Because this website is being incredibly tempermental, I am having trouble uploading all the photos that I would like to share with you. I might just have to add them a little bit at a time. Scotland. Scotland was great. Scotland was great because I got to see and spend time with my Clairey in a really beautiful place, and it also allowed me the opportunity to travel by myself for the first time in my life. I did the transit stuff by myself. This required me to get up at 2:45 AM on Friday to catch a cab at 3:30 on the lonely streets of a cold London morning in order to make it to Victoria Station to catch the Gatwick Express to Gatwick airport at 4:30 in order to make my 6:05 flight. Whew! That was a mouthful.
"Why the hell did she book such an early flight?" you may ask.
Answer is simple. It was the cheapest.
Because I hate to fly (something I realize more and more every time I'm on a plane) I was completely awake for the short flight.
The guy sitting in front of me kept scratching his frizzy flaxen head. I thought of my mom upon seeing this. I figured she would have commented on his need for Friz-Ease, or said that he had fleas, or called him Scratchy, or something. I love my mom.
Once we started to descend into the Edinburgh airport my attention switched from a memory of a documentary that I once saw describing all the different types of lice in Bob Marley's hair when he died, to looking down upon the vast verdigris of the Scottish Highlands. I realized as we got closer and closer to the ground that the little white splotches that sporadically appeared among mounds of green were in fact snow. It was absolutely beautiful.
At the airport I reunited with Clairey. She was wearing about 6 layers. "Girl from Tucson goes to Ireland and freezes her ass off," she explained.
Once we got to Edinburgh we got lost a few times, thanks to my inability to make any sense of a universally acknowledged system of direction (Never Eat Shredded Wheat), and then we found our hostel. We dropped off our bags and headed back out into the cold to scrounge up some breakfast. We stumbled across The Three Sisters, a pub that served breakfast starting at 9:00AM. We were starved. We didn't think twice about eating there. And I was pretty happy to be eating at a place called "The Three Sisters" in the land of Macbeth. (My internal monologue: The Three Sisters> the Wëird Sisters> there were three of them> Yes!)
Claire ate some haggis while I looked on in horror. It looked like it just may have come out of a cauldron.
All in all, the grub wasn't bad.
We went back to our hostel to embark on a guided walking tour of the city with Tom. Tom introduced himself saying, "Hi. I'm Tom. I'm from Australia, and I've been in Edinburgh for three weeks."
Yep. This was going to be good.
Tom wasn't all that bad. Though in the end he turned out to be a bit of a pretentious-know-it-all-jerk-face, the tour was entertaining if not completely enjoyable due to Claire and my lack of sleep from the night before.
He shared with us many gory details about the bloody history of Edinburgh. About ghosts and the drowning of witches and sewage run off things that I'd rather not think about. (Quite the charmer, as you can surely tell.) He also introduced the idea of going on the "City of the Dead Tour" which Claire had her heart set on.
Since I know better than to subject my sensitive constitution to such things, I refused to go. I don't doubt for a minute that it was better this way. Especially after Claire's friend Allison told us that when she and a friend went on this tour when they first moved to Edinburgh to attend law school, her friend was so frightened that she literally passed out on the tour in some crypt someplace. That totally would have been me. No thank you!
(And Adam, if you're reading this, go ahead and make fun of me. I would rather not pass out in any crypts thankyouverymuch!)
Friday night we went on a pub crawl. The night concluded at a pub/ bar called Frankenstein. The DJ at this place was straight up out of his mind. His playlist included:
Stronger- Kanye West
Can't Touch This- MC Hammer
Something by The Strokes
A song by Dolly Parton
and a number of other v. random selections that Claire probably remembers in total.
DAY 2: We went around the city, seeing a number of museums and eating the best piece of apple pie that has ever touched my lips for dessert after lunch.
Something very interesting happened when we were looking for a place to eat for dinner.
A woman came up to us when we were looking at a menu on a restaurant window. She told us to get inside because the sirens meant that trouble was coming. (We had no clue what sirens she was talking about.) Then she pulled out a red umbrella and said that she had been attacked before.
Well, whatever her delusional mind may have been attacked by, I can assure you that her teeth hadn't been attacked by a toothbrush at any time in recent past.
While doom never befell us, as soon as this woman had imparted her wisdom, this group of drunken teenagers came rambling through the street. This guy, maybe 13 or 14, was yelling and trying to free himself from the clutches of two young girls who were clinging onto him, trying to drag him to the ground, and yelling back at him with a volume that matched his own. Behind them walked a group of older guys. I don't know if they were looking to have a word or two with screaming boy, but they didn't appear to be too happy.
Claire and I then found our way into a restaurant that was trying to be an Applebee's (and served Claire a chocolate shake that tasted a little too much like cake batter for it's own good). As we sat down at the window to wait for a table to become available, the street outside became eerily empty, and a group of mean looking guys ducked into an alleyway across the street. For a while I was convinced that a street brawl was about to ensue. In my mind this brawl resulted in one of the mean looking Scottish gangsters getting hurled through the window we were looking out of. That, or we would have a front row view as the riders of the apocolypse rode through the deserted street of the Royal Mile.
Neither of these things happened, thankfully. But this account provides a perfect example of my susceptibility to frightening ideas or circumstances, which offers even more support to my opinion that going on the "City of the Dead Tour" was the worst idea EVER. (Sorry, Claire.)
DAY 3: We went on a lovely tour of Loch Lomond. We had wanted to go Nessie hunting, but sadly the Loch Ness tour sold out right before we got to the ticket booth. So, instead, we rode on a bus through the rolling green hills and gales of Scotland, and the views were beautiful. As was the site of Claire sleeping during at least half of the bus ride. She really likes to nap :)
We took lots of pictures and learned a bunch of interesting facts from out tour guide including the fact that the film Braveheart is a load of crap. I will now dispense with a bit more of the knowledge he imparted on us:
In Scotland a Glen is a valley, and a Ben is a hill.
Traditionally, only highlanders wore kilts. (And real Scotsmen wear nothing under their kilts.)
We took a boat ride on the Loch, and were v. amused at the site of a man who was basically the French equivalent of what would happen if the characters of Dwight and Creed (from The Office) were combined into one human being.
That night we went to dinner with Claire's friend Allie, who lives in Edinburgh. The two met when Allie did an exchange at Claire's high school. We ate Mexican food for dinner, which was quite hilarious. After din, we went to the Elephant Cafe, the birthplace of Harry Potter, where we drank hot chocolate and tried to soak up J.K. Rowling vibes. (She wrote Harry Potter in this very cafe!!!)
On Monday morning, we woke up at an obscene hour, jumped on a bus, jumped on different planes, and I came back to London while Clairey returned to her Emerald Isle.
After just a weekend, I was so excited to come back to London. When I came out of the tube station and onto Tottenham Court Road, I actually smiled to see the sun trying to shine down through the London smog. And I like that I'm starting to associate London with a sense of familiarity.
Don't worry, I'm coming home in June, but for now, I'm really happy to be here.
My next trip is planned for March. I'm headed to France with Syd, Claire, and Alissa. Yes. It's going to be legendary. Watch out Paris, here we come. Be very, very afraid.
3 comments:
I love to nap.
You Look Great Coco!
What, you didn't eat haggis? I wouldn't touch that stuff either. hahahaha
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