Edinburgh!

This weekend Kali and I went to Edinburgh! We stayed with my roommate from Miami, Victoria. 

We took a night bus up Thursday night. It was an experience to say the least because our first bus broke down and then we had to change buses twice. But, we made it and even managed to get some sleep too. We arrived in Edinburgh in the morning, found Victoria's flat and dropped our stuff off and then went on a free tour that was the same company if the tour we went on in Dublin. It was cool, really informative and we went all over Edinburgh. This is a picture of a heart that is where the old tax building was. It is there just so people can spit on it...

It was so nice outside! Victoria and her boyfriend Artie said that we got lucky, it had been really cold and snowy for weeks!

This is the pub where they would take people who were going to be hanged and give them their last whiskey. 

Maggie was a real person who was hanged, declared dead, and then on the way to be buried it was discovered she was alive. So they were going to hang her again, but then decided she had been punished enough and let her go. 

This is the school that is said to have inspired Hogwarts

There were a lot of Harry Potter names in the graveyard.

After the tour Kali and I went to the castle. It was cool, but some rooms had these creepy statues/fake people like on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney only worse that I wasn't the biggest fan of. Way too similar to Chucky. We also got to see the crown jewels of Scotland, which was pretty cool. 

Fun fact: Scotland might be separate from the UK in the near future. They have their own parliament now and they are thinking seriously about being independent. 

Apparently the Scottish took back the castle from the British by climbing up the cliff and taking it by surprise. I am impressed. 

There was a club that was having a Miami night :)

The second day we went to a really cute farmer's market in the morning and then Kali and I went to Arthur's peak in the park nearby. So basically we climbed up a mountain. It was fun!

On the way up.

The view from the top!

rock fall down the mountain and people were making pictures with them, so I climbed down and made a big []_[]! Go Canes! A lady who was there even knew that we went to University of Miami because of the U I was making!

After we had a picnic on the mountain we went to the National Museum of Scotland to see Dolly, the first cloned animal.

Here she is in all her stuffed glory.

Then we went over the the Elephant House, which is a coffee shop that JK Rowling wrote the first 2 Harry Potter books in and had tea. We tried to "read" our tea leaves for fun (since, thanks to Harry Potter we all know to drink your tea, swirl the leaves around 3 times counterclockwise and turn the cup upside down to drain to read your tea leaves, duh right?) Needless to say we didn't really see anything. What do you guys think? See a grim in my future? 

The toilet there was all tricked out with Harry Potter stuff. On one of the stall doors were specific directions to Tom Riddle's grave in the cemetery nearby where we saw a few other Harry Potter names the day before. 

So we went and found it! (For those of you who haven't read the books, Tom Riddle is Lord Voldemort's given name, and his fathers. He is the bad guy. So this was cool )

That night we went on a free ghost tour of Edinburgh. This is our guide from the back, he was dressed up like some famous dead dude who had been executed and we walked us around a little bit and told us stories of other famous executions. It was more funny then scary, which I was glad for. The ones that you pay to go on take you down to the catacombs and stuff, which would have been waaaaay too creepy for me. 

The next day we headed out early to catch our bus for the 10 hour ride back...
All in all a good relaxing trip. It was fun to see friends from school in Europe! In 2 weeks they are coming down to visit Kali and I in London.