Under Attack

Edinburgh is under attack, but at least this year we were prepared. It's festival season again, and with hundreds (thousands?)of shows and events playing at several hundred venues across the city, tens of thousands of tourists from across the country and overseas have descended upon Edinburgh, crowding the footpaths, stopping every bus that goes by wondering where they're headed, and ticking off the locals.

Last year our lives were quite affected by the festival. By being only two blocks away from Edinburgh Castle, the noise of the Edinburgh Tattoo's fireworks was scary-loud. It was particularly bad on Saturday nights, when the special late show included a five minute firework display. In our bedroom it sounded like the place was being bombed. Now we just hear a rumble every evening between 10:37 and 10:40pm, and I have yet to hear the Saturday night fireworks. We also lived in a much more central location, only 2 blocks away from the Royal Mile, between the very busy Grassmarket and the popular bars of Tollcross. As a result hundreds more people would walk by our window every night. And there was no chance of forgetting about the special closing times for bars and clubs during August. The festival goers who took advantage of the 3am bar closings and 5am club closing sure would make a lot of noise on their way home! But now that we live off to the west end of the city on a back street, there's no party-goers walking by (unless they're heading home), and since we're up on the third floor they're no longer walking by our window.

We're staying away from all the festival stuff this year actually. Last year we went to a couple shows, including the tattoo, a musical, and a comedy show. This year Derek's been heading to Glasgow all the time, and I've been working on a new chapter. I'd been completely focussed on my work and barely noticed that the festival had begun until I went to a pub near campus and saw the extent of the traffic jams outside. We now put off shopping until a day in the middle of the week, because on the weekends the main shopping area around Princes Street is absolutely packed. Walking anywhere that requires going near or on the Royal Mile? Give yourself an extra 20-25 minutes! There's buskers, show-goers and tourists stopping all over the place to take photographs, plus the annoyed local trying to get places. And if I don't allow myself enough time to get to school for a meeting, then I become one of those annoyed locals trying to get somewhere! The problem is, if I ever need to speak for any reason then the locals think I'm one of the problem-causing tourists thanks to my accent and in turn find me annoying. So I just try to look like I belong, like I've got places to go, people to see, etc. :)

I can't believe that August will be coming to an end quite soon, but we've gotten a lot accomplished this month. Derek is onto his second stage of training and is enjoying the work and the people in his programme. I've written the rough draft of a second chapter for my thesis and am feeling really good about becoming a PhD-3 shortly, plus a friend and I have a great-looking conference in the works which I'll tell more about once we've got our webpage up. It's been a very busy month, but a productive one, and in truth I'm rather glad that we've been able to stay away from the craziness of the festival, instead staying focussed on home, work and friends.