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Published: February 17th 2009
Our trip up to Edinburgh, Scotland began when we arrived at 7 a.m. after catching a night bus up from London. We figured we would save money on airfare and hostel by traveling this way. When Dani and I started making our plans for this trip it began by planning around our February 9th concert in Glasgow, Scotland to see Ray Lamontagne, then everything else all sort of worked around eventually ending up in Glasgow on this day. In addition, we asked ourselves, "what's better than traveling with one of your best friends to Scotland?" we answered, "traveling with three!" So we reunited with Anne and Erin in Edinburgh Saturday morning Feb. 6. We had all had long nights of travel, but we were excited about the quaint and snowy little town of Edinburgh so we headed off right away. We found a cute cafe with wood bench seating and a dimly lit interior to warm up at before walking around the city. We saw the castle, learned about witch burnings, the lochness monster, and saw the buildings that inspired J.K. Rowling to write Harry Potter!
Unknowingly we showed up in Scotland for the kick-off weekend of the Six Nations Rugby
Tournament (Wales, Scotland, France, Ireland, Italy, England). There were fans everywhere and rugby games being shown in all the pubs. We went out to a pub that night and met a group of older men who were part of a "stag party". They kindly explained to us how rugby worked in the thickest Welsh accents. We headed in early that night and played cards in our hostel and woke up and fixed "egg in a hole" for breakfast in the morning!
Sunday was the big day because it was the Wales vs. Scotland match. Early in the day we went and walked around the Queen's Gallery and up to the top of this beautiful look out spot where you could see the water and all of Edinburgh. The entire city was packed into various pubs and we were all well fed (we tried Haggis!) and full of beer by around 4 pm. Wales won, but it was expected and so the music was turned up and the first song that was played was titled "As long as we beat the English!" We were all crowded together but met our favorite friend, Gordon, a sixty year old leprechaun man from Scotland.
He kept calling us "belle lassies" and told us he would NEVER cheat on his wife. Good ol' Gordon.
On our last day in Edinburgh we went to the museum, but didn't make it out of the kid's section. We went there mainly to see Dolly, the cloned sheep and ended up staying to race cars, test our reflexes, and build robots. After play time we went and had lunch at the Elephant Cafe, the cafe where JK Rowling started writing Harry Potter! It was so beautiful with a view of the castle and cemetery, it was clear how she created the land that she did. We had really tasty sandwiches, soup and pastries and then headed to the train station.
We caught a train to Glasgow, not exactly a destination town, but we were only there for the concert. We had our own little guest house room for the four of us and we relaxed there until it was time for the show. Ray Lamontagne is a folky-acoustic singer, so the show was really enjoyable. In the morning we all parted our separate ways, Anne and Erin went back home to Granada, Dani went to Manchester to visit a
cousin and I headed back to Paris!
I've been back in Paris for a week and tomorrow I'm catching a train down to Aix-en-Provence to visit another best friend Kari from Bainbridge who is studying down there. I'm staying in Aix for two nights and then we are going to head to Nice for the Carnival Festival and I will return to Paris (and the start of classes) on the 22nd.
Phew!
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Mom
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You look so happy!
This is everything I hoped you would experience. Loved the smiles on your faces! I want to meet Gordon.