On Pub Crawling in Edinburgh

The process is simple.

You go from one pub to the next, buying beers. In Edinburgh, Scotland, your most reliable choices are these: Tennent’s, Innis & Gunn, and Guinness.

If you, like the author of this article, are enrolled at the University of Edinburgh and possess an ID card from the same institution, you can find pubs where pints of Tennent’s cost about £3 after a student discount. See, for example, the Southsider — an always-crowded venue whose bartenders dole out cheap pints like they’re feeding pigeons in New York City. Thus, on any weekend or (for reasons unclear to me) Wednesday, you’ll encounter throngs of your peers imbibing the stuff, then swaying out into the streets to find more.

To a greater or lesser extent, they’re probably on a pub crawl.

The first step of an Edinburgh pub crawl resembles a religious pilgrimage, due to the (un)steady progress of people from one place (their residence) to another (a pub), united by a common cause. As the night goes on, characters first encountered during this initial trek might reappear, making cameos across the city. Up and down Cowgate, near the Royal Mile, somewhere across the bridge, in New Town — distances and places converge, leaving only anecdotes and vignettes in their wake.

In Edgar Wright films, it seems like pub crawls involve sitting, but this is a fictional liberty. You’re probably not going to find vacant tables at pubs. If you do, prepare to be jostled by passersby whose trajectories are more erratic than normal. Noise saturates all the pubs — sometimes the roar of voices, sometimes the pounding of musical instruments, often both. Pub crawling isn’t a quiet endeavor. Rather, it’s a process of forgetting yourself in the crowd, talking to whoever seems talkative, smiling at people you think you recognize, apologizing when you run into them. You won’t conduct any intelligible conversations. It’s too loud, and the person you’re talking to might not be making sense anyway. Instead, you talk to other people to say, “I see you’re here, too!” and invite them into the loose web of society that forms around happy, tired, sociable pub crawlers.

A benefit of drinking throughout the night is that it masks the artificiality of the whole thing. You’re oblivious to the signs throughout Edinburgh that advertise “guided pub crawls,” whatever that might mean; you don’t mind the steady outflow of pounds from your wallet, which at earlier hours is a symptom of the curated business model to which you’re subscribing; you entirely forget that the beers are themselves catalysts for social interaction, intended to reduce the barrier between you and conversations with strangers. All of it just becomes fun, and intellectual considerations get set aside for later.

As your night becomes a string of different businesses, memories, and conversations half heard, you begin to understand where pub crawls get their cultural importance. These long, rambling nights out are best recounted in long, rambling fashion. They’re an unpredicted saga in miniature, even if the details are entirely predictable and only interesting when you’re living them.

Does pub crawling in Edinburgh (or any proper city) ruin Colby parties? It does, a little bit. I’m not sure how I’ll go back to the cramped, sweaty interiors of the Alfond Apartments, where variants of the common cold circulate like gossip.

But in a city of Edinburgh’s dimensions, on a regular day, you’re one among countless unfamiliar faces. Each pub crawl is an effort to dispel this feeling—to convince yourself that strangers are just unmet acquaintances. At Colby, even if the parties sometimes feel like absurd charades, this, at least, isn’t true. People you see on a night out are the same ones you’ll find in the dining halls. And when you yell an unintelligible greeting over the noise of a JBL speaker, it usually includes the other person’s name.

 

~ Elias Kemp `27