Friday, July 5, 2002
Location: easyInternetCafe, Edinburgh
Weather: Sunny for most of the day, now high cloud.

The last day of the first choir tour!

The french restaurant didn't work out yesterday (we didn't have a reservation, they were petite, and fully booked) and we wandered for quite a while before finding something (a) open, (b) with an appealing menu, and (c) not full. This proved difficult, but we eventually came across a new wine bar restaurant named "Grape", occupying a renovated bank space (very high ceilings, so no smoke smells) with a simple, tasty menu. I had an uninspired pesto chicken penne (very short on pesto, undercooked penne, but lots of chicken and pine nuts at least) and a large glass of an extremely delicious cabernet sauvignon/malbec.

After dinner we rambled back to the hotel, but I broke off to go to a bank machine and got distracted by an extremely beautiful sunset lighting up the sky to the north. I wandered around taking pictures for a little while, then got back to business, got my money and headed home. Back in the hotel we had an impromptu party in Craig and Susan's room involving a bottle of gin, then I turned in to get some rest.

This morning was generally lazy until about 11, when I left to make my way up to St. Giles for our warmup at 11:30. I stopped en route at the internet cafe (unlimited use for a week) so I had to walk quite swiftly over the north bridge and up the hill to the cathedral, but the warmup started a few minutes late anyway so it wasn't an issue. St. Giles turned out to be dark and atmospheric inside, quite lovely, with an unusual layout: the altar, choir stalls and organ were situated in the centre of the church at right angles to the main body, so that our audience sat on our left and right rather than in front of us. The acoustic, though, was excellent: both responsive, letting us here the other parts easily and not too cluttered, but also (from the larger open spaces beyond the choir) reverberant and rewarding when we got loud. We had one of our best concerts of the trip, ending on a high point.

After the concert we wandered down the Royal Mile to a bar restaurant with an few outdoor tables, which we quickly occupied. It wasn't directly in the sun, but we enjoyed being outdoors and not freezing for a change. I had a lovely pint of Belhaven, a local cream ale, and a chicken pot pie topped by a completely excessive amount of puff pastry. After lunch I followed Bruce & Mary on an ill-fated expedition to find a deep-fried Mars bar -- the shop was closed, possibly by the health inspector -- and then poked around an extravagantly expensive map store before heading to the National Gallery with Anne, which turned out to be the destination for many of the rest of our group as well.

After a couple of hours in the Gallery we were kicked out (it closed abruptly at 5) and went and sat in the sun in the park, reading books. Eventually the clouds rolled in and we gave up and started to go back to the hotel. I split off partway to come back and make a final diary entry from Edinburgh.

Our final group activity is our farewell dinner tonight in the hotel. Tomorrow morning about half of the choir head back to Toronto while the rest of us split up to various destinations in Scotland and England. I'm headed to Durham, thence to York, with Bruce, Steph and Brian. Next Wednesday I head down to London, and Thursday I'm off to Russia!
posted by Tom at 1:29 PM | link |