Any grey day, February to May

It seems utterly ridiculous to be sitting here reminiscing about grey days in Edinburgh when it’s over 42 degrees in Melbourne today… Still, call me Gen-Y if you wanna, but a world of extremes has always kinda been my thing ;-)

So any day grey from February to May… basically, an excuse to be wistfully nostalgic about all things Edinburgh… so in no particular order, and certainly not a complete list…

Coloured doors
Usually primary colours – bold and red and blue and yellow and shocking. I loved them. I loved the dark, grey, mysterious buildings too, but somehow all the more thanks to the contrast of the doors. And OK, it wasn’t every door, but there were a lot around town.

Girl Time
I have an older brother, and perhaps because of this have always been more comfortable with a lot of male company in my life. Not there. Not then. For whatever reason (though I do suspect it may have been the state of my lil heart at the time) I was all about the ladies when I lived in Edinburgh.
I shared Storm’s room, as I already mentioned, in a girl’s university dorm. There were six girls in our dorm, and four or five more across the hall, many of whom would pop over for ‘family dinner’ between study session and episodes of crappy UK TV.
And at work too… though I am famously allergic to female managers, I worked in a team of seven women, and genuinely enjoyed it.
There were boys in Scotland too of course (nice big Rugby sized ones), but they didn’t much scratch the surface.

My Mountain

This will be mentioned again and again. Every weekend, without fail and regardless of emotional state, hangovers and god awful weather, I climbed Arthur’s Seat. It was about a two and a half hour door-to-door sweat-fest, always solo. And it was a kind of exhaustion that cleansed me to my soul, which may have actually been the whole point…

Princess Street in the mornings
I walked the long way to work every day, not just because Café Lucano is the only place in Edinburgh that has real Italian coffee, but so I could walk the length of Princess Street. It was an extra 20 minutes every day… 20 minutes less sleep, every night for those few months, and I am smiling now with gratitude to myself for doing it.
Every one of those mornings I would gape up at the castle, perched illogically on its jagged edge of volcanic rock, and feel a tightness in my chest from the sheer drama of it. Amazing.

Graveyards
I have a beautiful friend, who has a beautiful daughter (who is my friend too, lucky for me), who always loved graveyards. To be fair, this friend of mine is more than a little insane, so I always thought it was kind of a strange thing to love.
Then I got to Edinburgh.

Hair elastics on the street
I have no idea why – the wind blowing them out, perhaps?! – but I have never in all of my gypsy wanderings seen so many abandoned hair elastics lying on the street as I saw in Edinburgh. To the point where if I see one now, in whichever city I find myself, I smile and think of Edinburgh.

I do quite a bit of smiling and thinking of Edinburgh, actually… :-)