Travel Journal:

As a Postgrad in Edinburgh... - Hogmanay, Edinburgh Style


Hogmanay, Edinburgh Style 2/1/2008
 
50,000 people. That is the number of people officials estimated would attend Edinburgh’s Hogmanay this year. That is the number of people organizers were prepared to handle. Imagine walking down the street with 50,000 of your closest buddies. You're already shoulder-to-shoulder, but its manageable. Now, squish closer to your neighbor to make room for 50,000 more people on that same street. And now you will arrive at the estimate for the number of people who ACTUALLY attended Edinburgh’s Hogmanay street party on Princes Street.

Having gone to Ohio University and attended the infamous Halloween event, which attracts an estimated 20,000 people annually, I am no stranger to big crowds of rowdy holiday revelers. And Hogmanay started out as such, only with way more clothes involved; for those who have ever been to an OU Halloween, it’s well known for its scantily-clad clientele of all sexes, genders and orientations, even in sub-freezing temperatures. Obviously, Edinburgh is on a larger scale than Athens, but the experience was the same. We stopped first to see a funky Punjabi-rock band that was actually pretty good. A nice way to get the blood pumping. Very electronica and Indian, with plenty of “AhhhhAHahhhhhs” to satisfy any hippy inclinations. After the band did their mini-encore, we headed out to find another beer. And that’s the story of the rest of the night.

We spent the next two hours stuck in a mass of people that sometimes moved forward but more often than not moved backward. All we had wanted was a beer and a bathroom, and it turned into an Odyssey in true Greek hero fashion. It didn’t help that while in line for the bathrooms, the guys in front of me were duped by a silly, fake-blonde and crying girl and they just let her walk to the front of a line full of very angry and yelling revelers who didn’t give a hoot if she had “women problems.” As a woman, I was totally unimpressed and found myself giving in to the fervor of unfair queuing and yelled angrily right along with everyone. I am beginning to take my queue experience as seriously as the Brits.

The upside of the whole debacle was that when it hit midnight, we had somehow managed to crawl forward to the perfect viewing spot for the fireworks, which lit the castle up in true New Year’s fashion. Good thing it was a pleasant location, too, because there was really nowhere else for us to go, and we were stuck right in the same spot for about half an hour. We could have been stuck behind the museum buildings with a great view of… the back of the building. I have no idea how the city managed to accommodate 300,000 in 1997. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t that.

After midnight, when the crowd began to head for the exits (beer service stopped at 12:30, so there was a mass exodus to everyone’s favorite bar for the afterparty), we made a beeline for the Grassmarket Bar, always a good local choice because its never packed but filled with locals. So we relaxed there for our last drinks of the night, watching a stumbling, totally gone dude try to hit on one of the bartenders in vain. She was way out of his class.

The next day turned out to be cool and rainy: the weather that had been expected last night but had been so kind as to hold off until the next day, which I’m sure was good for Hogmanay attendance but bad for me. The rain didn’t keep us from heading over to Holyrood Park in the early afternoon for Dogmanay, a fun little family event featuring dog racing. In theory, they pull sleds, but seeing as it doesn’t snow here (ugh!), there were huskies, malamutes, Samoyeds, and Eskimos dogs pulling wheeled carts and scooters across a festively muddy field. The grass on that part of the park is now totally destroyed. The cool part, though, was that anybody with some kind of snowdog could bring the pet and run these races. Huskies from all over the city came out from the cracks to at least watch the races. There were some professional breeders and racers there, all with their little tents are caravans set up in the back, showing off their fancy stock. We ended up standing next to a woman with a big male Sib. with the same coloring as a younger Koani: a rich reddish brown. It really made me miss my dog, one of the few things that can make me homesick. But I digress…. It was obvious that some of the dogs had some training, but others were just here to have fun and were all over the place, just like walking Koani. One little girl got distracted by food that someone had dropped on the other side of the fence and stopped mid-race to try to dig under the fence to get the morsels. Other dogs got distracted by every other dog standing around watching. But the mood was jovial, and nobody was taking things too seriously. And the entire park was filled with the echoes of the announcer and the yodels of acres of huskies all hanging out in the same place.

After watching the races for a bit, we headed out to find some cheese to top tonight’s dinner: Skyline Chili direct from Cincinnati and courtesy of my good friend Laura Settle for Christmas (along with One Hundred Years of Solitude for our bookclub, but we won’t talk about that). Nothing warms a Cincinnatian like good, old fashioned, Greek-style Cincinnati Chili.
 
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