Hi, I’m Meenashe and I’m a second year medical student. We decided to focus our SSC project this semester on our lives as medical students in Edinburgh, which have obviously been a lot more different than our experiences last year pre-Covid! Despite the restrictions there are still plenty of fun things we can all do to keep sane.
Venturing to new city sights
One thing I realised when speaking with my friends was that despite all of us having the freedom to go wherever we wanted last year, barely any of us actually did! So there were some places in Edinburgh that I could walk to blindfolded but so many that had never even crossed my mind to visit. This year I decided I would make a more conscious effort to sightsee, and get some fresh air whilst I was at it.
The Botanics
As current restrictions allowed this, I visited the Royal Botanic Gardens with a friend – rather naively granted the season – but had a good time regardless! I would definitely recommend visiting the gardens during Spring/Summer time when there are actually flowers (yes it did take me getting there to realise this).
Despite the lack of flowers, the Gardens still made a fun (roughly two hour) excursion, a highlight being their rock garden. The Botanics are free to visit but you do need to book a ticket beforehand so that they can monitor visitor capacity and keep us all as safe as possible.
The Botanics during non-pandemic times host many special events during the year, the highlight being the Christmas gardens, something that I would recommend visiting once allowed.
One exciting thing a day
To keep us from going crazy, my flatmates and I try to do one ‘exciting’ thing a day, which, as sad as it sounds, ended up being us going to every Lidl in Edinburgh, something I can say that we have now accomplished! This was something that entertained us a lot more than anticipated, and gave us a welcome break from sitting on our laptops all day. Next on the list are the Aldis!
