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Published: September 4th 2013
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Seeing the sights with the Madre
Alternative title: taking up an entire row with the Madre. Adrianne's fun fact of the day: If you hit the button labelled "subscribe", you will be sent an email that tells you I've updated my blog. It's easy, it's convenient, it saves you the hassle of constantly refreshing my page.
And now back to your regularly scheduled programme:
So Day Three was somewhat less eventful than Days One and Two.
We woke at the completely respectable 10 AM local time, and headed out for more city exploration.
Because we are responsible people who are first and foremost concerned with our health, followed closely by goal accomplishment, we began our day with a city tour. Which we have taken like, three times.
We saw the sights, caught some great views (mmm, love me some views), and learned that the Scots are a sarcastic and funny group of people who are really not fans of the English. While we knew all of that already, it was still amusing to hear.
Additionally, if someone remotely famous did anything in Edinburgh, we heard about it. We know where Robert Louis Stevenson’s uncle, a very accomplished lighthouse engineer if you
can believe it, stayed at one point in his life. Another fun factoid: one of the University’s old Art buildings, a young Sean Connery once posed nude for a still life art class.
We got off the tour at Prince’s Street, and did some shopping. I got pillows, warm clothes, a coat, some boots and assorted toiletries. Woo hoo for hygiene.
Then we went back on the tour so we could hitch a ride back to the Grassmarket because we are super lazy and our bags were bulky.
Finally, after like, an hour or two of being up and functioning people, we fuelled up for the day ahead. We went to the White Hart, the oldest pub in Edinburgh. This is where Burke and Hare collected their victims and Cromwell had a drink while occupying Scotland. I find the latter to be conjecture at best because, as everyone who has read anything to do with British history will know, Cromwell was a puritan. Not drinking was kind of a thing with his kind.
Anyway, the food was sub-par. We had burgers that came with tortilla chips and a
salad (what’s wrong with the standard fries?). The meat was funky. Not the “about to expire” funky, the “I might be eating the kidneys and/or liver” funky. So far, the best food we’ve had has come from The Beehive Inn (in case anyone wanted a recommendation, their burgers are great).
Of course, with the White Hart, it’s not about the food; it’s about the building you’re eating the food in so it wasn’t a major tragedy.
Of course it was a minor tragedy; we all know how important a good burger is to me.
Then we did another round of the tour, only this time we listened to the kids’ version of the audio tour. It was a Horrible History recording so of course we got all the juicy bits we missed last time around: conspiracies and the like.
After that, we headed out to Mary King’s Close, an old and abandoned sub-city that was functioning during the plague, until the city officials chopped off the bits that stuck up past the ground and used the rest as foundation. To give a visual, the area the close was in looked like this originally: /- and when the refurbishment was done it looked like this:---.
That’s my really confusing way of saying that they levelled the street so it was level with the castle, which involved building over streets that were lower down a hill, like Mary King’s Close.
The tour was okay, but the guide really wasn’t having a good day and we didn’t really learn anything really cool about the close until he took us to a tiny room where the wall was crumbling and you could still see traces of the decorations people painted on the walls because they couldn’t afford wallpaper.
After that, we discovered a ridiculously short short cut that took us to pretty much the front door of our hotel.
We went across the street to a little Italian restaurant that was staffed by ACTUAL ITALIANS. Because that is a thing here. People can actually come from the country that created the food you’re consuming. How dope is that?
Way dope, man.
Then we headed back to the hotel, chatted with the family (Dad, the sim card thing still didn’t work. It’s irritating), watched some TV, and basically lolled around while I tried to build up some steam to write this post.
A few moments ago, I took out my ear buds to investigate what I thought was dogs wailing but upon further inspection turned out to a choir of drunks having a good old time across the street.
Ah, it’s good to be in Scotland.
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