Crown Dual, a parody of
The Crown (first season), featuring this superbly talented duo

My Land was a Ukrainean modern dance/juggling/contortionist show Vicki much
liked

Edinburgh Scenes, 2

More not exactly random scenes from our time in Edinburgh...

Not your classic, greasy fish and chips joint, but certainly the best I had on this
campaign in the UK of GB

The Royal Mile can approach gridlock in August with street acts going on every
hundred meters or so

One wonders what David Hume would have made of the melee?

More proper view of a favorite philosopher; one wonders
what he would have made of being dressed up as a classical
Greek

We had a couple lousy meals, but some great ones too; if you're in Edinburgh and
feeling homesick for Parisian fare, visit Chez Jules in New Town; bistro fare as
good as it gets outside of France, and very affordable too; also very popular

Skyline

The Scotch Whiskey Experience: skip the experience and head for the retail store,
where you'll find the best selection and prices for single malts in town

Another Royal Mile scene (royal because it runs between the
two royal castles, Edinburgh and Holyrood)

The Tartan Weaving Mill, best selection/prices if you want
to dress Scottish; evidently many Asians do...

Very weird pop-up on a church building...

Another Royal Mile scene

Pipers generally out in force, adding to the mix; some very
good, some just getting paid to practice....

Cathedral not visited

I discovered Cadenhead's way back in 1989 and have always made the pilgrimage
to the store on Canongate; if you want to know what scotch really tastes like,
straight from the cask, not blended, not watered-down, not colorized, etc., visit
Cadenhead's, Scotland's original bottler; I treated myself to a small bottle of the
1842 line Islay; at 59.7% ABV you really have to cut it; but the best Islay ever

Huge old building near the train station

"Mr. Stanley, I presume?"

New Town shopping

Visits Scotland once and gets a landmark monument...

Edinburgh Scenes, 1

We were in Edinburgh August 2-13, at a nice one bedroom apartment in Stockbridge, along the river Leith, a little less than a mile from the center of the action, the Royal Mile and environs. Several of the venues we got to were in New Town, even closer. The apartment--I'll find a photo eventually--was well-located for us, quiet, secure, and within walking distance of everything we needed. Expensive, yet Spartan, but pretty much what we were hoping for when Vicki booked it through AirB&B months ago. We were pleased. It was our fourth and longest visit to Edinburgh, which most of the time seems a pretty staid place, but which in August goes fairly wild and crazy because of the thousands (yes, thousands) of events associated with the Edinburgh Festival (many festivals) and the Fringe, the wilder collection of events that evolved over the long course of the the Festival. The Fringe, so it seems to me, now dwarfs the Festival. Be that as it may, we were in Edinburgh mostly for the Fringe, but also the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, and then also for the botanical gardens, the art and history museums, some shopping for favorite Scottish products (both liquid and solid), and not least, the electricity when 3 million visitors descend upon a place with mostly art and intellectual expression on their minds. So it's going to take several, no, many posts to convey what I can and also what I want to remember. I've done more conventional posts on visits to Edinburgh, in 2009 and in 2013, in August of those years, easily found via the search box or the blog archive to the right.

Just walking around is part of the fun, here in New Town, an Art Nuvo edifice

Central Edinburgh is mostly gray Georgian or neo-Gothic, so it's interesting to find
something really different

Looking down Princes Street, New Town, the Walter Scott Monument, etc.;
how many major cities feature an author for their major landmark? It's a Festival
city, to be sure, but also literary city, home to still the largest of book festivals