Scotland!! Part 1

Well, it's been awhile. I went to Scotland last weekend and it was AWESOME so this will be mostly about that trip with lots of pics. Anyway, the beginning of last week I was trying to finish my skeletal report so that I wouldn't have to worry about it while I was away. I spend a few days in the human bone lab and time at school trying to write and just ended up mad that I couldn't find the info I needed about my skeleton. I only know that he died sometime between the 11th and 20th centuries. That is a ridiculously huge range and I'm sure there is a better record of when he is from but the school is not making that info available, so the report is a bit sketchy. Okay, rant over.

On Friday I left for Edinburgh, Scotland. I was taking the train, which was lucky because Friday was the day that all air traffic across the UK was stopped. So I headed to the train station around 10 to catch my train into London. Then I had to take the underground to a different station to catch my train up north. Getting to the other station was fine, and I had plenty of time. Then I went to the public restroom and had to pay 30 pence to go in! I was a bit scandalized, but I did it. When they announced what platform my train was on a huge crowd went surging toward it. I wasn't too worried as I figured this was normal. However, when I got on the train almost every seat had a "reserved" ticket on it. I wasn't really sure what this meant as I had never seen them before. Apparently you can reserve a specific seat on trains, but I didn't know this. So what this meant is that because of the planes stopping everyone in London was going by train. And that meant that those of us without a seat number ended up sitting on the floor between train cars. It was a most uncomfortable 4.5 hours. And I couldn't even see anything that we were passing because there were no windows :( We thought maybe we would get seats eventually, but everytime people got off more people got on, so it didn't happen. There were about 25-30 of us where I was standing and more between other cars. Completely ridiculous.

So when I finally got to Edinburgh I took a taxi to the bed and breakfast that we were staying at. The taxi ride was amazing because the city is so beautiful. Just driving down random roads there was amazing architecture and a view of the castle up on the cliff. The woman at the b&b was really nice and the room was pretty good as well, except for the single beds, which are ridiculously small, but it is what we had ordered, so oh well. Danielle got into town later as she had to come from where she was doing her museum placement and hadn't come up with me. When she got in it was about 8:30 so we just headed out looking for something to eat. We ended up a a chinese restaurant and got the crispy duck. It was awesome because they brought half a duck to our table and shredded the meat right there. We thought about going to a pub after, but were both really tired so we just went back to the b&b and went to bed.

The next morning we got up around 9 for breakfast. We had the full Scottish breakfast consisting of eggs, toast, bacon, sausage, some sort of beef thing (which was quite good) baked beans and a fried tomato. It also came with black pudding, but I couldn't convince myself to eat it. Then we set out to explore Edinburgh. We thought the walk to downtown wouldn't be too bad, but actually it kind of was. It took about 30-45 minutes. We did get to see a lot of the city though. Anyway, we stopped in some souvenir shops and then saw a tower. It was the Walter Scott monument and for just 3 pounds you could climb to the top of it. So we did! But it was a windy day and high up it was even windier. That didn't make for the funnest climb. And the top sets of stairs just got narrower an narrower. The last one was barely wide enough to get through. It did have some excellent views of the city though, which you can see in the pics.

Climbing down was harder than going up, but we made it and then headed over to the national gallery. We saw a whole bunch of paintings by Scottish artists and others. And the building itself was very beautiful inside. After the museum we headed up the street and saw a bar that we had seen in a broucher so we decided to stop in for a fancy cocktail. We weren't hungry for lunch after our ridiculous breakfast so that was a good alternative and they were both fancy and delicious :)

After the drink we headed up to the castle. This was a trek because the castle was built on the top of an extinct volcano and we were at the bottom. So there were a lot of steps to get to the top. It was a bit late in the day so we decided to do that castle another day. We started walking down the Royal Mile (the high street of the town leading down from the castle). A little way down we found the Scotch Whiskey Experience and decided we should do it despite my hatred of whiskey. The tour started by riding in a motorized car and seeing how whiskey is made. Then we got out of the car and the guide gave a talk about the different whiskey regions in Scotland. There are 4 and the whiskey tastes differently in each of them. Then we got to smell smells that each region is suppose to taste like. There was fruit, flowers, cookies and smoke. I picked the fruit one. Then we each got a sample of whiskey from the region that we picked. Then we went into a different room to have a tasting. We had to smell it a lot and that about made me sick. And it didn't smell fruity at all. Then we had to swirl it around and watch it drip down the sides of the glass. It was a lot like a wine tasting, actually. Then we had to taste it. I did, but didn't like it so I dumped the rest out. Then we got to keep the glass, so that was exciting, although what I'm going to do with it I don't know... At the place they have the world's largest collection of whiskey, so that was kind of cool to see. Some guy from South America collected it and this place bought it, but won't disclose how much they paid. I'm not sure why, but whatever. Some of the bottles were really neat and decorated crazily. The most expensive was 10,000 pounds I think. Which is crazy!

