A Rummage Through Edinburgh

Yesterday, Kirsten and I met up in Edinburgh for a good rummage through the vintage shops. I may have taken this as an excuse to go a little overboard with Photoshop filters…

We started by heading through the Gardens and over the hill to vintage central: The Grassmarket.

Kirsten’s first purchase was a skirt from Godiva. We loved the size label:We also stopped by the lovely Barnardo’s vintage shop but Armstrong’s was where we had the most fun – and it was so nice to be there on a weekday when we weren’t fighting through hordes of people!

I got a couple of belts and a headscarf with parasols on it. Kirsten got the loveliest green hat.

We stopped for cakes and hot drinks at Hula on West Bow. Hot chocolate with honey and cinnamon in it? Yes, please!I love this one – me taking photos and Kirsten checking in on Foursquare; sums up our day pretty well!

We made our way round a couple of other shops including Analogue Books which is a fab shop with the best old sign above the door:Some more pics from our wanders:

We stopped off for dinner at Tiles on St Andrew Square:

There was also tea and pear tart at the lovely Centotre. I was too busy enjoying the food to take pictures but wanted to rave about the remixed Italian language tapes being played in the toilets – genius.

Long Weekend: East Coast

I’m just starting to realise how.many.photos I took this weekend. To keep it almost manageable, I’m going to split them up into a few posts over the space of the week; here’s a nice compact one to start with:

On Friday, Steve and I got the train down to Edinburgh; we had just long enough in the city centre for a coffee before catching the bus out to my lovely cousin and her husband’s new house.

Of course, I managed to snap a handful of pictures on the way to the coffee shop:

And one from the coffee shop window; I was frustrated by the window glare at the time, but I quite like how the Castle is sat inside Steve’s shoulders.

This one was taken from the bus on the way to their house; they live on the very edge of town – literally, there is a field at the end of their very short street and it is not in Edinburgh – so it was a long journey and I soon realised why so many of Sparklesmith’s February three things involve staring into people’s windows from the bus! There are some beautiful homes en route.

We had a lovely evening of extremely garlicky food and Wii Fit humiliation, then woke up on Saturday morning to find that it was snowing.

One more bus journey later and we were waiting in the Waverley Station booking hall for our train across to Glasgow.

And that’s where I’ll leave you for now. The first Glasgow post is enormous and I’m still trying to figure out whether I can slice it into two…!

Camera Obscura

This weekend Steve and I were in Edinburgh. I love Edinburgh; usually, I take masses of photos of the gorgeous buildings and quirky details, but this time a combination of constant rain and my post-whatever-was-wrong-with-me-last-week-fatigue meant my camera rarely came out of my bag.

A couple of randoms:

This is the view of Edinburgh Castle from The Elephant House. This is the cafe where JK Rowling supposedly wrote the first Harry Potter novel; it’s the only place I’ve been where the toilet cubicle graffiti is consistently grammatically correct. It also does good shortbread:

One of the highlights of the trip was meeting up with my friend Jill who I don’t get to see nearly enough of. What with the lousy weather, we weren’t much in the mood for trudging around the shops, so we decided to go to Camera Obscura instead. So much fun! Well worth the £9.25 entry fee; we spent about an hour mucking about with all the displays and taking silly pictures:

This is the view from the roof of Camera Obscura:

Steve and I also met up with some of my family at the Royal Botanical Gardens. By that point I was sympathising with the great big cactus that would die as soon as it bloomed so I took exactly one picture. I intend to go back one day and take more, though; it’s a gorgeous place: