After spending some time sitting on the very top of the Arthur’s Seat, my flatmates and I began the walk back down to the city and mused on the types of birds we’d like to be. A pelican, a vulture, an owl, and me, a seagull.

The more I see of Edinburgh, the more I love it. I have never known a city so widely loved, and I knew that it would be wonderful before I even arrived. Whenever I told people who’d lived in Edinburgh before that I was going to be in Edinburgh for the summer, their eyes lit up. I’d met friends who could talk and talk and talk about the city, about places to see and eat and drink and enjoy. Los Angeles, Paris, New York City, and London do not even receive that response. Imagine: here is this humble Scottish city, so loved, obscuring such metropolitan giants.

I continued to fall in love with Edinburgh as my view of it became more and more panoramic approaching the top of Arthur’s Seat. The day that we went was about as perfect a day as you can get in Edinburgh to hike up Arthur’s Seat. It’s a very rewarding hike because you can see your destination from every point along the trail, and on that day, it was very windy and quite sunny, but with very fast-moving clouds, so just when we felt like we were exerting ourselves, there would be some wind to cool us off.

And, of course, the view was… almost unbeatable. Anyone who knows me knows that I swear by the beauty of Vancouver, that nothing can beat it, but Edinburgh made a good case for itself that day. Already out of breath from hoofing it up the hill, the view of Edinburgh from almost-the-top took my breath away. I know people tend to take that phrase for granted—”take your breath away”—but I learned on that day that there are such views that can actually do that.

The winds were incredibly strong. Even in the streets of the city, it was very windy. At the top, the winds were strong that I would have to get my balance every time I stood up or took a step. A person generally only has two hands at their disposal: one to hold their hair back as they take a selfie, the other to take a selfie! However those winds were so strong that my selfie ended up looking like this:

But hey, it isn’t about my face, it’s about that amazing view.

The only times I took a bus out of Edinburgh were to leave it; I arrived by train and walked everywhere I went in the city. Anyone will tell you that it is a very walkable city, which gives the illusion that Edinburgh is quite a small city, but from up there, you could see the city truly sprawling, radiating around Arthur’s Seat out into the green Scottish countryside and out into the North Sea.

At the top of Arthur’s Seat, birds with their wings outspread seemed not to be able to get anywhere unless the wind was also going that direction. Crows trembled midair, as if on some kind of windy treadmill, and smaller birds were nowhere in sight that high up. But seagulls… seagulls rode the wind with ease, and for that I envy them.

In Berwick-upon-Tweed, a seaside town occupying the northeastern-most corner of England, there were these tiny birds that flew in circles because they would fly away from the beach and be forced back toward the water by the wind. I felt like a Disney princess, because they were basically flying in circles around me. At the same time, I felt distinctly that it must be rather frightening to be so weightless that you cannot control your own direction.

Seeing seagulls when I first arrived in Edinburgh reminded me that I was close to the water again, just like at home in Vancouver. I love that you can see seagulls in the city, but they also—by their very name—belong to the sea. And yet, they are birds before anything else. I envy and admire a creature that can belong to the earth, wind, and sea; it’s also a creature that, like me, finds home by the water.

Everywhere I’ve gone in Scotland where I’ve been struck by incredible beauty—the cliffs on the Isle of Skye, Glen Coe in the highlands, and of course, Arthur’s Seat—I’ve found seagulls. Feet (and tour guides who make you stop looking at Glen Coe so that you can move onto your next stop) seem to be such an inconvenience whenever I watch seagulls. As we made our way back down from Arthur’s Seat, they continued circling the peak. On another day, as I forced myself back to the tour bus, a seagull flew over the pathway deeper into the glen. Couldn’t I just be a seagull and weave between mountains and rivers and fairy falls forever?