so this year we decided to spend new year's eve abroad, and we chose to go to scotland. the weather and climate should be mild at this time of the year, the amount of rain should be modest, and temperatures should be between 0 and 5 degrees celsius. or so the internet says. let's find out... to get there, we went via frankfurt to edinburgh, and arrived in the early afternoon on day 01. there's a tram from the airport straight to the centre of scotland's capital city. since we will stay here for (at least) two days, we bought a two day ticket at the conductor - our first encounter with the lovely scottish accent. took us a while to figure out all the words he said, but since it was a rather simple task to buy two tickets, we managed that easily. we got off the tram but did not know exactly in what direction we should be heading. with all the luggage we wanted to take the shortest path, so we asked two ladies at a bus stop how to get to our accommodation. with a wonderful scottish accent they pointed us in the right direction. luckily it was just a 10 minutes walk to our guest house. so far the weather was fine, we had no troubles talking to the locals, everything seemed to go as planned. but... when we arrived at our hotel, we met a sturdy, grumpy looking guy at the hotel, who couldn't find our reservation. he said a lot of stuff but most of it we didn't understand. we figured he is in charge of three guest houses as there's currently no staff due to christmas holidays. a phrase we did understand though when he came back after leaving us for a few minutes was "found ya", with a big grin on his face, and seeming to be relieved and less grumpy. turns out booking.com put nina's name first on the reservation, but i gave the guy my name, so of course he couldn't find us at first. also, nina's name was spelled badly wrong, handwritten by the guy on a piece of paper. but who cares, we got our room - yippieh. there we left our luggage, and decided to explore the vicinity. turns out edinburgh is not as big as it looked on the map. only a few minutes walk took us right to the heart of the city. a problem though is the early sunset, which is already around 15:00 o'clock. one hour later it's already dark, and that is not good for taking pictures. we started our tour on princes street[01-07] with the adjacent princes street gardens, in which the christmas fair was still opened. they also had an amusement part with a big wheel[01,14-15,36-37] and carousels, big ones[04-05,07,14-15,] and the smaller ones[06] for the kids. the edinburgh waverley railway station[08-17] is entirely under a big glass roof. at first we thought it was a glass house, but then we saw all the trains and platforms when we entered; really impressive. we left the station and strolled along cockburn street[18-24], where there are loads of shops with all kind of fancy stuff, like the unicorn-bride and horseman-groom wedding-cake topper[23]. then we took high street[25-30] to get to the top of the hill to edinburgh castle[31-37], which was nicely lit, but unfortunately already closed. so we headed back to our guest house, but first had a delicious hearty burger at the "jekyll & hyde" street. the interior was awesome, they had different sections, from steampunk decorations to mummies in sarcophaguses. when we arrived at the "eyre guest house" we watched a little television and then went to bed, getting some rest. so far, scotland is pretty nice - hopefully it will stay this way. track for day 01.