We left at 11pm on Thursday night (19 February, yes, I went to Scotland for Dad's birthday :) on an overnight bus to Edinburgh. We got in at around 7:40am on Friday morning and were all kinds of exhausted. We went and checked into our hostel, Princes Street Backpackers, which was very nice and then slept til about 11am, since none of us really got much sleep on the bus. We decided to just go exploring, and walk around that day and use the next 2 days for the real touristy stuff. Only 6 of us had arrived at the time as 2 of our friends had stayed for Friday classes and were arriving the next morning.
Once we were ready to go, we hit the streets... and it was raining. The first inside thing we found to do was go into the National Gallery. We walked around there for quite a while, got some food at this place called The Wash Bar, which had amazing nachos. Sounds weird, but they actually have nachos everywhere around here, and this place had great guacomole :) Then we headed out for more exploration to the Royal Mile, where the streets are pretty much lined with tourist shops. We stopped for coffee to decide what to do for the rest of the day and decided to do a ghost tour at 9:30pm. To waste time before that we did more shopping, specifically looking for this one store that's all hats (Fab-Hat-Trix) that we didn't get to before it closed unfortunately, and then stopped at this great, cheap pub (Maggie Dickson's) for dinner.
At Maggie's we met a group of Irishmen that were having a Stag night... without the groom, haha. They were singing very loudly across the pub so we joined them and then started a song war with them and another table where we all were trying to sing our sing the loudest. Of course this eventually prompted one of the Stag night guys to come over and talk to us. We convinced him to sing a traditional Irish song for us and then the other table joined him in singing it because apparently they were Irish as well. I got the whole thing on video, haha.
We headed over to the ghost tour afterwards, which was a tour of the underground city. It was alright, more informational than scary, though the guide certainly made on effort, and at the end was successful as another guy jumped out at us when the only light that we had was from a small flashlight.
Day Two: I had to get up early because Briann and Scott's bus was getting in at 7:30am and I somehow volunteered to make sure they got to the hostel alright. Briann was put in the same dorm as the rest of us but there wasn't room for Scott, so he was down the hall.
Something I should mention about the hostel, especially for all you facebookers that have seen the interesting tags on the photos I posted over there: each room in the hostel was lettered and each bed inside that room was named something that began with that letter. We were in room H with a guy we nicknamed Mr. Spain until we found out his name was Salva (short for Salvador) who had been in Edinburgh since September and in that hostel for 3 weeks (we aren't sure why as he spoke very little English) and a couple from France who also spoke very little English. Anyway, back to the bed names... here's the list: Briann-Herb, Mr. Spain-Hell, Colleen-Hallucinate, Erica-Haunted, Shana-Happy, Jessica-Hairy, French guy-Hansome, French girl-Harlot, Jackie-Hot Stuff, and me-Horny. Yeah, that would happen to me. And then Scott was in room J in the bed named Jumbo. Anyway, somewhere along the line we all decided that we should start calling each other by our bed names... haha.
We found a deal for a ticket that got you admitted to 3 different attractions and on all the hop on, hop off tours, so we hopped on one got to see the Royal Botanical Gardens and the Royal Yacht, Brittainia and then had dinner at Zizzi's, a chain italian restaurant. As it turned out we ended up missing the last tour bus and had to take a public one back to town.
At the restaurant we had decided to try to see Tom Riddle's grave (he is the namesake of the villian in Harry Potter for anyone who doesn't know) but that was during the day, and by the time we got to Greyfriar's Cemetary it was really dark. We attempted to find the grave anyway, but it was too dark and most of us we a little creeped out to be in a cemetary in the pitch black with only our cell phones as light. We did, however see the cafe that JK Rowling wrote a good portion of Harry Potter at. And we saw Greyfriar's Bobby, the statue in memory of a dog who visited his deceased master's grave everyday until the dog dies himself.
Then, it was back to Maggie's for the night. We got a big table at the back and played the drinking game King's. I only had 2 Strongbows, for the record, there are witnesses. The rules that we had (whenever you draw a King from the deck you make a rule) were as follows: anyone (except Shana who made the rule) who said the word "and" had to standup, shake their butt and blow a raspberry, anyone who said the word "drink" had to pretend to have T-rex arms until someone else said "drink" and anyone who said "what" had to put their hand over their face like a claw until someone else said "what" and took it away (the forth King never got drawn). In the slideshow you'll see Erica doing both at the same time. Her and I basically passed the clas between the two of us all night. We also met another Stag party that night, made up of guys from Cornwall, England. Me and some others left at this point, but the people that stayed met a separate group of Englishmen and a couple Norwegians leading us to the conclusion that there are no Scotish people in Scotland, haha.
Day Three: Visited the Scott Monument and then took a bus tour to Edinburgh Castle and Hollyrood Palace followed by a nice dinner (that started off not so nice as two people decided to try haggis and Briann and I almost puked from the smell). A little bit more souvenier shopping and drinks (hot chocolate) at The Wash Bar. Our bus left at 10pm and got back into London at 6 something. Good thing I didn't have class until 4pm! I slept the next two days away :)
There's not much to tell about our last day, but I still have a ton of pictures from it. Some are stolen from other people though, because me camera ran out of battery on our way to the Palace.
Well, that' s all for now, folks! Next time I'll tell you about the trip we took to Jane Austen's house this weekend!
Missing you all terribly,
Kendyl
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