I caught the metro to Newcastle, then the bus to Edinburgh after my workshop on Friday. Lily and Ash also had Friday classes, so we all rode up there together. The bus ride was long and slightly annoying, because there was a guy sitting beside me who insisted on telling me all about the different species of squirrels in Scotland, as well as the feeding habits of vultures and other useless bits of info (ex: the excrement from pigeons actually has a high enough acid concentration to burn through your clothes if you don't wash them soon). Needless to say, I was very thankful once we arrived in Edinburgh. We dropped our bags off at the hostel and grabbed dinner at an American-style pub called The Filling Station. By this time it was pretty late and we were all tired from the ride up there, so we took it easy Friday night in the hostel.
Saturday was spent exploring the city. We met up with the rest of our flatmates who were staying in a hostel down the street, and set off with absolutely no plan other than to explore. With a map in hand, we made our way up a big hill to the Edinburgh Castle, where we discovered an unattractive admission rate of £14. Although some other folks had recommended checking it out, none of our wallets felt like dishing out the quid just to go inside, so we moved on. In case you've never been to Scotland before, it really is filled with kilt wearers and bagpipe players. Everywhere. Edinburgh is a very touristy town so it would make sense that it was stereotypically Scottish, but I saw tons of other bagpipe players well outside of the city. These people take their heritage very seriously.
After checking out a few souvenir shops along the main road, we grabbed a cuppa at The Elephant House, which is where JK Rowling wrote the majority of her later Harry Potter books. I had talked to my art professors at App before I left and they all said that Edinburgh had a really great art scene, so I drug a few of my friends to the National Gallery. It housed a very impressive collection of Renaissance work, but I really don't care for the Renaissance that much. Of course I respect the talent of the artists, but all the paintings just look the same to me. I was more interested in the tiny Impressionist collection, which had a few paintings by Monet and Seurat. I hated how quiet the entire place was though -- my phone went off for about half a ring, and before I knew it one of the curators was headed towards me telling me to turn it off. No one spoke above a whisper, and it just wasn't a welcoming environment at all. Exit stage right.
There had been a heavy blanket of fog over the city since the morning, and it was just getting thicker and thicker as the hours passed. Some more walking led us to St. John's Episcopal Church. There wasn't anything too fancy about this church, but the fog made the graveyard surrounding the church particularly eerie. We then checked out the National Museum of Scotland, which was exponentially better than the Gallery in my opinion. The layout of the museum was a little confusing and maze-like, but I thought that it made exploring the museum even more enjoyable. There was an entire section dedicated to the evolution of communication, from light signals to Morse code to rotary phones and every other type of phone you could imagine. Another display case had a lot of models of old Scottish ships, so I snapped some photos to send to my padre (attn padre: maybe you can find a Bryce model of one somewhere, and then make another ocean scene based off old Scotland!). There were tons and tons of other interactive exhibitions and it was just a really fun place to be in. I could have easily spent the entire day there.
For dinner we ate at Frankenstein's, which was by far the coolest pub I've visited since I've been here. At the stroke of six oclock, all the lights went down and thunder/maniacal laughter filled the pub, and a mechanized Frankenstein emerged out of the wall lying down on a table. He sat up, looked around for a bit and, laid back down, and went back to his hole in the wall as the lights went back up. A Harry Potter tour after dinner wrapped up the evening. Because I'm not a Harry Potter fanatic, I had no idea that JK Rowling had written the entire series in Edinburgh. The tour guide took us to a few places of inspiration for Rowling, including the gravesite of Thomas Riddell and William McGonagall, as well as where Rowling's handprints in the cement marked her receipt of the Edinburgh Award in 2008. We knew we'd have to wake up super early for our bus tour the next morning (plus we lost an hour of sleep due to daylight saving's time), so we tried to get in bed at a decent hour.
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