A Tale of Two Pubs

On Saturday night, Alette and I went out in search of musical entertainment and drink. There's a lot of pubs in Edinburgh and we'd really only visited our neighbourhood pubs thus far. So, where does one start?

Having recently joined the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), I looked up their recommended pubs. One of those noted by CAMRA are the Wetherspoon pubs that are located throughout the UK (as part of our CAMRA membership, we even have some real ale coupons for Wetherspoon pubs). The closest one to us, The Standing Order (or for a more informative link), was only about a 20 minute walk away. Admittedly, there were both good and bad signs from my research into this establishment. On the good side, they claim a large selection of ales, and had real cider. And they apparently have the best pub toilets in the UK (where I assumed that 'best' would include cleanliness). On the down side, the pub is in a very touristy area, and it is apparently quite busy. We discovered this first-hand on Saturday when we came upon a long line of very young clientele waiting to get in. And since they didn't appear to have live music anyway, we opted to avoid waiting in line and headed for our next pub.

I'd come across The Royal Oak previously when I was looking for things to do in Edinburgh. And since we were looking for live music, I investigated it further before we headed out on Saturday. The Royal Oak is a wee pub but has a lot of character, perhaps with a little bit of The Laff in it. The main floor of the bar, where we spent our time, only fits about 25 people. We were entertained by Alan Hunter and his guitar, which consisted of a number of traditional folk songs with random interludes of swearing at the audience, and quick smoke breaks outside. It was actually a lot of fun. The lower floor of the bar can serve about 20 people, and is more oriented towards traditional folk music performances. We peeked in on Saturday and saw a small group of people singing some traditional tunes. We'd likely return to visit this part of the bar in the future.