<>Let’s see…sheep’s heart, liver and lungs, minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt.

Mixed with stock, and boiled in the animal’s stomach for approximately an hour.

Hmmm…for some reason, this description of the Scottish delicacy known as “Haggis” was not making me hungry.

Thus was my sojourn into Edinburgh…

Edinburgh, Capital of Scotland and the 2nd largest city. A very beautiful city with people to match.

The ancient-architecture is nicely preserved and gives the city much of its charm.

Getting around town is made easy by the double-decker buses and reliable taxi service.

They can get you to anyplace you need to be in town including…

the beautiful gardens at Bruntsfield Terrace

The Doctor’s office, where it looks like you can get anything cured…

…To get a new suit-of-armour, or Tweed…

To visit the Sir Walter Scott memorial…

To shop at Jenner’s Department store…

You can check out Holyrood & Scotland’s newly built Parliament building. The object of much controversy because of it’s architecture, it has suceeded in collecting many design awards.

The National Galleries…

…Waverly Train Station…awesome…

The Royal Society of Edinburg, Scotland’s society of Science & Letters….

Grab some coffee from the delivery-guy, in his unique truck.

…and head-out to Edinburgh Castle where pipers play at the base of the castle hill

and Mel Gibson lookalikes collect money for needy-causes (yes, they were all Braveheart-crazy)…

The Castle rests on an imposing granite-hill, giving it a full view of the city and great tactical superiority.

Once you scale the heights, these are the guys you’ll have to deal with.

Lush green lawns were everywhere.

Next you can head north, out of town to get to the beautiful Scottish Highlands…

…including a nice tour of a whisky-distillery…

and even get to sample some of the good stuff!

Further-north, into the Highlands, the land turns into lush rolling hills…

Pheasents were everywhere…

and the Clydesdales were enjoying the unseasonably warm (and dry) days!

It was here we first ran into the famous Heeland Coos, which, translated from the Scots means “Highland Cows”. Whouda thunk that was the name of these hippie-cows?

Not sure if he could see if I was standing in front of him, but I wasn’t about to test those horns!

Being a smallish island, the seagulls were never far away. here they’re following a tractor to see what’s being stirred-up.

On the way back into town, we observed the beautiful Forth railroad bridge (click here), an engineering marvel, designed by Scott Arthur and first opened in 1890. It’s just incredible to see and makes up two bridges on the First of Fourth. The other bridge is for vehicular traffic and resembles the Golden Gate in design.

I had thought of bringing some of the whiskey to the bridge so I could have a First of Fourth Fifth, but decided against it.

Oh yeah, I eventually did get hold of some Haggis and it wasn’t nearly as bad as they first made it sound.

Tasted pretty much like a giant sausage and if you didn’t think too hard as to what it was made of, it was actually quite good!

So, that was it for my quick tour of Scotland, a great place with good people!

Photo notes:

All photos taken with a Nikon D-200, Tamron 18-250mm zoom lens, SanDisk compact flash cards.

Since, for the most part, the shooting conditions were very contrasty, I kept my metering on center-weighted and, if the day was cloudy, my camera color control on vivid 1, using “sunny” white balance.