Catch-up (The Scotland Chapter)

On a technical note, I might have to stop including so many links in my posts because the Blogger automated system has tagged mine as a "spam blog." It's been reviewed by a person and passed as a "real blog, I guess. But I don't want it to get snagged again.

Anyway, my catching up continues now with a trip to Scotland that actually happened more than two weeks ago. It might be a bit more abbreviated that I would have liked, but I will do my best to remember everything.

As you can probably tell already from the pictures, Scotland is quite beautiful. We flew out of London bright and early on Friday morning and flew into Glasgow Prestwick airport, which is situated on a very picturesque golf course near the coast. We took a train into the Glasgow city center and then walked to another station for another train into Ediburgh, where our accomodations were. After we settled our things into Castle Rock Hostel, we grabbed some lunch and toured the Edinburgh Castle, which is up on a huge volcanic hill in the middle of town. The view from the top of the walls was quite impressive, even with all the clouds in the sky (see top photo). After the castle we wandered around town a bit and ate some dinner at a cute pub on Rose Street, which purportedly has more pubs per block than anywhere else in the UK, or something. I wasn't convinced, but it could be true. We were pretty tired after dinner but stayed awake long enough to walk over to a bar so I could meet with my friend Laura, who I know from Chapel Hill freshman year when she was doing her study abroad in the States.

When we got back to the Castle Rock we discovered what sort of adventure we had gotten ourselves into. We had co-ed bathrooms, a 12-person room -- which was thankfully all girls -- a 20p fee for towel "rental" and very thin walls. But I think we were all so tired that it didn't matter much at that point anyway.

The next morning we got up and had our hostel breakfast of cereal, roll and juice -- really quite good for 1.90. We walked down to Dean's Village, which is an adorable little town just outside of the hustle and bustle of Edinburgh. On the way back we ran into a farmer's market, which was packed with people, meat, cheese and some very good freshly fried crips (read: chips).

Then we decided to walk to the other end of the city, going down the Royal Mile, the road between Edinburgh Castle and Holyroodhouse Palace (third photo), where the queen holds investitures and various ceremonies. On the way we stopped in St. Giles Cathedral, which is where John Know preached, making it pretty much the birthplace of Presbyterianism. It was a very pretty church, but I'm not sure everyone else really understood why I thought it was so special. Obviously they're not enthusiastic to be Presbyterian. After walking to past the palace and the new parliament building -- built in a very incongruous modern style, but very interesting -- we stopped at a small cafe for some lunch. I ordered the traditional full Scottish breakfast (served all day), which consists of: two links of sausage, one egg, two pieces of toast, hashbrowns, flatbread, pile of bacon, mushrooms, beans, a tomato and a little bit of haggis. I nicknamed it Cholesterol on a Plate, but it tasted quite good. I wish now that I had taken a picture of it.

After lunch, Robyn and Alyssa trekked off to Leith, the port town of Ediburgh, while Christina, Amanda and I went the other direction to hike to Arthur's Seat. The large and very green mountain/hill is in the middle of a public park and is surrounded all the way around by city. But when you get halfway up or so, it's hard to believe you're not up in the highlands because everything is so green and hilly. We passed numerous families having picnic lunches or walking the dog. And the view from the top is unbelieveable. It's almost impossible for your thoughts not to wax poetic up there in the wind. That night we ate at a marvelous Thai restaurant for dinner and went out for a while to a bar that was decorated a bit like a 50's diner and is apparently a major college hangout. It was fairly quite when we got there but packed with 20-somethings by the time we left.

Sunday morning we left the Castle Rock early and caught the train back to Glasgow, where we checked our luggage at the station and spent the day wandering the somewhat larger Scottish city. The main attraction of the day was Glasgow Cathedral (photo at left) and is accompanying necropolis, basically a huge cemetary on a very big, very pretty hill. Next to the cathedral was a museum of international religions which was small but very well-planned with explanations of how different parts of life are celebrated/explained/whatever by the major world religions, and some of the minor ones too. We did some shopping in Glasgow too, and had lunch at one of the MacIntosh tea rooms. We had afternoon tea with tea sandwiches and scones and everything.

The voyage home was particularly long for various reasons, but the trip was great and we were also very glad to be home. I will try to get up blog entries for Spring Break very soon, hopefully around the time that Blogger unlocks this thing. I did upload some new Rome and Scotland pictures to Flickr, and the SB07 pics will be coming soon. Cheers!