Edinburgh free tour

---

Well today i had lotsa rest to wake up and make a nice big breaky for myself in the morning. I bought some food to make my breakfast the night before so I was all prepared for the morning. Had a shower but had to wait for 15 mins while the chubby hostel chick took her sweet ass time haha. They have great showers so i enjoyed that, (especially when im only averaging three a week). Got all cleaned up and decided to walk a different way into town today. Took George st which runs parallel to Princess which is the main st.
Walked through the park and across the bridge into the Old town where all the sights were. It was getting near one now and i really wanted to witness the 1o'clock shot from the castle every guidebook had been mentioning. I waited and waited and then around three minutes after one there was tiny little poof. Man that was not what i expected. Everyone in town is supposed to be able to hear that. I could barely hear it and i was standing right beside the damn thing so it defineltly wasnt like New Years or Butcharts or anything.
I guess my expectations were a little high.
Then i had quite a few things like always to take care of on the net so i headed down to the Central library for some free quality surfing. They made me wait in line when there were like 4 free computers which i really started to get frustrated from. Turns out they didnt have internet connection so i felt a bit ignorant. Finally got on and started doing my thing for an hour. They had to physically kick me off ha just like another guy in front of me who threw a fit. I wasn't nearly THAT bad.
Then i wanted to check out this free tour i had heard about so i went over to Starbucks to catch the 3 oclock tour. It was the same company who did the pub crawl so I didnt know what to expect. Two and a half hours later it really surpassed my expectations and actually made my trip to Edinburgh all the much better. Learned a ton of facts about the city like for instance do you know where being shit faced comes from!!! I use this term all the time so I laughed my guts out when I found out. In old time Scotland you went to the bathroom in a bucket which u kept in your house and then threw out the contents when it got full. Well there were quite a few ppl back in the day here already so they had to relegate it to a certain time to make everything run smooth. Well that never helped the guys who went out to the pub and came home a bit drunk at 10pm. Bucket full of that and I would probably never drink again hahahaha.
Also JK Rowling wrote her Harry Potter Books in Edinburgh and we went to the cafe where she wrote them and saw the graveyard called Greyfriars where she took all her inspiration from as well as Hogwarts castle. Learned about the Body Snatchers Burke and Hare who made a living digging up graves and killing hookers to be paid by Doctors for research in dissection. Saw where Burke was hung in front of thousands of people. When we went by the castle we were told the story of Robert the Bruce, who took Scotland back from the English after William Wallace was executed, by scaling up the rock face of the castle and killing hundreds of unexpectant English forces with only 14 of his men in 1306. Then we were told about Walter Scott who has a huge ass monument on Princess st right in front of the castle. He is the reason Scotland is known as Kilt wearing bag pipe playing drunkards. He was a lawyer and no one knew that he wrote famous poems unnamed untill near his death because he thought it would ruin his career.
Then we ended off with the story about the Stone of Destiny which was just returned to rest in Edinburgh castle after being stolen for 700 years. It was used for Monarchs to be crowned since the beggining of time in Scotland. It was taken by Edward 1st of in 1296. It never returned to Scotland untill 1950 something when 4 boys stole it from its resting place in the Westminster Abbey Christmas day. They ended up breaking into 2 because the thing weighs over 300 pounds and managed to get away almost undetected untill a guard put the pieces together and rang the alarm to shut the borders with Scotland. They had this planned tho and planted it in a field to come retrieve it later. When they came back there were a band of Gypsies living over top of it and they had to confess what had happened. The gypsys loved it and helped them retrieve it and make its way back to Scotland. They partied for 2 weeks or something like that with the Stone and decided that they would bring it back to the place of its righ tful owner. The bishop at the church didn't want this to cause any trouble with the police so he called it in and the English came to rescue the stone and bring it back to Westminster Abbey. It wasnt untill 1998 that it returned to its final resting place. On the tour there was a girl from Victoria travelling on her own as well that went to Stellies. Dont remember the name but she was defineltly younger maybe 4 years.
We went to the Grocery store together because she didnt know where any was and by now i was an expert on the town. I got myself a Scottish drink called Irnbru which is like an energy drink that tasted like cream soda mixed with some crack or something. He recommended it on the tour so i gave it a whirl. Not my fav but definetly worth the try. Got back to the hostel made myself some dinner and read my book on the castle which i ended up leaving there on accident. Pamela the Brazilian girl bunking next to me was asking me what happened to me the night before. I couldnt bring myself to tell her i wanted to give her some space to suck face with the kiwi guy haha. She left for her flight to Dublin and I ate.
Then just as I was washing up for a nights sleep she came into the room. Cried her eyes out because she missed her flight. Poor girl missed some sort of step at the airport and was desperate to get out of Scotland to see Dublin. I said i would help her find a printer to get another flight and print off the ticket within the limits of 4 hrs before the departure. We never did but a guy at the hostel let her use the comp to find a flight. I never did see her again. Off to bed I went.

---

Photos

Crazy ass lady
sorry never paid

town foutain
it was filled with wine for everyone to drink and ppl were chained to it as well

Greyfriars cemetary
This is a creepy ass place downtown edinburgh where jk rowling got all her inspiration for harry potter