On the Fringe (Edinburgh)

Nice place to stay...

When we first planned to spend a few days in Edinburgh we gave no thought to the timing of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.  However, as coincidences have it, it just happened to be on while we were there.  Another fortunate coincidence was the tail end of the Jazz and Blues festival at the same time.
As luck would have it, with said coincidences, our time in Edinburgh differed from our initial thoughts.  We didn't end up doing all the standard tourist sites...the Castle for instance.  We spent our 2 days between comedy, jazz and whisky; hard life we know...to gain some sympathy back, it did rain a little and there were more sheeple milling around than we could poke a stick at...and believe me I wish we'd had a stick on various occasions.  For some quiet and solitude (that's all...really) we discovered the bar in the basement of a place called "The Scotch Whisky Experience".  They have around 300 whiskies to taste, most of which you could then purchase upstairs in their bottleshop.  Some friends (they'll know who they are) have twice tried to visit the castle but haven't gotten any further than this bar and we can now understand why...and no, it's not why we didn't get the castle...we didn't have really enough time...not due to the aforementioned bar...really.  This place also does a tour of a distillery which we also didn't have time to do but we did believe we had learned enough at the comedy show we'd been to on a previous night called "Whisky: an idiots guide", very funny.  We followed that up with a more civilised Jazz Sextet (Laura MacDonald Sextet) with a superb trumpeter and tenor sax player.  The only thing on the standard tourist list we did do was climb Arthur's Seat (well, mostly)...if there's a hill we always seem to have to climb it. Great views over the city but like all of Edinburgh during the festival, full of people.  We also managed to eat a bit of decent food.

...herds of sheeple on the Royal Mile

We've been surprised by our time in England and Scotland, just how good the food is, though admittedly we didn't really eat the standard fare much of the time.  On our first night in Edinburgh we went to the Michelin star restaurant "The Kitchin".  We had the Chef's Land and Sea Surprise, which wasn't a surprise as they told us what it was  ;-) .  There are a few ideas we'd like to try cooking when we get home, though not all would be easily accessed ingredients.  Our favourite was the boned and rolled pig's head, served with roasted tail of langoustine (like a hard shell prawn) with a crispy pig's ear salad...anyone want to come round for dinner when we get home? We also ate some very unScottish Turkish food and some excellent spicy Thai...all the flavours we won't get when we head back to France.

Great food: rolled pig's head, crispy pig's ear and langoustine

We can also highly recommend our accommodation where our host, Eric, provides stylish accommodation in his spacious apartment filled (literally) with art over every wall, and most of the flat surfaces. Super comfortable (great bed, footrests, etc) near enough to the old town, and a very congenial host.