kilts and cashmere

if you want to buy a kilt or some cashmere, ediburgh, scotland is the place to go. seriously you will find shops on every street. sadly though, i did not purchase either.
i really liked this city. it was a little too cold for my liking (probably because i should have brought my peacoat with me but of course didn't), but it had some cool architecture and of course men in kilts playing the bagpipes.
i also experienced my first real culture shock in a long time. what was it you might ask? only everybody speaking english! and the roads being backwards. but seriously, it was so wierd to be back in a country where everybody speaks english.. even if i couldn't always understand them because of the accent. it took me the first couple days to get over it.

chloe and i arrived late at night and were starving due to our lack of a real meal for dinner. unfortunately this meant we stopped at mcdonalds because its what was open. great way to start a trip right? anyways. after meeting up with anthony (chloe's friend) and getting our food, we headed to his place ready to get some sleep after our long day of traveling. i had already decided i liked the city though at this point because when we got off the bus from the airport we could already see some really cool buildings all lit up.

a big air mattress and super comfy comforter were provided for us. the makings of a goodnights rest right? well not really.. turns out during the night the mattress felt like deflating, which left us partially on the ground. at least we had a nice comforter! the most frustrating part though was that after two nights of this we tried really hard to find the hole and couldn't! oh well. at least it was only a couple nights.

our first excursion was to get some bagels for breakfast at elephants and bagels. they were super good and i liked how there were kid drawings of elephants all over the place.
next up we went to elephant house (lots of elephants.. huh). but this one was cool because it is where jk rowling wrote harry potter!

there were cool chairs here too:

we continued our adventure with a harry potter theme by making our next stop tom riddle's grave in the graveyard just behind the cafe.

next up we made our way to the royal mile. chloe and i got our picture in a typical phone booth and then we visited st. giles church.

we also got our first glimpses of the men in kilts with bagpipes. music we would hear throughout our trip. i love it when stereotypes are real :)

we kept walking down the mile looking at street vendors and enjoying the ambiance of the city. we were amused by the contrast of a guy playing electric guitar in the street only shortly after having seen the bagpipes.

we explored a graveyard that had a lincoln memorial to scottish-americans. then we made our way to calton hill for a cool view of the entire city.

we also found a pantheon, so we climbed on up. btw. it was the perfect height to make it possible to get up, but very frustrating.

for lunch we went to the mosque's kitchen and got chicken iwth kurry and rice and garlic nan. it was soo good and super filling. and we got to try irn bru soda which is apparently the most popular soda in scotland/only found in scotland. it was ok, way to sweet for my liking though.

After all of the morning adventures out in the cold, we decided we needed a little break before seeing anything else. But soon enough we were ready to head out again and we made our way to the Princes Garden... where we then rested again. haha.

but look at the pretty view we had!

we stayed there for awhile enjoying the sun and sitting in the grass. eventually we finally decided to get up and headed over to grass market. to be honest, im still not really sure what it is. i guess on certain days there actually is a market going on the square? i dunno. nothin special was happening when we were there.
we headed to tesco (a grocery store) to get food for dinner because we decided we were going to try not to (completely) break our bank accounts on this trip. and then we had a movie night starting with 127 hours. such. a. good. movie. so intense. but so good. seriously, if you haven't seen it, watch it. but maybe having something so you can cover your eyes at certain points :)

day two we had big plans. anthony had to study so chloe and i made our way to the scottish national gallery and then the castle.
on our way to our first destination, we saw a sign about some ghost tour and decided we would come back later.

we finally made it to the scottish national gallery which had some nice pieces, but was also warm which was nice for us :)

afterwards we had a nice picnic lunch. we got lucky and it stayed sunny for most of the time we were actually eating, and when the clouds came back decided it was probably a good time to continue on.

we got to the castle with no major problems since it was just at the end of the royal mile.

unfortunately it was kind of expensive at 14 pounds, but we figured we should just pay it and see what there was to see. i'd say we got our money's worth since we were there for like three hours.
we made friends with statues.

we saw the crown jewels. (and got pictures of fake ones since you cant capture the real ones).

saw a couple more cool views.

got free tastes of some scottish whiskey (which honestly we just wanted because we were cold lol).

and even learned about a dog that was almost thrown overboard during the war. he was saved because he was finally claimed by the entire army.. not just one person.

we left the castle in time to get back to the ghost tour by 5 oclock. unfortunately though, since we were the only ones who showed up at that time, the guy told us we would have to come back later. lame. guess we wont get to see some cool free ghost tour of edinburgh. whatta bummer.

for dinner that night anthony took us to mum's where we ordered shepherd's pie and steak and ale so that we could try real scottish food. they were both delicious.

too tired from our long days of walking all over the city to feel like standing at a crowded bar when no seats were available, we ended up deciding to head back to the apartment and prepare ourselves for the next days to come. i mean come on, we still had three more cities ahead of us!