We went up to Edinburgh to watch the All Blacks take on Scotland as part of the Rugby World Cup – it was fantastic being at the match – a great atmosphere and a lot different from Westpac Stadium!
Rugby aside, Edinburgh is an amazing city – virtually every building is at least 200 years old, it seems, and it is all very clean, and very well maintained. It is a very hilly city, and it was really cold – no doubt some of the lowest temperatures we’ve had since we arrived in the UK.
As some of you may know there was a mess up with my Rugby tickets, and they were either sent to NZ or to me here in London, but no body was home to receive them. As a result I had to go to the Stadium either on match day or the day before to pick them up – which turned out to be no problem at all…
Then after that we jumped on a bus and headed out into the country to go have a look at Rosslyn Chapel – as sad as it sounds, the easiest way to describe this chapel is “that church in the da Vinci Code”. That said it was truly amazing – the detail in the carvings was absolutely mind blowing. The good thing is despite all it’s media attention, this is still an operating chapel, and we were booted out halfway through for a service! We were allowed back in afterwards though.
That evening, we took a ‘haunted tour’ of Edinburgh’s underground vaults. Basically these were built a few hundred years ago to accommodate Edinburgh’s expanding population, and so they built all these underground vaults for trading and commerce to happen. Essentially, being underground, away from the eye of the law, the whole thing turned to mayhem and
On Sunday, match day, we started the day off with a hike up to Edinburgh Castle – this was amazing – you can really see the difference between a place like Dublin where the British were forced out, and a place like Edinburgh which is at the receiving end of a lot of the Monarch’s wealth!
That afternoon it was of course the big game – and we and what seemed like 10′000 other kiwis headed down to Murrayfield which is about 15 minutes out of the city, by car on a normal day (took us a bit longer on match day in a black cab). As I mentioned earlier it was a fantastic atmosphere, and was something special to sit amongst Scots and Kiwis cheering on our boys. The only downside was the tops they wore – it wasn’t as confusing to watch live as it was on TV, but you kind of feel like you wasted your money buying all your All Black kit to go watch them play in grey!
That night we went to a bar called the Three Sisters, which somehow became the official NZ bar of the city, so it was pretty much like being back down Courtney Place after the sevens!
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