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I haven't been using the laptop for the last couple of days. Something about advertising you have a laptop when you're in a 10 bed dorm seems like a bad idea. That 10 bed dorm was located in Stirling. An important place in Scots history - if not so important now. There are three things to do in Stirling:
1) Visit the Castle
2) Visit the Wallace Monument
3) leave.
We did all of them. The castle is the only historic site I've seen where they're actually renovating. I've often wondered why they start conserving them from a certain date. It seems rather arbitrary. Today we're using it, tomorrow we're keeping it exactly the same for the rest of time. Well here they're rebuilding bits, putting up walls, replastering, making new tapestries etc. They're hoping to return it to how it looked in the 17th centuary. It's not going to look old though, it's going to look new ie exactly how it looked in the 17th centuary. Why then? dunno.
The Wallace Monument was erected to the memory of William Wallace. Apparantly a lot of politics went in to finding the city, site and monument design. In the end Stirling won
by virtue of having been the site of one of Wallace's greatest victory's - The Battle of Stirling Bridge. It is also half way between Glasgow and Edinburgh, the other two contenders and bitter rivals in all things.
The other day that we were at Stirling we took the train and a bus to St Andrews. The home of golf is a charming wee town with six golf courses. They also have golf clubs but unlike in New Zealand, the club doesn't own the course and in fact, you only join the club to have like minded people to play with. The courses are public (making St Andrews the largest public golfing complex in Europe) and they are owned by the city council in a charitable trust. Since the course belongs to the people of St Andrews they are allowed to use it as a park. Every Sunday, The Old Course is rested from golf and open to the public as a park. For a mere 2.50 we were able to take a guided tour of the old course, which includes trampling all over the 18th fairway. Green fees for the old course are a mere 120 pounds. Which seems
low to me considering that it is the world's oldest golf course, the home of golf, etc etc etc. If you wish to play, there is a 12 - 18 month waiting list. They also do a daily ballot for a four person card. If you're a single you can wait by the first tee at 6:30am and if there are any cards of only two or three (and they're willing) you can join their card and play. On the day we were there, there had been 43 cards not able to be allocated to play that day (these being the ballot cards) and half of the cards that did play were only two's or three's. So actually, your chances of getting a game at St Andrews, seem to be pretty good. For those of you sickened by our brag photos I'll just say that the day was beautiful and frankly we got a lot of photos in St Andrews, but we limited the ones we put on the website to a mere 3.
After leaving Stirling once, we decided it was a good idea and so the next day we left it for good and travelled to Edinburgh. The
tattoo started yesterday and the fringe festival starts on Sunday. Well, it's supposed to. No-one seems to have told the fringe performers this. If you walk down the royal mile you can have your pick of street performances ranging from juggling, juggling, comedy, juggling, magic, juggling, escape artists, juggling, juggling, some girls dressed as nuns and washer women chanting the lords prayer and cleaning the road, juggling and juggling. Also, you can collect enough flyers for performances going on during the fringe that I dare say you could make a tree out of them. A big tree.
Today we had a wander through Mary King's close. This is a section of Edinburgh dating back to the 1600's which has been well preserved by virtue of the fact that they built the council chambers on top of it, passed a law that no-one can live underground and then sealed it off. We had a guided tour which included stories of the conditions of living back then, ghost stories and people wearing period costume.
Our hostel is across the road from the train station and the Edinburgh Dungeon. I'm not sure if it's because of this or because of the festival, however
since writing this entry I have seen many people walking past wearing varied costumes. To quote Con Air "on any other day, that would seem unusual". Today though, it doesn't even rate a second glance.
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