Edinburgh Castle

So Last Monday I finally went to Edinburgh castle, the "must see" tourist spot in Edinburgh. After spending a full four hours in there, my impression was that is was like a mix between a tall weapons museum and Disney World. It has amazing views, stories of its bloody history, and lots of canons. But it is also a bit shielded and restricted, constantly guiding the tourists in the right direction which somewhat kills my urge to explore. For me it tries to be too safe to be fun. 

So I took lots of pictures, probably to justify my £13.60 ticket, and below really is around 5% of the pictures I took. That being said, my lack of excitement is going to make this a short post. Let's get started!

First we have the entrance.

Above: The Castle

It's obvious that even on midday Monday the place is swarming with tourists. One of the nice tourists took a nice picture of me in front of the gate.

Above: The Tourist Pose

Then came the line. It wasn't roller coaster bad, but it certainly took more than twenty minutes.

Above: Arghrghhgh

Once I was inside I did the whole I-take-your-picture-you-take-mine thing. As you can see, the views from up there were phenomenal.

Above: Cold Hands Tourist Pose

Hey look, there's the Athenian half-completed building I talked about before.

Above: Top-o-Carlton Hill

As you can imagine, it was pretty daunting to try and swarm this castle from the cliff-face.

Above: More pretty views.

Once inside, there's a large spiral road that goes to the top of the castle. They used to only have staircases until they realized how heavy canons were.

Above: Canon-Carrying Road

Speaking of canons...

Above: Blammo! So Many Canons

The whole Castle, all 360 degrees of it, was covered n canons. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if there were 360 canons. At the top of the castle was this cool well though. I had that tingly "wow I'm high up" feeling looking down this well that used to provide the soldiers water. To get an idea of how deep it is, look at the small white reflection of light from the water at the bottom.

Above: The really, really deep Fore Well

Of the hundreds of pictures I took in the museum, this is the only one I felt like posting. It's this pretty sweet model of the whole castle.

And then onto the food, where I got to answer the question, do I like Scottish Carrot cake?

Above: Carrot Cake and Caramel Bar

The answer is yes, all carrot cake is moist and delicious.

Now one pretty cool thing was the ...

So every day at (you guessed it) 13:00 a gunsman fires a blank shot from a massive gun to signal the time. It's been a tradition from the days when people had to set their imprecise watches, and it still goes on to this day. Since sound has a speed, the time you heard the bang was not exactly at one o'clock. Below is a map, with every concentric circle meaning another second delayed from one o'clock due to the speed of sound. It's interesting to see how much delay there was based on your location.

Above: Time-Lag Map

By the time I made it through with the castle it was time to leave. 

Above: stairs to leave.

Satisfying my inner-tourist, I got this refrigerator magnet to give to my grandparents when I returned.

Above: Souvenir

PS. I also found a fat TARDIS for the fat doctor. Teehee.

Above: Doctor Who anyone?

Now one nice thing about going to the castle is that as a student, it also gave me access to all other castles and palaces in Scotland for the next five days. That lead to something I was VERY excited about, Linlithgow Palace, where I visited the next day. I'll be writing about that in my next post.