Day Fifteen- Last day in Edinburgh, First night in Paris!

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Beware; this is a long one.

As the title suggests, today was our last day in Scotland. I’m really sad to be leaving such a beautiful country, especially without having had any haggis (not that I particularly wanted to) or experienced more traditional Scottish customs. We left trudi’s aunt’s place at around 10am and headed straight to Rosslyn Chapel with Bec, Taylor, trudi’s dad and her grandad.

Rosslyn Chapel was beautiful! So old and delicately carved, and with so much history behind it. It was also the place where The Da Vinci Code was filmed, which would have been a lot cooler if I’d seen The Da Vinci Code. We spent about 45 minutes here before heading into the city to the Scottish Museum (sans Bec and Taylor to begin with, long story, no point explaining).

Our flight to Paris was at 6:30pm, meaning we had to be at the airport by 4:30pm, meaning that when we got to the Museum at 1:30pm we knew we didn’t have much time. We walked around the ground level for a little bit as we waited for Bec and Taylor to arrive, and once they did we went and had lunch. I tasted Irn Bru today! I cannot believe I waited til the last day to try it as everyone has told me its a staple part of the Scottish diet, yet here we are. It’s nice, tastes a bit like creaming soda.

After lunch at the museum we went to see the Kingdom of Scots exhibit, where we saw a replica of Mary Queen of Scots’ tomb, a real guillotine, and a shrine of real and massive swords. It was super interesting. We headed up to level 7 of the museum which is a lookout over Edinburgh. It was nice to relax there in the sun, looking out over the city, even though knowing that I won’t be back for a while.

We eventually headed back to Trudi’s grandparents’ house where we picked up our luggage, said our goodbyes, and hopped in the back of T’s grandad’s car to head to the airport.

We finally had an airport problem. We knew it was coming, every overseas trip has to have some sort of issue at an airport (even minor like ours was) and we’re happy we got it out of the way when we had lots of time. Basically, after checking in our baggage and receiving boarding passes we headed upstairs to customs. And my boarding pass wouldn’t scan! Trudi had already gone through, so I was stuck slapping my pass every which way and that over the scanner only for it to say “invalid” over and over again. I eventually had to break some arms and legs climbing over the queue to get to a member of airport staff, where he examined it and told me they’d just accidentally printed something underneath it.

“Oh good,” I said, “so I’m all right to just go through?”
“Uh, no. I need to see a real boarding pass. You’ll have to download the app to retrieve it, it’s the only way.”

So we then spent ages trying to connect to wifi and then wait for the app to download then log onto it and retrieve the boarding pass and then show him so he could scan it. While he was scanning it I looked around at the packed customs room, knowing that with all the time wasted with the pass and all the people in line we wouldn’t make it to the plane in time. THANKFULLY, the staff member told us that in order to make up for the inconvenience he’d put us straight through with the shorter, family-with-small-children line.

And then we were super early! We got some drinks and played cards for a while until our boarding gate was announced. Headed to the boarding gate and, using the app we’d been forced to download, decided to check where our plane was out of curiosity. 20 minutes before we were supposed to board, our plane was flying over London on it’s way from Amsterdam. So there’s no surprise we boarded 40 minutes later than expected!

The flight to Paris was quick, only an hour and 20 minutes, but Trudi woke up with a cold this morning so the plane made her even worse. It still hadn’t quite hit me we were in France until we were walking through the gate and someone said “Bienvenue, tout le monde!”. I had a bit of an excited giggle for a while after that.

We were airport for about an hour while we waited for our phones to download maps of Paris so we could see where we are at all times without wifi. We then hopped in a taxi with a man who couldn’t (or pretended he couldn’t, which is more likely) speak English. I ended up having to type in our accommodation address for him because he couldn’t understand my horrible French pronunciation! We noticed quite quickly that he hadn’t turned the meter on, and wished we knew how to ask about it in French.

The cab ride was actually a bit scary, and not only because the driver was a speed demon with an apparent wish to hit pedestrians. There were scary looking men coming up to all the cabs as we were stopped at lights, people huddling in groups on the street near other groups of huddled people, and lots of yelling and arguing going on. We made it to our place and Trudi handed him a €50 note (before we got the cab we checked how much it was going to be) and we left before he could charge us more.

The air bnb we’re at is super secure and adorable, and I think we’ll have a really lovely time in Paris!

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