Serendipitous tourism with an all access bus pass

On Friday I got on the first bus that showed up, which turned out to be the 34. In an afternoon's ride I saw the campus of Heriot Watt University, the Ocean Terrace, as well as a bit of my neighborhood and a section of freeway. I saw a convenience store called BOOZE AND NEWS and a paycheck cashier service called Johnny-£-Cash. I saw supermarkets and malls and countryside and council estates and a wee Chinatown, and a potters-field graveyard and sailors' bars on the wharf and a little knot of teenage prostitutes and that was just the one route. I may use this idea to randomly explore parts of Edinburgh and her surrounding countryside I otherwise would never see.

Yesterday a little group of us went to the farmers market, where i bought what are purported to be the best pies in Scotland (likely salesman's hyperbole but he was cute so whatev), and a handmade oat bar and a fried doughnut and a real baker's snowball (nothing like the Little Debbie travesties) which i dropped half of on the floor and almost cried. I also bought a bottle of Spring Oak Leaf Wine, which it should come as no surprise that Scottish wineries will distill literally anything and per the tasting flight i preferred the Spring Oak Leaf to the Autumn Oak Leaf (you can really tell a difference). The same winery's market stall also had bramble wine, elderberry wine, and one called shrubbery wine which is on my list for next week to purchase. The name of the winery is Cairn o'Mohr, which is some Scottish wit.

The rain was something else too yesterday, bucketing down in what i can only describe as torrents in the early morning, then slacking off to what i would otherwise never have described as slack, but for the contrast with the earlier gullywasher deluge. The market was in full swing nonetheless--Scots donny give a fook aboot a wee rainstorm.

You know what's big here that i wonder if/when it'll take off in the US? Men in two- and three-piece suits with Chelsea boots and long Byronic hair loose and untied-back. It's an unexpectedly fantastic look. If the cuts of the suits were a bit more mod it'd be expectedly Carnaby but they're more classic and sober, which is perhaps part of what makes the juxtaposition more startlingly appealing.

Haggis truck.

Old Craig, where i go to class every day. It was once a fancy estate, and also a mental hospital and "wwayward girls" home.

Doorbell encouraging you to go away if it's nighttime.