Scotland-Part 1

So, a few weeks ago a few friends (Ashley, Julie and Shannon) and I went to visit my ancestors in the beautiful country of Scotland! I was hoping to find a few members of the MacDonald clan, haha, but we ended up finding so much more!

We flew Ryanair (naturally) and arrived in Edinburgh around 8:00 am on Saturday. We took a bus from the airport to City Centre and as soon as we entered the city, we looked to our right and saw Edinburgh castle. Seriously one of the most breath-taking castles I've ever seen in my life! It’s perched atop volcanic rock, so it’s literally sitting on a cliff in the distance. Incredible.

After marveling in the beauty of the castle and the cleanliness and charm of the city (it’s like a miniature London, but cleaner and friendlier) we checked into our hotel –Holiday Inn, very nice!- and walked around the city a bit. It was still rather early in the morning so the sun was just rising and the morning dew was still glistening-perfect for pictures!

We then walked to the Starbucks on the Royal Mile (one of the two main streets in Edinburgh) for our free Sandeman's New Europe walking tour!

Sandemans is a great company that offers free walking tours, as well as pub crawls and ghost tours, in some of the most popular cities in Europe (a few of us actually did the one in Dublin a couple weeks after the Scotland trip, haha!)

*** If you ever go to Dublin, Edinburgh, London, etc, check them out! They’ll usually meet at 11:00 and 2:00 at a notable point in the city, and the tour will start from there. Like I said, it’s completely free and the tour guides work for tips only. They are enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and genuinely interested in the city! It’s a great deal, and I plan to do many more!

We also got a free drink upgrade for participating in the tour :)

Our tour guide was Mark, a hilarious and very animated college student who told us great stories at each place we visited. They were the kinds of stories/interesting facts you wouldn’t learn from any ol’ guidebook (like the pub who was named after the first woman to be the beneficiary of double jeopardy).

Mark also told us about a particular statue in Edinburgh that experienced a stream of unfortunate luck. The horse looked like a drunk donkey, and holes had been drilled in the “donkey” so when it rained…well, just take a guess, hahaha. Just take a look on facebook for a photo.

We saw the entire city in just three short hours, including the Edinburgh castle (up close), the old Edinburgh market place, a heart on the ground which everyone spits on, and the cafe where J.K. Rowling wrote the first two Harry Potter books!

Funny story-when we were walking through a graveyard on the way to the school that was the inspiration for Hogwarts, I slipped and fell in a muddy patch of the graveyard. I had mud all down the left side of my body, including on my jacket, my tights, and my sweet walking shoes. It was fine, though, my friends and I all thought it was hilarious. That was until Mark began telling us stories of people who had mysteriously been "tripped" or "hit" by ghosts in this particular haunted graveyard.

I'd been "Poltergeisted!" as we liked to call it. (In case you were wondering, this is where the facebook album name "Hey guys, I think I've been Poltergeisted" came from, hahaha.)

So, we then went to a pub for lunch (got a veggie burger!) and went to the national museum to see Dolly, the first cloned mammal! It was in the middle of a kid's zone type of area, just spinning around in her glass case (she had been stuffed in 2006). We thought this was a little odd, but we took some pictures and left, went to the hotel, napped, and prepared for our pub crawl that night!

The pub crawl was through Sandeman's New Europe tours again, and cost us only 10 pounds for 5 pubs and free entry into a nightclub at the end! We started at the Bank Bar, an old bank they turned into a bar, and visited a number of other pubs (a new one about every 30 minutes). My favorite was a mixture between a pub/dance club called Frankenstein, which had a haunted house-type theme. I felt like I was in a Halloween haunted house, rather than a nightclub, and clubs with very noticeable themes are quite rare from what I’ve seen. Needless to say, it was awesome.

The pub crawl then took us to a dance club called Espionage, where we danced the night away on four different levels (all with different music). We also found 10 pounds and a “Bride to Be” pin on the ground, which we immediately pinned on Julie. Ha!

Altogether, it was a great, great night and a wonderful start to our trip! :)