June 27
The whole MYA group takes a group near Edinburgh Castle and then we have 4 hours to roam. First, we go get lunch at Nandos, which is this restaurant specific to the United Kingdom. Eric and I try out all the hottest sauces by dipping chips (French fries) in each of them, and they’re actually not that spicy.
Our group then splits up because some of us want to try haggis while others don’t want to and so they spend more time wandering while I go with some people to find a restaurant that serves haggis. Surprisingly, it doesn’t taste bad at all. Maybe it’s because I’ve ate weird things like liver before, but the taste of haggis wasn’t unpleasant at all. It’s very rich so anything more than two bites is too much, and I would never want to eat this often, but it’s not that gross.
We then get some ice cream, where I try this flavor called “Scottish tablet” which tastes a lot like caramel and toffee. We stop at some souvenir shops and gape at the TV because it’s showing a concert of this band of Scottish bagpipes that call themselves the “Red Hot Chili Piper” and because none of us are able to actually play bagpipes, we were mesmerized by the fact that noise is being made even when the bagpiper is breathing. We enter Edinburgh Castle and walk until we reach the restricted area, where you need to pay to continue inside the actual castle. It costs 16 pounds per person and we are all broke, so we just take pictures in the “free” area, and then wander around. We meet up with Sean, a chaperone, and we walk around some more, finding a candy shop where lots of us try bricks of macaroons, tablets, and fudge. Eric buys this candy that’s a lot like those Valentine’s Day sweethearts hard candies. It looks like broken pieces of chalk and it actually writes on chalk because Eric tested it out and rubbed out “MYAC” on the cobblestones!
As we’re wandering around, we see a streetperformer who is doing juggling acts with fire. He puts humor into this performances (it’s a little dirty but it flies right over the heads of little children), but it was entertaining and his impressions of jugglers from different countries (Irish, German, American, British) were also funny.
We load the buses and head towards our hotel. After spending 2 nights in a hostel, everything has been so wonderful, and today we spent the night in the same hotel chain as the one we stayed in Glasgow, Premier Inn, and I just want to say that it’s wonderful to have soft beds with no bugs, wifi in the rooms, and workable, hot showers that don’t turn off every 8 seconds.
Ethan and I go for a walk because he wants to see this tower that apparently has 287 steps. I didn’t really want to stay in a hotel and I wanted to walk around a bit, so I agree to go with him. I was dumb enough to trust him without looking up a map to get directions on how to get there and I was also not thinking and didn’t bother to even ask him for the name of the tower. Ethan also is pretty bad with directions and has a bad sense of direction in the first place. Anyways, so apparently he hears directions from our tour guide to take a left, go on a big street, and then go straight. So we leave the hotel, take a left, go on a big street, and as we’re walking, we notice that things are getting more residential and the buildings are no longer stores, but apartments.
So yeah, we’re lost, we don’t have wifi so we can’t look up a map now, and we don’t even know the name of our destination so we can’t ask anyone about it. We end up walking around, passing by the University of Edinburgh, and then walking back to the hotel. Back at the hotel, we do make it back in time for dinner and at the table, I look up the tower and realize that it’s a tower that I actually found really cool and would have loved to go to. Oh well.
We had freetime at the hotel before curfew, which is 10pm because we have to wake up really early tomorrow to go back to Dublin.
No comments:
Post a Comment