A room in the Old Town

This photo is available on Redbubble: Edinburgh Room.

Coastal Edinburgh: Fun Park and Fried Food

This is the other side of coastal Edinburgh: the deep-fried food and shiny fun parks. There are fairly obvious reasons why this is so: if you go for a sunny day on the beach, it will probably rain. All of these places have been around for decades – if they’ve changed ownership in twenty-five years, they haven’t changed name or function.

A Leith cameo

Like most pubs in Leith, the Cameo Bar has lots of beer, lots of meaty/fishy pub grub, but if you’re vegetarian, better come at the weekend for breakfast. Which they serve at lunchtime.

This photo is available on Redbubble: In the Cameo window.

(No one ever seemed to click on the Google Map tags, so I’m not going to do them any more.)

The Scottish Government from Beanscene

Staff friendly and helpful, coffee good, music fine, outlook lovely: but it’s a good thing the wifi connection came free with my coffee, or I’d have asked for my money back!

The connection was claimed to have an Excellent signal strength and to be available at 54Mbps (IP address 10.31.81.85) but it took me two minutes to get through to The Cloud Networks login page, and after 20 minutes of trying to get any page other than a Google search page to load, I realised that (although I was the only person in the Beanscene using a laptop) the wifi system was so poor that it was unusable.

It’s a pity: this Beanscene is a nice place with good atmosphere and pleasantly sunny, but wifi this poor is better not advertised: you wouldn’t want anyone to come in *because* of the wifi. I’ve heard from other customers that this is a common problem with Beanscenes – the wifi service exists in theory but is shoddy in practice. I’ve had similar problems with other chain cafe wifi systems – probably a low-bid problem, but Beanscene is certainly the worst. (Local cafes which offer wifi where the manager herself chose and is making use of the system, don’t have this problem: it’s always chains where the local cafe staff didn’t get to choose the wifi provider and don’t have the authority to change it because of its poor performance.)

But the coffee is good. Seriously: take the “free wifi” signs down. It comes close to being false advertising. Beanscene should stick to selling coffee.

I took this photo here. It’s available on Redbubble: the Scottish Government from Beanscene.

Scottish Parliament from Reid’s Close

I took this photo here. It’s available on Redbubble: Scottish Parliament.

King’s Stables Road: Shiny!

On King’s Stables Road, just beyond the bridge of Castle Terrace, there is a house with a shiny metal door and window. The metal is somewhat dented, and gives the most interesting reflections.

I took this photo here. It’s available on Redbubble: Shiny!

Leith: Cats reflecting

One cat, or two? Black and white cat reflecting in a window in Leith, Edinburgh, in spring sunshine.

I took this photo here. It’s available on Redbubble: Cats reflecting.

Bricks Behind Bars

You see these windows that are no longer windows all over Edinburgh.

I took this photo here. It’s available on Redbubble: Bricks Behind Bars

Blind-eyed building

I took this photo here. It’s available on Redbubble: Blind-eyed Building.

Leith: Jigsaw Window

I took this photo here. It’s available on Redbubble: Jigsaw Window.