Browns Close

The lower end of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh is called Canongate, which is where we live. As you walk along Canongate there are handfuls of little doorways that lead back into courtyards and "tenement buildings", as they say here. They call these "closes", so as you walk along you see little signs marking White Horse Close, Cowans Close, etc. We live in Browns Close, which we recently learned sits on the site of an old tenement building that was constructed by Bailie John Paterson with his portion of the winnings of a golf match in which he partnered with the Duke of York and to compete against two English noblemen. The Englishmen claimed that golf was an English game, prompting the Duke of York (later known as James VII) to challenge them to a match, which was held in 1681. The matter was settled when the Scots won the match. Paterson established the tenement building with his half of the prize money and the building was known as Golfers Land. The Duke had a stone carving of the coat of arms affixed to the wall and the golfers' motto 'Far and Sure' was inscribed on it. Sadly, the original building was torn down in 1960 to make place for Sir Basil Spence's development of a pub called Jenny Ha's. The pub is still there on the Royal Mile today, and our flat is just behind it in Browns Close. I've never lived in a place with so much history - it's pretty amazing.

After that story, the details of our flat are rather unimpressive, but here they are nonetheless. We are guessing that our flat is about 650 square feet. Our kitchen is definitely not made for more than one cook to be in the kitchen, which is good news for Tony. Pretty much everything here is tiny - cars, flats, grocery stores, grocery packaging, washing machines and refrigerators. Not much more than a few pairs of pants, a few shirts, and a few socks will fit in the washing machine at one time, so we'll have to become more consistent on keeping up with laundry! Here is the kitchen, looking in from the living room (for some reason, all washing machines are in the kitchen here):


This is the counter top that is behind the door in the above picture. As you can see, our stove, freezer and fridge are all very small. We'll have to become more consistent in grocery shopping as well, because you can't stock up for more than a few days at a time with a mini-fridge in the kitchen! This is the view of the living room from the kitchen doorway. We have a small balcony off the living room there which we'll enjoy having on less rainy days.

Same room, but looking back towards the kitchen. Every room has a door that can be closed to section it off from the rest of the house - they seem to like that here as we've seen it in every flat thus far. Between the kitchen window and the balcony window we get a lot of natural light, which I'm so thankful for.
This is the hallway that the living room door above leads to. If you take a right, you're in the bathroom and if you take a left, you're in the bedroom. Here's the bathroom!

And the bedroom...The bedroom has good closet space and a small built in desk in the corner. Tony doesn't plan to use it for studying, so I've taken it over for my jewelry, perfume and array of hair products since there's so little storage space in the bathroom. Thanks honey!
This is the view off of our balcony - Calton Hill.

And to conclude the tour, this is the courtyard behind our flat.

Last night I attempted to make chocolate chip cookies, Tony's ultimate comfort food. I had heard from a friend that they don't have chocolate chips here, which is still rather surprising to me. Ingredients are slightly different around the world, but even so I wasn't expecting the cookies to come out as strangely as they did. The batter had a hint of the tangy flavor of muffin mix, but was still pretty good. The cookies themselves, however, came out with a very odd texture and flavor - much more like little cakes than cookies: Perhaps the milk chocolate Cadbury's bar I chopped up is too milky to be substituted for semi-sweet chips. It's hard to say what went wrong because the ingredients all seemed fairly comparable to the US, so I'll have to do some testing. This batch will go with me to the dinner I'm going to help serve to the homeless here in partnership with the church we visited on Sunday, and I trust they will enjoy them more than we will.