Edinburgh
Trip Start
May 13, 2008
1
3
16
Trip End
Jun 26, 2008
Edinburgh,
Scotland,
United Kingdom
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Unfortunately for both of us we were feeling pretty crappy after all the traveling. Jill was especially feeling bad and Jenn was so tired we allowed ourselves a couple hours to nap before venturing out to the streets for dinner. We found a cute place and had a panani for cheap which became rediculously expensive after the pound dollar exchange rate. We will do our best to save some cash in the UK but it is proving quite difficult. We searched around for a while to get cell phones but found that prices were steep and we would need a new sim card for every county so we decided to just use our own American cell phone sparingly. It is expensive for us to text out but we can recieve text for free so text away!! We just won't reply! We are talking to people on Skype so that is fun but requires the net which doesn't seem to be free anywhere!!!
Later that evening after dinner we met some people in the hostel. One of our dorm mates was an interesting charater named Thomas from Argentina. He was fun but actually called both of us lazy cows and said it was a complement because he thought cows were beautiful and great! We think he was crazy. We also met some Canadians and decided to check out the nightlife. Jill was feeling a little to sick to party so she went to bed early...about 11pm and Jenn had a great time with Thomas and the Canadians...she was out late watching live music at a bar called Live Music Bar...how original and went searching for some night clubs with little success. It was still a fun night tho! The next morning we woke up at 8am even tho Jenn was running on about 4 hours of sleep! We had breakfast of cereal and toast with English butter...yum!!
Because we knew we had 2 days to see the city we decided to take a train and see the surrounding city of Stirling. We thought we heard Harry Potter was filmed at the castle but we were wrong. It was still a cool town and a sweet castle! It was actually the castle that Robert the Bruce and William Wallace (from Braveheart) fought at for Scottish independence! It made us want to watch Braveheart again. We took a tour around the castle which was great because of all the great history and we met some newlyweds from Oklahoma who we hope to keep in touch with. Exhausted and starving we walked around the quaint streets of Stirling trying to find some good, but cheap food (a difficult task indeed) we finally agreed upon a pub and had small dinner that we rushed through when we realized we had to catch the train back to Edinburgh. After and run to the train station we boarded and had a quick nap on the train to revitalize us for the night to come.
Back in Edinburgh, we returned to the hostel for about ten minutes and made the quick decision to go on a ghost tour that left in ten minutes. We took our new French Canadian roommate with us on the spooky tour. On the tour we learned about the darker side of the history of Edinburgh. Apparently Edinburgh burned the most witches out of any city in history and their ghosts haunt the graveyards becuase a mark of a which was red hair (Scottland has one of the highest population of redheads in the world) so that was a lot of executions. We also heard some other erie stories in the dark of the graveyards and Edinburgh streets on the sites where they occured. Graverobbings, murders, vampires, hangings, suicides, and madness were just a few of the subjects of the ghost stories. After the tour everyone had a pint together and we met yet more Canadians to go out with. We returned to the live music bar and had some fun until we returned home out of sheer exhaustion hoping to have an energetic following.
