A magical evening with Harry Potter

If I was asked what my best memories of my trip to Edinburgh was, undoubtedly the Harry Potter walking tour would be in the top 3. If there is one place in the world a die hard Harry Potter fan must go to, it is Edinburgh - the very birthplace of Harry Potter! So, after months of grueling research, we found a good tour guide that would take us around the city, showing us the prominent Harry Potter attractions. The places that inspired the settings of the films or the people who inspired a few characters in the series. I just couldn’t wait to see it all!! 

This was a trip I was planning for months in advance. I had re-read all the Harry Potter books and packed my Harry Potter sweatshirt and scarf. I was all set to enjoy the best evening of my life!

We spent that morning at the National Museum, looking at various ancient artifacts. I was so excited that I barely remember all the things we saw there. My eyes were on my watch, waiting for it to turn 4. Quarter to 4, we walked across the street from the museum to the statue of Greyfriars Bobby. This was where the tour was supposed to start.

Bobby

The statue is of a dog named Bobby. Bobby was a Skye terrier belonging to a man named John Grey. When his master died and was buried in Greyfriar's Kirkyard (meaning churchyard) Bobby guarded his grave faithfully for 14 years, till he himself died of old age. And so, he became famous for spending the rest of his life guarding his master's grave. In Bobby's memory, the local people build a statue for honoring his loyalty to his master.

I took this opportunity to explain to my mom why dogs were amazing pets and yet again begged her for one of my own. She shook her head and gave me the same response that she gave me the last 101 times I had asked this question - ‘when you grow up and have your own home, then you can have a dog’. I made a face and turned back to look at Bobby.

I noticed many people rubbing Bobby’s nose. I asked my parents about it. They told me that rubbing Bobby’s nose brought good luck. I too rubbed his nose and wished that the dog’s good luck charm would rub on me! Hopefully, this would get me a dog of of my own soon!

I looked at the other people who had come for the tour. There were two other girls huddled up in sweaters; it was  a cold day. I was wearing my Gryffindor sweatshirt and a Gryffindor scarf. Yep, you guessed it right, I am a huge Gryffindor fan. I smiled politely at the other girls, and soon I got talking with one of them who had come from Netherlands with her uncle just to experience the Harry Potter tour. We talked about our most and least favorite parts in the books and realized we had a lot in common. And we walked together for the rest of the tour!

We had waited next to Bobby’s statue for about 5 minutes when we saw a woman in a flowing black cloak walking towards us. She looked really smart in the cloak. In her hand was a brown package that she wouldn’t reveal to anyone. She introduced herself as Charlotte, our tour guide.

After a brief introduction, we all followed our humorous guide away from the crowd into a slightly isolated place. Our first stop was a graveyard. As soon as we entered the graveyard, a cool breeze seemed to descend upon us. Here we all huddled up around Charlotte and she pointed out the graves of various people whose names inspired J.K Rowling. Like Riddle, Moody, McGonagall etc. 

The tombstone of a man with the name McGonagall

The Riddle family that inspired the Dark Lords first name

                                                   

We also saw the shabby graves that Harry Potter fans had made for Sirius Black and Amos Diggory. They definitely hadn’t put much effort into these. In fact, on Amos Diggory’s tomb, they had only written Amos Dig- on a piece of rough stone. Looks like the ‘gory’  part was forgotten! Sirius Black’s tomb was slightly better. I was kind of disappointed that there was no tombstone for Severus Snape, he’s my favorite character in the series!

The tour was going great and I couldn’t wait to see the other sites. We saw another bunch of places that inspired the Harry Potter film setting. One that I particularly liked  was a street that looked exactly like Diagon Alley. To add to the slightly uncanny resemblance, this street also had a big marble structure on one end that looked exactly like Gringotts!

Soon, we were in front of a cafe called "The elephant house". The cafe had the words - Harry Potter,   'The Boy Who Lived’ written in front of it. We were told that this was the place where J.K. Rowling wrote a part of the Harry Potter books.  No wondered it was so highly decorated. It even had a picture of Harry Potter on all paper cups in which they gave out  their coffee! Talk about wanting publicity!

The Elephant House the 'Birthplace of Harry Potter'

A few minutes later, we stopped in front of another cafe. No one could figure out how this cafe had any connection to Harry Potter; it didn’t look like any building in the movie and it didn’t have any tourists flocking around it. Charlotte told us that this was the actual cafe where J.K. Rowling actually wrote the first book of the series in. So this was the actual birthplace of Harry Potter! On looking closely, we noticed a tiny sign engraved on the side of the shop that said ‘J.K. Rowling wrote the Harry Potter series here’!. 

Just before the tour ended, Charlotte herself showed us some magic and asked us to try it out. She handed each of us a wooden wand and taught us a simple spell that would change the traffic lights to green, enabling us to cross the road. The name of the spell was Roccio Lumos. It was pretty cool, she would tell us when to say  the incantation, and voila, after we swished our wands the traffic  light would change from red to green!  After using the spell to cross a couple more traffic lights, I figured out that she knew the exact number of seconds that it would take for the signal to change lights and that is why the spell seemed to work! She almost had me fooled with that one!

Next stop – the hotel where  J.K. Rowling wrote the last few books of the Harry Potter series. I pondered on how she changed from writing in a cafe to writing from a 5 star hotel, from being a single mom hardly able to manage all the expenses to an author of a best-selling series. She is truly an inspiration for all of us. Despite facing failure uncountable number of times, she never gave up and that is why she is what she is today. As someone rightly said, every failure is a lesson, if you are not willing to fail, you are not ready to succeed.  If J.K. Rowling had given up, then we wouldn’t have had the blockbuster series that we have now!

This was going to be the last stop of the tour. Looking at my watch, I was surprised to see how fast 2 hours had passed! Initially, my parents had thought that this tour was going to be a waste of time.  But by the time the tour ended, even they grudgingly agreed that the tour was amazing!

For me, this tour was more than amazing. It was a memory that I would cherish forever! At the end of the tour, I was filled with an inexpressible sense of happiness and thrill that I always experience whenever I read the Harry Potter books!