While we were in the hotel, we were busy looking for a flat, and exploring Edinburgh. A prime opportunity to be a tourist. It's a curious phenomenon. You only really see a place when you're a tourist. As a resident, you fall under the impression that you'll get around to seeing sights, history, museums, and so on. Since it's always around, there's no impulse to do it. So you don't. As a tourist, all of those things just seem to happen.

So, before we settled down and started forgetting about all the things to do and see around Edinburgh, we ran around as tourists. We took a Guide Friday bus trip around downtown, with the running commentary about local notables and bits of history. The bus is a classic double deck bus with an open top. As the bus drove around, we began the process of learning the city geography. We saw a former residence of Robert Louis Stevenson, the house of the guy who invented Chloroform, and so on.

That bus ride, of course, wasn't enough. We'd find out about the core of the town soon enough. So we also took a perimeter bus tour. It took us around the outskirts of town, that we hadn't seen any of at all. Here, we got to see the vista of downtown from a variety of perspectives.

We spent a good deal of time wandering around town, trying to figure out what was what. The castle is easiest to find. It's at the heart of town, on top of an old volcanic outcropping. The castle grounds have the oldest building in Scotland, a 12th century chapel. The rest of the castle has been built in bits and pieces, continually modified since then. Today, it only protects the Honours of Scotland (the Scottish Crown Jewels), shelters some of the Army, is a war memorial, and, of course, a tourist attraction. Brightly illuminated at night, it provides a backdrop view for much of the town.

The castle marks one end of the "old town", the other end at Holyrood Palace. Connecting the two is the Royal Mile. There are probably more tourist things to do on this stretch today than any other street in Edinburgh. There are at least three companies that lead people on tours around the old town, either historical tours, "ghost and torture" tours, and the like. At least some of the tours take you into the "underground city", beneath the streets of old town. Apparently, back in the days of old, at least a large part of the town was built as a medieval sort of a high rise. In some places, the buildings got 5 or 6 levels deep. Not up, like new high rises, but down. I'm not completely clear, but it sounded like new buildings were just raised on top of the old. This was also done in the days before modern sanitation. It was damp from the water seeping through the rock, with no natural light, and little ventilation. During the plague, some sections were apparently just sealed off, rather than trying to clean them up. Sealed with whatever, and whoever, was left behind. The tours won't take you that deep, only a level or two down into a maze of rooms hidden beneath the "modern" buildings above.

Holyrood Palace is still the Scotland home for the British Royalty, and at the lower end of the Royal Mile. Adjacent to the palace is Holyrood Park, the most dominant piece of the skyline apart from the castle. Holyrood Park is home to both the Salisbury Cargs and Arthur's Seat. Arthur's Seat is the highest hill near (or in) Edinburgh. From either, you can view the panorama of what seems like all of Edinburgh. One day, we took a long hike around the park, starting at the Palace, going between the Crags and Arthur's Seat, down to the "disused" Innocent Railway (now a cycle/jogging path), back up to the Crags, and along the bottoms of the crags back to the Palace. It's wonderful to see this big open space so close to the center of town; just because space is there doesn't mean it needs to be built on.

To the north of Old Town is the New Town, built in the late 1700s. The New Town now houses the main shopping drag, Princes Street, a huge number of pubs on Rose Street, and so on. The biggest surprise about this region is how intertwined housing and commerce is. There are flats all over the place, and only in the outer portions of the New Town do the forerunners of suburbs appear. At the west end of New Town, across the Water of Leith, and above Dean Village is were we eventually found a flat. Soon, it would be time to stop acting like tourists, and try to camoflauge as locals.