City visions

To truly understand living in Edinburgh, you have to accept that it is all about changing elevations.

There is no direct route to from anything to anywhere in Scotland's capital. The only straight line in Auld Reekie is for tourists. It runs from the Palace of Hollywood House up the Royal Mile to Edinburgh Castle, and as a student elbowing your way through the crowds of Spanish backpackers and Americans on the trail on non-existent roots will make less and less sense the longer you spend studying here.

Instead, seasoned Edinburgh students learn that getting from A to B has little meaning here; paths take you down dark dripping closes, through derelict breweries and along overgrown canals- always rising and falling with the land, one minute along broad leafy terraced streets, the next pulling past derelict tenements and warehouses. You won't have to be drunk to wind your way home at night.

Living in Edinburgh is about suspending your sense of place, distance and direction. Roads run under roads, streets lie buried under buildings; the Queen's Scottish residence sits next to social housing; facing it the Scottish parliament, a squat, defiant and angular expression of nationalism set among baroque spires, pebble dash and the green slope of Arthur's Seat. Bankers and insurance salesmen fill the same club nights as students and wideboys. Anywhere else, the jumble wouldn't make sense. May be it doesn't here either.

The profusion of landmarks would seem to affirm Edinburgh as a national capital with its royal residence and parliament 'all our ain', but at times it seems like a little more than a village. If you live within a few square meters from the Shore to the edges of the semi-detachedd-dom of Morningside, as most students do, walking around you will see the same faces a over and over – friends, classmates, lecturers, the guy who served you your pint the night before, the girl that you didn't call back the morning after.

Other than the risk of getting smacked with John Knox's pants at graduation, the city wears its weighty cultural history lightly; first year University of Edinburgh English Literature undergraduates walk nervously up the stairs to tutorials for which they haven't done the reading in the building that Francis Jeffrey founded The Edinburgh Review in. Napier students drink at the union bar in the shadow of Merchiston Castle – John Napier's birthplace – and get lost in the halls of the former psychiatric hospital at Craighouse, deliberately designed like a maze to prevent patients from escaping.

What does it say about Edinburgh that the same is true – except it happened by accident?
(The Skinny, 2010-2011- couldn't have said it better)