Edinburgh Outside the Fringe
Edinburgh is easy to love. The compact capital of Scotland, from UNESCO Old Town to UNESCO New, is up there with Europe’s best of the best. While the nickname “Athens of the North” may be a bit much, it’s certainly not because Edinburgh is unworthy of such comparisons.
The decidedly more suitable “Auld Reekie” fits the overall aesthetic of this humble city much better. True, while Edinburgh is hardly “Old Smoky” any longer, the lovable moniker effectively conveys the inherent warmth, conviviality and witty wryness of the Scottish capital.
The world’s largest arts festival, the Edinburgh Fringe, is as indelibly woven into the city’s cultural fabric as bookend Royal Mile landmarks Castle Rock and Holyrood Abbey. What began as a protestant alternative to the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 is now a behemoth annual event with ticket sales in the millions. So massive and mainstream is the Fringe, some sixty plus years down the line, that it regularly inspires offshoot festivals in parallel – or “Fringe Fringe” festivals, as it were.
Sometimes visiting a city is like being in a dreamstate, where fantasy seems to cohabitate with reality. That happened to me when I visited a Bavarian city that’s a 2 hour train ride from Frankfurt and that doesn’t always get mentioned in guidebooks on Germany, even though it’s been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1993.
We thought it would be interesting to put together a list of the 10 most popular and/or well-known addresses in the World. Now the tenants in several of these addresses (at least #1) change on a regular basis, but the fact that these addresses are significant does not change. The structures and history surrounding each of these will keep them well known for years to come.
Formally the District of Columbia, Washington, D.C. is the capital of the United States, located on the North Bank of the Potomac River and is surrounded by the states of Virginia to the Southwest and Maryland to the other borders.
By Rob Ashford