Edinburgh Day 5 - J.K.Rowling pilgrimage, Palace of Holyroodhouse, VAT tax refund

11/15/2014

Last breakfast in Edinburgh. Boo! We keep saying how much Mom would love the hotel's croissants, as they’re oh-so-flaky:

I’ve been meaning to take pictures of the hotel’s library during our stay, but didn’t quite get around to it until push came to shove. We think the hotel was once the home of a wealthy family in the Victorian era. The house is Georgian in style, but the interior is full of intricately carved wood circa the Victorian era. Wood beams, wood balustrades, wood fireplace. It’d cost an arm and a leg (or two) to get the level of detail nowadays in these wooden decorations!

Hotel Library

There’s a small farmers market every Saturday 9am-1pm at the base of Edinburgh castle. They sell hot Scotch eggs, but was a little too expensive for us. 3.5 pounds for one egg!

Edinburgh Castle

The sun even came out today! The hotel receptionist said that this is not normal for November in Scotland; it’s usually snowing this time of year. So I feel verra blessed that our days here were fairly dry, and hey, at least it’s not as cold as Birmingham! Minus the one day of pouring rain in the Highlands, of course.

Edinburgh Castle

Last day at Edinburgh Castle. ;( I love Edinburgh. Have I said that before? The people are so nice, the city’s very clean, and there’s a perfect balance of ancient and modern to satisfy everyone’s tastes. 

New Town is more modern, with all the big name stores occupying Princes Street. In Old Town, you could seriously wander around the whole day, getting lost in the side alleys and winding stairs. "Close" is "courtyard" in Gaelic, and you see a lot of the street names in Old Town named XYZ Close. This usually means there’s a hidden courtyard in the middle of the buildings. A lot of these “secret” courtyards are decorated in a fairyland sort of feel, so you really feel like you’ve stepped into a land of magic.

No wonder J.K. Rowling adopted Edinburgh as her home. The Hairy Coo tour guide said yesterday that J.K. Rowling used to live on Millionaire’s Row in Edinburgh, but she sold it off for a princely sum. She still has a country estate somewhere in Scotland.

So it's very fitting to end our time in Scotland with a pilgrimage to all the sites that helped inspire Harry Potter. Well, fitting for me. Not so fitting for Angel, though she was a good sport and trotted along with me the whole morning without a single complaint. *gasp* I know, right?

We started out the day passing by Edinburgh Castle (kinda hard not to), going into Old Town...

Edinburgh  Castle

...and to the George Heliot School:

George Heliot School

George Heliot School is a private school and not open to visitors (aka tourists aka Harry Potter fans aka me). J.K. Rowling said the school provided the inspiration for Hogwarts. I can’t really see the connection, but then again, the movie version is not her vision of Hogwarts, is it? 

Edinburgh is kinda divided into Old Town and New Town, based on which side of the river you’re on. Old Town is where Edinburgh Castle is located, and the architecture there dates from the medieval ages. Old town is situated on a volcanic rock, so it’s very hilly. The cobbled streets wind and twist, and there’s a lot of narrow, winding stone steps leading down to God knows where. J.K. Rowling was inspired by Old Town in her creation of Diagon Alley.

As Edinburgh grew bigger and bigger, the smell of human waste and sewage grew too strong—the combined smell was ironically called “the flower of Scotland.” Most cities during the time followed the same practice—just throw your waste and garbage out the window, so the city streets were padded with dung 24/7. Rich people got around this by either going on carriages, wearing high-heeled shoes, or just avoiding the bad parts of town altogether. 

So, during the Georgian era, a contest was held to build a New Town. A young architect (I think he was in his early 20s) won, and all the gorgeous buildings of New Town that you see today can be attributed to him. In fact, it’s because of this young architect that Edinburgh became the first city in Europe to have a “planned city” look with streets making up a grid. You’ll see this in old New York, Boston, Paris, and most noticeably, in Bath. I remember studying city architecture back in Harvard, and the teacher spent so much time on New York’s planned city look. Welp, here’s the original, guys and gals.

Scots openly disobeying the window tax of the Regency Era:

The Elephant House Café! Aaaahhh! This is one of the coffee shops that J.K. Rowling used to haunt when she was writing the first Harry Potter book. Indeed, the Elephant House markets themselves as “the birthplace of Harry Potter.”

This is a statue of Bobby the Skye Terrier:

His owner, Jack, once lived near where the statue now stands. Dog and master were inseparable. The story goes that when Jack died, Bobby stayed by John’s grave for the next 14 years, until his own death. After the statue was put in place, the government realized that people started touching Bobby’s nose as a good luck charm. So they put up a sign discouraging the desecration of the statue, but during the 5 minutes or so we stood in front of the statue trying to make sense of our map, we noticed sooo many people ignoring the sign altogether. Everyone went up to touch the poor doggie's nose. 

