Samer has heard me talk about visiting the Edinburgh Festival Fringe for many years. I love comedians and learned long ago that all UK comics pass through this festival at some point or another. When Andy Zaltzman and John Oliver hosted The Bugle together, they made countless self-deprecating jokes about it.
I always talked about the festival, but I never put it on my list of “must-dos.” So, when we were deciding what to do for our vacation, I was surprised that Samer recommended it. I was more in the mood for a gay Sitges trip, but I thought, why not?
The festival was incredible.
I cannot overstate that enough. I loved it so much. We got to Edinburgh around lunch on Saturday and stayed until Tuesday morning. We saw 11 different shows. They were: Alex Kitson: Must I Paint You a Picture?, Mythos: Ragnarok, Ahir Shah: Ends, Balls of Philadelphia, Shitty Mozart, 3 Kidneys, No Colon, 60 Minutes About Scotland, Remythed, 2 Truths, 1 Lie, Mustafa Algiyadi: Almost Legal Alien, and Maria Fedulova: Russian. Mafia. Family.
My top 3 were Maria Fedulova, Alex Kitson, and Shitty Mozart. Special honors go to Mythos, which is a professional wrestling troupe. Cool as hell.
It is nearly impossible to make sense of everything happening during the festival. The printed guide for shows is as extensive as a phone book, and it’s hard to make sense of everything. Luckily, there is an app. It’s like Grindr for finding shows. You open it, and it tells you which performance is starting next and how close it is to you. It’s really fun to walk around beautiful Edinburgh and then wonder if a comedy show is nearby (there always was). The Alex Kitson show was in a yurt pitched in the Potterrow Underpass behind some shops—so random that someone walked in during the performance basically asking, “what’s up?” We found Maria Fedulova because she was a contestant on the “2 Truths, 1 Lie” show, which we discovered through the app.
The lesson I took away from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe is not to plan too much. Bumble your way through it. Not everything was great, but almost everything made me laugh at some point. I would do the festival again. A long weekend is a great way to tackle it.
One of my favorite UK foods is the sausage roll, and I loved having breakfast at The Piemaker. The sausage roll had a lovely crust, and they offered other hand pies that weren’t so meat-forward. The busker culture during the Fringe is also fantastic. Market Street was alive with acrobats, jugglers, and performers of all sorts, but the acrobatic buskers were the most impressive.
It was shockingly cold for August, so I ended up buying a scarf and a sweater. I even stopped at a thrift store and purchased a cold-weather vest from the Kilchoman distillery. Throughout the trip, people would comment that I must really enjoy Kilchoman whisky.
After the wrestling match one night, we grabbed stuffed crepes from a food truck. Simple, but so good.
We also had a lovely dinner at The Little Chartroom, with oysters and sashimi that were excellent. Samer and I both think this may have been the best meal in Scotland.
The Café Royal in Edinburgh was fine, but not memorable. The front bar seemed far more interesting than the sleepy booth we ended up with in the restaurant. The food was nothing to write home about. It’s a pretty spot, but I’d pass.
As for Edinburgh Castle—we did it on our own, and I don’t remember much. I’d suggest joining a tour. Stirling Castle stands out more in my memory: it’s more imposing as a presence overlooking the city, and more vivid as a place actually to visit.
The rest of our time in Edinburgh was spent street wandering, which has blurred together in my memory into a pleasant, shapeless blob.