We headed down the road after the whiskey experience and found St. Giles cathedral. It was really pretty. Admission was free, but you had to pay 1 pound to take photos in the church. So we paid and took a ton of photos. The ceiling in the church was really cool and had been painted bright blue. There were also some really pretty tombs and statues inside.

From there we headed down the road further to Mary King's close, which is an underground area where people used to live. It had been above ground, but then they built the city hall building over it so it became enclosed and people were still living and working there. Edinburgh is weird in that it has a lot of buildings built many stories and very close together. The small alleys between then are called closes and there are doorways to shops and houses down them. I thought this was creep and felt like I would get mugged going down them, but people there use them like normal streets. But they have always been there and got built over is some places. So because the close is a guided tour we couldn't go right away and had to wait until 8pm, or about 3 hours. So we went to find some dinner even though it was pretty early. We ended up at a little pub where I had steak and mushroom pie. It was very good. After dinner we did some souvenir shopping and then still had time to kill so we decided to have dessert. Nothing fancy, but I had apple and blackberry crisp and it was tasty.

It was about time to go on our tour so we headed back to the close. We looked around the gift shop for awhile and then sat down to wait. We got talking to a coupe from Wales who told us that we should go to Cardiff. We've been wanting to go but people here tell us that we shouldn't. The lady said she didn't know why anyone would tell us that and that it is a nice city. So we plan to get there at some point. Finally our tour was called and we got to go down into the close. Our tour guide was suppose to be someone who lived in the close. We saw the rooms of some of the more well off people in the close and then the rooms in which more than one family would have lived. Then we saw where they would have kept animals and where they slaughtered them. The plague was a big problem in these areas and we saw some examples of what the plague looked like and what would have happened to you if your family came down with it. One family's little girl came down with plague and they locked her in her room, where she died. Then they said that the plaster on the walls of many of the rooms contains human ash. Perhaps from the plague victims that were burned to try to stop the spread of plague. Lastly we saw the workshop of the last man to live in the close. They wanted to expand the city hall building above and had to pay him a lot of money to get him to leave his house so they could build over it, but they agreed to let him keep his workshop under the building. It's very weird to think that people would live under another building like that, but they did because they were too poor to do anything else. Eventually the closes were shut up due to crime and disease and this one was just recently opened to tourists.

After that we went to a bar for a bit. It was pretty crowded and there we no seats so we just got one drink and then discovered that they had a ton of shots. We found one called USA and then a French Canadian so we decided we had to have them. They weren't that tasty, but we felt patriotic ;) Then we grabbed a cab home, having learned our lesson about trying to walk. We tried to watch Doctor Who when we got back, but the internet was too slow, so we went to bed.

Sunday we decided to go to Glasgow since we were only an hour away by train. So we got a cab to the train station and caught a train. It had been raining when we left Edinburgh, but by the time we got to Glasgow it had stopped. So we got a ticket to the tour bus that would take us around town and jumped on. We took it to the Kelvin museum (named for the guy who invented the temperature scale) by the University of Glasgow. It was a nice museum, but the labels for the pictures seemed like they were written for children, so that was a bit disappointing. The actual displays were nice though. Then we got back on the bus to go to the Cathedral across town. Behind the cathedral is a Necropolis, so we were pretty excited about that. We missed our stop by the church, but got off at the next stop where we found a tapas restaurant. So we walked back to the church with plans of going back for tapas for dinner. The church was very cool and because it was built into a hill it was multiple layers. And this is when my doubts of JK Rowling creativity started. Actually they had started earlier this year when I went by a pub called the Hogshead in Poole. But in the church was St. Mungo's tomb and his well. So I was a bit disappointed, but more on that when we get back to Edinburgh... The church was really cool inside and had a lot of rooms and chapels that you could go in and look at. Then we headed back to the necropolis, which is a big cemetery basically. There were some beautiful tombs and mausoleums in there. Most of them were in pretty bad shape though, which was sad. People had been in them partying and breaking things. Even the ones that people hadn't destroyed trees and ivy had. It was really sad to see that kind of thing. Especially when I later learned that people have given huge sums of money to have these things built and taken care of.

We spent quite a bit of time touring the necropolis and could have spent longer as it just kept going and going, but we got hungry so we headed back to the tapas place. We had a jug of Sangria and some food. We got there just before 5 so we got the lunch menu, which was awesome because it was much cheaper. The food was good, but not spectacular. The sangria was good though. After dinner we headed back to the train station so that we could catch a train back to Edinburgh before dark. Glasgow is apparently not the place to be at night.

When we got back we got a taxi home and then went and got some take-away indian food a bit later. We then ate it while we watched the Doctor Who that we had downloaded during the day. So nerdy, I know. And it was kind of a crappy episode, but oh well. So I think I'll stop here and get this one posted and finish in a second post. Just to make sure I don't lose all this somehow. So the next post should be up shortly if you're reading this on Sunday morning.