Malika called me on her lunch break a couple of weeks ago and said, “Hey, we should book our flights to Sicily now.”
I’m not much of a beach person. When I travel, I prefer to visit new cities and wander their streets — really get a feel for the place. But living in Europe feels like that all the time, and a couple of days drinking neon-colored cocktails and reading books underneath an umbrella sounded like a dream.
“Let’s do it,” I said, and opened my browser. I already had a tab open to CNN and it automatically refreshed. The headline read: Deadly Mediterranean Heatwave. I clicked on it, skimmed, and said, “So, about that…”
It was already hot in Vienna — in the 90s every day for more than a week. We have air conditioning in our bedrooms and living room, but our hallways and landings get warm, and in a city with very little air conditioning, even running simple errands becomes a chore. I was now reading an article about forecasted temperatures of 115 or higher in Sicily.
We both opened up new tabs and started looking for a new destination — north. I found a decent flight to Edinburgh and opened the weather app.
“It’s supposed to be, like, 60 in Edinburgh,” I said.
“Perfect,” she said — and booked the flight.
Day One
We were awake by 3:30 AM and in a cab to the airport an hour later. One interesting thing about living abroad is the passport counter. If we forget to hand over our Austrian residency cards at the same time as our passport, they start flipping through the pages in search of an entry stamp. It feels a little like living in the cracks between two countries.
We had a short flight to Munich, followed by a two-hour flight to Edinburgh. Because the plane was full and we’d booked the cheapest ticket possible, we were both assigned middle seats — seven rows apart. I waved at the back of Malika’s head from row 19, opened my Kindle, and read a book.
After dropping off our luggage at the hotel, we hit up an outdoor food festival. The Fringe festival starts next week—that is, to say, this week—and the streets are lined with posters and advertisements. (Fun fact: after the Olympics and the World Cup, the Fringe festival is the largest ticketed cultural event in the world. Millions of tourists will descend on this city of 500,000 for the month of August.) We ordered a couple of items from the food stalls and I went to the beer tent.
“Hey, do you have anything local?” I asked the guy.
He laughed and said, “No, not here — but go to that black tent at the other end of the park. They have good beer. Just don’t tell anyone I said so.”
Afterward, we went to Blackwell’s, one of several bookshops on our list, then to Greyfriar’s Kirkyard, a ghoulish cemetery with a bunch of famous names if you’re into a certain wizard-themed fantasy series: Tom Riddle; McGonagall; Scrimgeour.
It began to rain the kind of rain you expect in Scotland — fine yet driving, a gray sky overhead with a blue sky blowing in from the west. We did some window-shopping, then popped into a coffeeshop to dry off. One of our favorite things to do when we travel is write short-short stories (flash fiction). We call them seven minute stories and have written them in cities and countries all over the world. We pick a prompt, set a timer for seven minutes, and scribble one-draft story in our notebooks. When we finish, we read them to each other.
Here’s “Rain,” by me, written in Edinburgh, Scotland on July 27, 2023:
She walks home from the train, her hair twisted in a braid and wet with rain. The sky is three shades of gray. A light mist, too fine for an umbrella, hangs suspended in the thick air.
She brushes the tears from her cheeks, avoiding eye contact with the businessmen darting flat-footed across oncoming traffic. She’s been out all night and bobs and weaves between tourists dragging huge suitcases across wet cobblestone. A man plays violin for spare change. Another begs silently for the same.
She’s three streets from home, three streets from her own cold bed. The exhaustion is as layered as the dense clouds overhead. She feels it deep in her bones, closer to the surface — in her heart — and in the rain that drips from her hair. She clings to it.
Some days, it’s all she has.
Day Two
We’ve never done one of those “hop on, hop off” bus tours in any city. To be honest, I’m a little proud of that fact. I eschew the touristy things when I can. But we had big plans — tall plans! — for our second day, and because Edinburgh doesn’t have a subway system, we found that one of the bus tours took you around the city, and we could use it as a form of public transportation.
We sat in the open rooftop section. The sky was blue, the air 60 degrees. If the weather in Scotland feels like how you imagine it, the Edinburgh cityscape looks like how you imagine it. It’s a city of old brickwork and cobblestone, a castle that emerges from a cliffside, cathedrals piercing the clouds above. Buskers play bagpipes like you’re in an endless funeral procession.
That may all sound depressing, but I totally dug it.
We took the bus to another bookstore, where we loaded up on so many items we had to buy a canvas tote to carry them all. When you don’t live in an English-speaking country, you stock up on books where you can. #SorryNotSorry
From there, we went to a food hall for lunch. We split an amazing Sri Lankan dish. (One of our all-time favorite meals was at a pop-up Sri Lankan restaurant in D.C.) I got a coffee for the road and we were off — again.
Arthur’s Seat, a dormant volcano that was last active 340 million years ago, sits some 900 feet above Edinburgh. I’ve never been much of a hiker, and I’ve never been much of a climber, but we took the walk slowly, pausing whenever we needed to pause, and after about half the climb I realized: Hey, all this walking in Vienna and cycling along the Danube is doing your legs good!
The last third of the climb was something of a scramble over volcanic rock, and because Malika was (rightfully) worried about her knee, she stayed back while I went for the summit. This isn’t something I’d normally do, but I totally get the sense of accomplishment that people feel when they’ve climbed to the top of something and look down at how far they’ve come. #MetaphorAlert
We took it easy going down — listening to a few tunes from The Lord of the Rings because…of course. When we made it back to the park below, we said, “Hey, so…dinner?”
And that’s when we remembered that the food festival was right where we’d left it the day before.
Day Three
In the morning, Malika took the bus to the portrait gallery and I settled in at a nearby coffeeshop with an iced Americano and a pastry to write for awhile. I put in a few pages on the novel and read outside for awhile, then walked to a square near the gallery and met up with Malika.
We went to a French restaurant she’d read about online — they serve a set lunch menu and it’s apparently notoriously tough to get a table. We walked in, asked about a table for two, and…got the last one. Travel karma is a good thing.
We split a salad and side of bread and both had the steak frites with pepper sauce. Afterward, we bought shortbread cookies to replace the shortbread cookies we’d bought the day before and eaten — they’re apparently Scotland’s thing — and climbed the hill to the castle. We didn’t have tickets and they were sold out for the day, but we did see the following along the way: a guy dressed like an extra in Braveheart, a magician, and someone showing off a couple of owls and a raven.
In the evening, we dropped into a tiny pub — the sort that seats a maximum of twenty people — and listened to a couple of musicians play guitar as we enjoyed a drink. We grabbed dinner, did some more wandering, and collapsed into bed.
Day Four
Because of an early flight, we headed straight to the airport after breakfast at the hotel. However!
We had a four-hour-long layover in Zurich — that, due to a delay, stretched to over five hours — so after we landed we caught a train to the city center and walked around, snapped some photos, and grabbed lunch.
Zurich — the little bit I saw — feels a lot like Vienna. I’m excited for a proper Switzerland trip in the near future, but it was nice getting out of the airport and having a look around!
When we landed in Vienna, we took the train home — or, most of the way home. Malika peeled off to grab a few things from the grocery store in the train station and I continued on to pick up Abra from her dogsitter. Once home, we all curled up onto the couch together, and, if we had our way, might still be there.
Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed your Substack tour of Edinburgh!
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Sneak into the castle. They can't take your freedom.