Behind the statue of Bobby the Skye Terrier is Greyfriar’s Church. They were holding a craft fair today, but we were on a schedule, so couldn’t go into the craft fair. Greyfriar’s Church supposedly has tombstones marking Thomas Riddle, Senior and Thomas Riddle, Junior. Tom Riddle, as most Harry Potter fans know, is Voldemort. I can just imagine J.K. Rowling wandering around this cemetery and her imagination working on overdrive.

I thought I could waltz into the cemetery and, lo and behold, see Tom Riddle's grave. It didn't occur to me that the cemetery, being a proper cemetery, would have hundreds of grave markers of all the people who've been buried there through the centuries. Angel and I scoured the entire place but could not find the tomb of Tom Riddle. 

Angel said I would never make a good teeny-bopper. You know those kids who research their idols to death and know exactly which terminal of which airport at what exact time their favorite singers will land? I love Harry Potter and I love J.K. Rowling, but that's too much research for me. :T

Greyfriar's Church

Inside the cemetary

Adjacent to Greyfriar's Church is the George Heliot school. 

George Heliot School

A gate separates the two:

So we had to walk around the entire hill (both the church and school are situated on a sloping hill) to get a good picture of the front entrance of the GH school.

Candlemaker Row, another source for J.K. Rowling when conjuring up Diagon Alley:

Q Mile Residential Complex is across from the George Heliot school. If anything, I think the Q Mile looks more like Hogwarts instead of the school:

Q Mile

Sir Walter Scott’s parents lived here: 

The camera angle's off, but if you can see the stairs behind me--they're steep stairs, man. Leading off to who knows where. There's many of these cobbled steep staircases in Old Town, and helped inspire Knockturn Alley and Diagon Alley in Harry Potter.

"Close" means "courtyard" in Scots

In Bath and Edinburgh, there are a lot of plaques commemorating famous people who lived in this building or that. Angel wants to go home and make a plaque that says "Angel lives here." Oh, what a demented little cutie pie.

Palace of Holyroodhouse

Angel’s against paying admission for the Queen’s properties because she doesn’t want her money going toward buying the Queen a new Chanel suit. Or another dress for Kate Middleton. The British newspaper did a tally last year, and I guess Kate's wardrobe for the year cost 55,000 pounds. Crikey, what I could do with that kinda money!

So, we took pictures and left. 

Which, surprisingly, is what a lot of other people do too. Not just Asians! Causcasians too! As I was waiting for Angel to come out of the bathroom, I heard countless people saying, “Got the angle from the courtyard? Ok, let’s go.” The money saved on admission went toward buying Angel’s shortbread cookies.

View of Palace of Holyroodhouse shot thru the iron gate

As we walked back to New Town, we saw the ball dropping tower where they used to drop a black ball to synchronize all the captains' watches by the harbor:

We went to Primark to do a last look around at their latest offerings. Since Edinburgh’s our last point of departure, we needed to get a VAT refund form from Primark. I had pre-bundled all our previous Primark purchase receipts, and we went to the Customer Service desk to get the refund form processed.

In order to get the merchant refund form, you need to bring your passport and all the receipts, ie. for Primark, you would bring the receipts from all the Primark locations you’ve purchased from before, even if one Primark is in France and the other is in Scotland. 

Don’t try to get a VAT refund form from each Primark store you visit because the more your combined total amount is, the more of a refund you’ll get—the refund calculation is on a bell curve. Just remember that you have to get one form for each merchant, not each store.

Primark will add up how much you spent in all their stores, and goes down a chart to see how much of a refund you’re entitled to. The company processing the refunds (Global Blue) will deduct 50% for “processing fees.” Geesh!

So we went up to Customer Service, and the girl was very efficient at getting all our forms/receipts in order. She warned us that the Customs Office in Edinburgh Airport had closed down, so if you want a cash refund, you’ll need to go to the Tourist Office above the Edinburgh Waverly train station. Say what?! It’s a Saturday and Tourist Office closes relatively early. Holy crap. We rushed to Waverly station, and it turns out that the VAT refund office is the Currency Exchange booth inside the tourist info center. The guy was also very efficient, but he said he couldn’t process one of our purchases because the merchant uses another VAT refund processing company, not Global Blue.

Damn you, Royal Collection (the merchant that uses the other VAT processing company happens to be the Queen's Trust; we bought something from the gift shop at Palace of Holyroodhouse). Why you gotta make things so hard???

The guy pointed us toward the place where we could get the refund, so we rushed there. Only to be told that they don’t process this company, they process yet another company. Argh! How many refund processing companies are there???

So our only recourse is to hope that Customs will accept our receipt and process the refund. If not, well, the refund was only 1.30 pounds so I guess I can let that slide.

This ferris wheel wasn't here when we first arrived in Edinburgh. It went up in a span of a couple days and is part of the Christmas market that's being built. Like Birmingham and London, these Christmas fairs are comprised of temporary wooden structures that are very cute and quaint, like log cabins all decked out in Christmas decorations. I'm not sure when the fair officially opens this year, but as always, we missed out.