Scotland
Edinborough is quite rad actually. Really old with nice touches. Reasonably priced with some great hotels, virgin, glasshouse, etc and great restaurants and bars. Victoria street is rad. Went to Tiger Lilly and it was cool as shit, but it was a club, so it’s no longer for me. The St James Quarter mall and food hall is just too modern I thought. Really cool food concepts and I loved the energy but it seemed out of place maybe. The Bon Vivant was a cool restaurant and bar with modern Scottish food.
The Spirit of Scotland dinner and show was a joke. They tried so hard but it was like being in a satire about dinner shows. It was in a wedding reception type room. Blank and terrible with projector images on white walls. Terrible.
The Burke and Hare strip club was sooo bad! Oh my it was 100 dudes standing around a stage. I felt so bad for the women. No seats. No class. Awful. The 2 next to it seemed even worse.
Leonardo Hotel
We stayed at the one in Haymarket. Don’t stay here unless you want to walk a mile or get a car to go to any sites or areas you want to be in.
Perfectly fine business class hotel. No amenities that are interesting.
The Atholl Palace in Pitlochry was nice. No AC during a heat wave. Their outdoor beer garden areas are nice and we had a decent dinner in their pub. Their nice restaurant looked lame. Pitlochry is actually quaint and cute, but the palace is not that close to walk to it.
The Culloden House near Inverness was nice. No AC during a heat wave again. Very unique hotel with the most amazing secret garden. No kidding. Not close enough to Inverness to walk at all but that town is actually not nice. It’s oddly big and urban.
The Culloden House dinner was good but stuffy as hell. You sit in a small room where they wait on you hand and foot. Too much we thought. What’s worse is they do the exact same thing for the included breakfast. Sounds like an odd complaint, but having to wait for water service isn’t always what you want.
The Ben Nevis near Fort William is a shithole. Fort William is actually quite nice and cute and walkable.
Glasgow was great. I actually went to a movie at Cineworld which was right across the street from the hotel. It was pretty spectacular. We walked as much as people could walk in Glasgow. The architecture is amazing and they don’t subtle-y attach extremely modern structures to extremely old structures. It was neat to see. They had some amazing shopping and the nightlife was pretty fun as well. Karaoke!
The Maldron hotel in Glasgow had a great location and was a fine business class hotel, maybe slightly better than that.
I honestly don’t get Scotland. It’s beautiful for sure. The landscapes are amazing and castles can be very cool. But it really doesn’t hold a candle to many other places in Europe. None of the towns here are particularly old. It’s just relics that are old, the towns are fairly normal. Nothing feels medieval unless you are paying to get into a historical site. On a continent with the dawn of modern civilization and colonial powers of old, and world wars and serious sites, this feels just outdoorsy with some cool Scottish clan action mixed in. The “lochs” are nice, but it’s just lakes. The “locks” are cool, but they do that water moving action lots of places. The food is almost all the same pubby food. I love a good pub, but 10 days in Scotland? I don’t get it.
Notes to self:
-Do you have anything to declare? …snatch anyone?
