Christmas in Edinburgh

I am now heading backward over the past month of activities. We are on our way to London to go on the trip in my previous post. I am going backward a week to my birthday. We went into Edinburgh to see the city at Christmas and it was brilliant. The main area of activity in Edinburgh is the Princes street gardens, where we will be for New Year's or Hogemany as they call it here. During the month of December the gardens have a huge ice rink and tons of what we would call carnival rides, but they all have a winter flair. (something you could not do in Chicago, especially with all of the snow you guys have had) In addition to the rides and decorations there is the German market which is hundreds of shops set up along the street with all sorts of intriguing items from across Europe, but with a German focus. There is mulled wine, sausages, crepes and great arts and crafts, although some of it is of lesser quality. When you stand in certain places the city looks absolutely spectacular. After spending a number of hours in the area, we walked across to high street (the royal mile) and down to the grassmarket area looking for a restaurant called Blue. The reason we went to the restaurant is that the Kelly's got us a gift certificate to this place online before we left last summer. We found the place and had an amazing lunch, of course taking pictures for the Kellys. We then wound our way back along Princes street where all of the shops are with Beth and Monique stopping in many places looking for bargains. I of course spent most of my time in the local book store looking at guide books for Cyprus. All in all it was a tremendous birthday, my first in a foreign country.

Cheers