Friday, 2 November: Edinburgh

I'm going to do this day-by-day, because in my word processor, it's 11 pages and 3673 words long. I wish it were this easy to write a paper for my classes. So there will be at least one somewhat interesting post a day for the next few days, and some pictures as well. Once I stop being so lazy, there will also be pictures on Flickr, providing it doesn't freak out that I'm actually trying to post pictures. Maybe by next week. If you're lucky.

Friday I got up at 3:30 AM to catch the 4:44 bus to the train station. I left Norwich at around 6 and got into Edinburgh at 11:38. I think I really prefer Scotland and Northern England to the South/East Anglia. I met tons of people and the area is much more rural. At one point on the train, I looked out the window, and on one side was a field full of sheep, and on the other was the sea. It was gorgeous. Edinburgh was simply fantastic. It has a very stately sort of gloominess to it, and at the same time is incredibly fun. It is very touristy, though, mainly because we never really left the Royal Mile. The Royal Mile is the main street running from the castle to Holyrood Palace, the Queen's Scotland residence. That's where all the really famous buildings are, like St. Gile's Kirk (church).

I met Allie and we wandered up and down the Royal Mile before going back to the train station to pick up Catie. Then we checked into our hostel and went to the Writer's Museum, which memorializes Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Robert Louis Stevenson. I've read pieces by all three (although only one poem by Burns--the title of Of Mice and Men comes from one of his poems--thank you, Mr. Last), Catie's never read any, and Allie's read Stevenson, I think. I don't remember. We also went to the Scottish National Museum for about an hour. It was free to get in, and we got to see the body of Dolly the sheep. That was pretty exciting. We also saw an early Scottish guillotine. It was cool. (Don't get me started on my penchant for medieval torture devices.)

Catie and Allie also had multiple opportunities to get dressed up:

That night, we went out for dinner and then went on a ghost tour of the city. Ghosts have seemingly lost their power to scare me, because I wasn't scared and I was able to sleep that night, but I know last year or before, the tour would have terrified me. The first part, we wandered the Royal Mile, with our guide giving us some history of Edinburgh and telling us what life would have been like. The second part, we went into these vaults under the city that are "haunted", as in people genuinely believe there's supernatural stuff that goes on down there, like inexplicable changes in body temperature and orbs of light in photos. We didn't see anything, though, and like I said, I wasn't too scared. If people had been jumping out at us, though, I don't think I could have handled it. Then we went and hung out at an Irish pub down the street from the hostel that played American music. It was weird, but we had a good time.