Edinburgh, Scotland: Days 3&4

So, I'm basically extremely behind on my blogging, and I'm hoping to blog a bunch of posts until I catch up. Here is the rest of my Edinburgh adventure, almost two weeks late (oops - life is crazy!)

Saturday 20 February, 2010
Saturday we woke up and ate breakfast at the Royal Mile Tavern again. This time, I tried haggis, which is a Scottish specialty. "Haggis is a dish containing sheep's 'pluck' (heart, liver and lungs), minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed with stock, and traditionally simmered in the animal's stomach for approximately three hours." Yum. Although it sounds pretty gross, it actually tastes and looks a lot like stuffing with sausage in it. Go figure.

After breakfast, Ramon, Christine, and I split off from the other boys to go to the Scottish National Gallery. (The other boys went on the Scotch Whiskey Tour). They had a lot of beautiful artwork, but unfortunately the French Impressionism wing was closed. French Impressionism is the only art I know anything about because my class did a unit on it when I was a senior in high school, so I have been finding it really humbling to see the paintings in real life. Anyways, I found one painting that I really liked, entitled "The Three Ages of Man" by Titian. I don't know why I liked it so much, but I did.

After we finished at the National Gallery, we met up with the boys to get some fish n' chips. We ate outside on this terrace that overlooked the city, until we were kindly asked to leave (we were sitting in another restaurant's seats... whoops...) After that, we headed to Edinburgh Castle for the afternoon.

Edinburgh Castle was home to a lot of very interesting things, including dungeons, great halls, a castle (obviously), and a really good POW exhibit. It was also home to a BEAUTIFUL view of the city, that would only be trumped by the view from the mountain on Sunday.

We finished up at Edinburgh Castle, took a nap, and got ready for the evening, where we participated in a Pub Crawl. The crawl brought us to 5 different pubs and one club in Edinburgh, and only cost £10. At each bar we were given a drink or a shot, and we were given free admission to the club, which is usually £10 itself. So, it was a pretty good deal. We had a fun time, and it was a good way to see a lot of Edinburgh and its nightlife all at once.

Sunday, 21 February 2010

Sunday was our last day in Edinburgh, so it was also the day we had to check out of our hostel. Our bus wasn't scheduled to depart until 11:30 pm, so this was the longest day of all because we didn't have a bed or a room to go back to per se.

Christine had had her heart set on hiking up the mountain in Edinburgh since the day that we got there. We started Sunday off by hiking this hill. We got to a point where we weren't sure where to go, or even if we were at the top, and we were pretty exhausted (or at least, I was). As it turns out, we had merely walked to the hike, and what we had already completed wasn't even considered a hike at all. Well, since I'm super lazy, and my asthma was starting to bother me, I ended up not completing the hike, along with Alex who was really sick. We ended up going to a cafe at the bottom of the mountain and having some tea while we waited for the others to finish hiking. A few hours later, they collapsed on a statue at the bottom of the mountain where we met them before heading out to lunch.

After lunch, we went to the Scottish Museum to look around. We saw Dolly, the first cloned sheep, who had been taxidermied in the museum. We also saw numerous other artifacts, and Christine and I (later joined by Ramon and Alex) played dress-up in one part of the museum where they had different Victorian gowns and Samurai helmets that we could try-on.

By this point, we were all so exhausted and had no place to nap since we were checked out of our hostel. We were all pretty low on cash, so we decided to have dinner at Burger King. It had an upstairs dining room, so we sat up there by ourselves for a few hours while we killed time. We did, however, get in a very juvenile ketchup packet fight, which is evidence of how overtired and bored we actually were.

After sitting in Burger King we were desperate to find something to do, so we went back to the hostel to play some board games (they had some available for us to use). After surveying the choices and realizing most games did not have all the necessary pieces, we ended up commandeering a large stack of Trivial Pursuit cards and going to Starbucks to drink coffee (hooray for caffeine!) and quiz each other on random trivia questions. When Starbucks closed at 9:30, we headed back to the hostel to get our things (and return the careds) and go to the bus station. We stopped at Tesco Express on the way to grab some snacks, and arrived at the bus shelter at 10:43, exactly 47 minutes early for our bus.

When we arrived at the bus station, however, our 11:30 bus was not showing up on any of the departure boards. We looked at our confirmation only to find out that we mis-calculated the military time (or, perhaps we got confused at some point during the day) and our bus actually left at 10:30. Oops. After a moment of sheer panic and finding out that the next bus wouldn't depart for London until 11:00am the following day, we managed to high-tail it to the train station and catch the last departing train to London at 11:00 pm. This involved a lot of running which resulted in getting on the train roughly three minutes before it left. Oy vey.

In the end, the train ended up working out very well. It got us back to London about an hour earlier than we would have arrived via bus, and the seats were much more comfortable (and larger) than on the bus. We were able to sprawl out (there were many empty seats) and lay down across two seats and get some real sleep. There were also complimentary ScotRail sleeping masks! Hooray for sleeping masks!