Edinburgh is a city of dual natures. It has aristocrats and
highlanders; laborers and intellectuals; criminals and religious reformers.
These dichotomies are even apparent in the city’s design. Edinburgh’s Old Town grew
on the slope around its namesake battlement for nearly 1,000 years; in the
1600s, desperate for protection within the city walls, its people crammed
together, built narrow cobblestone streets, and lived in some of tallest stone
dwellings in the world. Then around 1800, Edinburgh’s New Town was designed and
built with wide streets and luxurious housing—one of the best planned cities in
the world. Today, both Old Town and New Town are UNESCO World Heritage Sites,
and both towns are Edinburgh. It is not surprising then that Edinburgh-author
Robert Lewis Stevenson’s most famous character is the two-faced Dr. Jekyll /
Mr. Hyde.
This makes Edinburgh a fascinating place. With Joye at work,
I have had an excuse to tour around and see some of Edinburgh’s less popular
sites. In museums I have learned about Edinburgh’s history, its famous poets
and authors, and even visited the gravestone of Adam Smith, “father of
economics” and just one of many academics who defined the Scottish
Enlightenment. Together, Joye and I went to a public lecture on evidence-based
public policy that was hosted in the basement of a haunted pub.
Here are some of my favorite pictures from the last week in
Edinburgh:
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