Edinburgh – (Re)Starting with a Bang

It’s been three years since I started this blog, and almost as long since I’ve updated it, too. I like to think that I’ve stayed pretty busy in the interim. I’ve graduated from the University of St Andrews, with a degree in International Relations, and hopefully better writing skills. I’ve moved to Vail, Colorado for a summer internship, and worked at a waffle house and at horse races. I’ve lived in a haunted flat and wrote a 50-page dissertation on rap music. And I’ve assembled quite an eclectic group of family and friends.

So I’m taking this breather between graduation and a full-time job to find out how much of the world I can see in a few months. As of right now, I’m still planning out where I’ll be and when, but I do have a rough idea of my itinerary. I’ll update as I go, and since I am traveling alone and everyone in my life is quietly concerned about what trouble I can find, so hopefully somewhat regular posts on here will ease that worry.

I’ve also grown more ambitious – today is the first leg of my 4(ish) month travels across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. I’ve wanted to see more of the world since I realized that there was more to it than just my hometown. At first, I wanted only to go to countries that spoke English (I’ve always been a big talker and the idea of not being able to talk to everyone all the time was terrifying). To be honest, I pretty much only wanted to go to Canada and Scotland (where my family was from).

So, to start off this grand adventure, I attempted to attend Edinburgh’s Fringe Festival. For the past three years, I had heard that this epic arts festival ran 24 hours a day for the whole of August, and that I had to go at some point. I booked flights to Scotland for the 26^th of August, hoping to catch the last week of the festival, when the crowds might be a little less dense. Turns out, the crowds were less dense (and the plane tickets cheaper) because the festival ended on that day.

But then I got into mythologies – Greek, Roman, and Egyptian mostly – and figured that the only way to understand how these myths really mattered, I had to go to those countries, too. From there, I discovered globes, which was really the beginning of the end. When I transferred to St Andrews full-time and kept learning about different parts and facets of the world, I realized that there’s probably no way to fully sate my curiosity. There’s just so much world to see, and so little time to see it all.

Thankfully, my cousin managed to snag tickets to the closing fireworks show that evening, which I can comfortably say is the best fireworks show I’ve ever seen, and a fitting start to the next four months. I also managed to catch 30 minutes of a street performer’s ten-minute-long show, which was not the best I’ve seen, albeit one of the more fascinating, if only for his time management skills. He did about 5 minutes of glass orb work with only one minor error (that he felt compelled to point out), and 5 minutes of fire juggling, which was a little more flawed. He dropped three flaming torches and concluded his performance a minute or two after all of his torches went out mid-performance. The other twenty minutes I watched he spent self-admittedly stalling for time. I left when he selected a 10-year-old out of the audience to help with an acrobatic trick. Given his track record, it seemed safest to leave before he landed on the kid.

Oddly, that performance, too, seemed appropriate for the beginning of this trip.