EDINBURGH - Thousands visit Edinburgh every August for the Fringe Festival, and its proper sibling, the Edinburgh Festival, which features more traditional takes on theater, music, song and dance. The catalog of events is mind-boggling -- last year's program for the Fringe alone was 224 pages long -- and the fare is an experimental rush of nascent innovation and classic talent.

Where else can you enjoy operatic interpretations of Calamity Jane having an orgasm or the Klezmer-Balkan infused music of Moishe's Bagel or the Sardinian guitarist Davide Sanna teaming up with the didgeridoo-playing Nathan Kaye? A lineup of the world's best rising comedians? A moving reading of "Dylan Thomas in America?" Or very talented young actors interpreting Brecht, Marlowe and George Lucas, occasionally at the same time?

I spent a week at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival last August with my cousin Lemonia (which means Lemon Tree in Greek). Because all the hotels had been sold out for weeks, we contacted a program called Festival Beds, which helped us find a room at the beautiful home of an elegant Scottish lady who made fantastic bread that we ate happily every morning with thick Scottish honey and fresh butter.

After breakfast, we walked through a vast leafy park, watching Chinese acrobats rehearse for their shows, past a packed post office full of postcard-mailing tourists and along one of Edinburgh's perfectly designed streets full of perfectly designed florist shops, pharmacies, pubs and cafes until we reached the Royal Mile.

Even by 10 a.m., this historic stretch of Edinburgh -- which runs between Edinburgh Castle and Holyroodhouse Palace (the Queen's residence here) -- was already bustling with hundreds of visitors in town for the Fringe. Every day we walked the stretch for hours, perusing the numerous bagpipes serenades, the Korean Shakespearean dancers, the skinny English teenagers singing John Mayer with a Sex Pistols accent, the fire-juggling Australian unicyclist. Somewhere in between we bought tickets for shows, including Brecht's "The Wedding," a dinner-theater version of "Macbeth," the jazz singer Madeleine Peyroux, and acoustic night at a very funky club called the Medina. The bill at the Medina included the Sardinian-born Sanna, the Botticelli-locked Kaye, the hot-babe frontman of a jazzy group called Gecko and a fantastic band called Last Great Wilderness, whose waves of lush guitars vibrated in my chest long after they had finished their set. We went home in the wee hours of near daylight. Happily exhausted, we slept like rocks until the next morning, when we entered the Fringe fray all over again.