Edinburgh Festivals: August 22-26

Visiting Edinburgh while all the festivals, especially the Fringe Festival were on, has been something of a long-cherished dream of ours. Craig has thought about it since his first visit to the city eight years ago and it was one of the deciding time factors in our travel and arrival in Scotland.

The Fringe Festival is the largest arts festival in the world. There are over 260 venues in and around the city and this year about 1.5 million tickets were sold. (More details: http://www.edfringe.com/ ) The Edinburgh Festival Fringe itself includes comedy (what it's most famous for), theatre, dance, music and a bit of film. As if that was not enough, Edinburugh also hosts the Edinburgh International Festival (more established and well... just more expensive acts than the fringe), the Art Festival, the International Film Festival, the International Book Festival, and the Edinburgh Military Tattoo (pipes and drums and hours of live entertainment inside the castle) during the same period in August.

The city is vibrant to say the least. Zoe was overwhelmed by the amount of good things going on everywhere all the time. It made her feel almost restless, jumping around, reading all of the thick festival catalogues. We saw some great theatre, comedy, art exhibitions, films, and street performers, seeing 2-4 shows every day. Some things were free, others discounted or full price. Some shows were great. Others not so; one show we walked out of.

The theme of the 2007 fringe was a festival of spirituality and peace so we saw some very moving, thought-provoking pieces on war in Iraq and other recent and ongoing conflicts in the world.

Edinburgh is a beautiful city, gorgeous old stone buildings and hilly streets, all presided over by Edinburgh castle which sits on a crag in the middle of the city. We really enjoyed wandering the streets, and tried to balance our festivities by planning on the shows we were keenest to see and also allowing ourselves to stumble across things.

On one wander we actually stumbled across Zoe's friend from Bennington College in the US, Shandoah. They hadn't seen each other for 8 years and it was really wonderful to catch up.