While the city centre of Edinburgh is OKish the surrounding areas are just awful. Mind you having lived bang in the city centre for a while in a flat made into bedsits full of drunks who broke the door off of the toilet / bathroom I wouldn’t want to live there ever again. There was a lot of violence. My (Irish) ex-boyfriend and I went in a pub in Edinburgh where they really hated English people and we were threatened, “asked” to leave the pub and the barman / landlord ignored us when we asked for a drink.
I also lived on the Gorebridge estate on the outskirts of Edinburgh for a while and my god that was rough. There was a crappy little supermarket and two pubs nearby and that was about it. We weren’t really welcome there either. We lived in caravans and the bus driver asked if we lived “on the ***** site” and we were silly enough to say yes and he refused to let us on the bus. This happened twice. So obviously the bus drivers had connived together to try and drive us out of the area.
There were a lot of drugs in the areas around Edinburgh when I lived there. The film Trainspotting has it spot on. Actually I love Irvine Welsh and understand all of his writing after living in Edinburgh and other parts of Scotland for two and a half years altogether (He wrote Trainspotting). I also lived in a few other Scottish places but Edinburgh was the one that stands out in my memory. Me and the ex-other half also went to another hellhole further north and we booked a room only to be asked to leave because we were English and the landlady couldn’t guarantee our safety. Apparently the other residents had complained about us being foreign i.e. English.
One of the nicer Scottish places I spent time in was the countryside right beside a loch. It was stunningly beautiful. Unfortunately after a while boredom set in and I wanted to be nearer to shops and pubs. I don’t know if I’ll ever visit Scotland again, if I do then Glasgow will be where I’m headed and this time it’ll be three days in a nice hotel.
