Wednesday 4/14

What am I up to--day five now? Halfway there guys!

We had an early start on Wednesday morning because we had to check out, but there wasn't too much to do before getting on the bus to Edinburgh. We ate breakfast with a bunch of other people staying at the hostel, then fought for space on the bus. I wasn't expecting it to be so crowded. A lot of people were left behind. The Buchanan Bus Station in Glasgow, by the way, is huge. There are so many buses going in and out all the time. I can't believe we didn't get lost.

Anyway, while on the bus, we unknowingly drove by our hostel on the way in, so we had to hike back to it from the bus station in Edinburgh. At least that helped us find our way around a bit though.

The hostel itself was mad cool because it's a converted church. The kitchen and dining room area downstairs was so big, with these really high ceilings. The upstairs sleeping area was like that too; however, it wasn't so cool there, since all of the rooms were only separated by wall partitions, meaning that one loud person somewhere wakes up the entire hostel. But hey, it still looked cool.

We chatted up the South African woman at the reception desk, who let me use her internet for free to check on my housing for next year, then she gave us some maps to find our way around. We were hoping to make it to this free tour, but missed it by five minutes. I was planning on going on it in May, as well as seeing a bunch of other stuff there, but since I canceled the other Scotland trip, it will all have to wait until I get back there again someday.

Instead of the tour, we ended up going to some souvenir shops to look at the kilts and numerous Scottish-themed trinkets. Alice and I got sweatshirts since they were on sale if you got 2, but otherwise I was a miser. Whenever we walked down the main street, we caught a glimpse of Edinburgh Castle, built high up on this amazing crag. Again, another place I would have loved to have seen more.
Instead, we visited a bunch of museums, including the Museum of Childhood...
and the National Museum of Scotland. Honestly, I loved this one. The British Museum was really great, but I loved the setup and displays in this one. I went down to the basement by myself and got lost in the early history of Scotland displays. Soo cool.
We stopped at a cafe for supper, then, even though we were stuffed, we got a scoop of ice cream at the restaurant next door. THEN we walked one more place down the street and found The Elephant House. Aaahhh--clearly the world hates me! That's the cafe where J.K. Rowling wrote the first few Harry Potter books--and we missed it because we were two doors down instead! I couldn't stop talking about it the rest of the night, much to the annoyance of Alice and Courtney, I'm sure.

Oh, some kilts that I mentioned.
More random pics.

The most we got to see of the castle.

A hill nearby called Arthur's Seat, which I was going to climb in May. Oh well. We talked about it in my King Arthur class.
After all that, we bought tickets to go on a ghost tour late that night, so while waiting we went to Starbucks to warm up. This family photo went horribly wrong...


You can see how we started to lose our minds already-and it was only Wednesday.
The castle at night.
So the ghost tour--well, the two cloaked tour guides took us down some alleys (called "closes") to tell us about murders and then down into the most haunted place in Britain, the rooms beneath Bridge Road. When the city was built, it was actually a bridge, but the planners decided to fill in both sides with buildings. However, after a couple of years they realized that not having waterproofed them and having no real ventilation made them hard to live in, so they were deserted. Next they tried having a market down there, but the same problems brought it to a halt after a decade. In its next stage it became an ideal spot for criminals and murderers to hang out and kill people. What it is today is just a museum of sorts, although there are no exhibits. There are supposedly many, many ghosts, not all nice ones, down there, so tours go through, lit only by candlelight. I was thoroughly freaked out even though I don't believe in ghosts, just because there were so many nooks and crannies for people to be waiting in to jump out at me. After we got out, a man and woman were talking about how they did see a ghost while we were there. Great.

Some of the ghosts that are there supposedly include Jack, a 10 year old boy who probably got lost one day and died, who likes to play with little kids who visit his room. There is also a certain corner where a ghost woman stands who was pregnant but her baby died. That corner freaks out people normally, but apparently this one time a pregnant woman was standing there and felt something scratch her--like I said, not all ghosts are nice, and some are jealous. There was also this one girl once who heard a voice breathing in her ear and then saying "get out...GET OUT." Whatever you believe, it was mad creepy.

After that lovely hour, we managed to find our way back to the hostel in the dark and buy some bus tickets to Aberdeen online. I also found out that my friends at URI signed us up for the housing that we wanted for next year, so my night ended well. Pity that volcano started talking.

Carrying on...