"Mind Your Heed!"

So we arrived in Edinburgh late the night of the 21st and took a taxi in to our hostel - our first hostel. In fact, let me take a moment to describe the hostel. It was called the Globetrotter Inn and is a total party hostel. It boats that it is a top 10 world hostel and is very proud of it. According to me, the top 10 award means that it just isn't quite as ghetto as the rest of the hostels out there - it doesn't mean it's actually nice. In fact, the thing that bugged me most was the way you paid for things. Like, in order to buy food at the store in the hostel you had to put money on your hostelcard. In order to put money on your hostelcard you had to put cash in a machine. In order to put cash in the machine you had to have cash, and for me that meant getting it out of the ATM. The ATM was broken. Then, you'd think you'd have to pay with you hotelcard for the internet too, but no. For that you had to go to the front desk (wait in the looong line) and give, yes, cash to the receptionist. The receptionist would then take you over to the store where for some reason the internet codes were locked and give you a code that you would put in the computer. So, everything took cash and had lots of steps. Anyway, enough about the frustrating hostel. So we got to the hostel and went to our separate rooms that were mixed dorms with 8 beds. That's one of the bad things about hostels. Luckily I got put with a pretty chill room and made friends with one guy who had been in Edinborough for quite a while trying to work. We'd always come home and ask him a bunch of questions about the city. I thiiiink his name was Steve. Well, the next morning we had to take the hostel's shuttle into town (which of course you get tickets for by giving, yes, cash to another desk) and of course, almost missed it. The city was absolutely BEAUTIFUL though. All the cities we went to for this trip were very beautiful in their own ways. I mean, I'd give Inishmor most beautiful landscape and Galway most beautiful river. Well, I'd give Edinborough most beautiful architecture. Literally every building was goregeous. Also, it was very hilly with the streets going up and down all over the place reminding me of San Fransisco. When we first got there we were incredibly confused and had no idea where we were. So we wandered around and walked down Prince Street and found the Sir Walter Scott Monument and went and got some lunch and ate it at the park. The place that we got the food for lunch was actually pretty cool too, but I have no idea how to describe it. Only thing I'll say is that it had more varieties of sandwitches than I have ever seen in my life. The big tourist street in Edinborough where almost everything we wanted to see was located is generally referred to as the Royal Mile. It is situated on a slope and we had two ways of getting there. We could either walk all the way down to where the bottom of the slope met flat ground and walk up the whole street to the highest part where we wanted to be, or we could walk up a very steeply inclined street which led to the end and highest part of the street. We chose to do that. It was absolutely gorgeous and I felt like I was living in a fairy tale, but I also was so tired by the time I got to the top I felt like I was going to die. The whole street was very lively with lots of entertainers, much like Times Square in New York or something. It was like that largely because we arrived during The Festival where all kinds of underground type shows put on performances, so that there were people advertising and lots of flyers for all the shows everywhere. The first place on the Royal Mile that we went to was Edinburgh Castle. It is the very endpoint of the Royal Mile and at the highest point, so that the castle is on the edge of a cliff. It's gorgeous. We went in and took a tour with some headphones that we bought. Actually we bought just one pair and one of us would just repeat everything it said to the other one. It was pretty neat. Basically just how you would imagine a castle to be. Outer wall, drawbridge, soldier's quarters, dungeon, etc. A highlight though, I would say, would be the Canine Cemetary that was built for all the dogs who were owned by great military people - most of which died in battle. I thought it was cute. We also learned a lot about British History (which I love) and some cool people who were imprisoned there. After Edinburgh Castle we went to St. Gile's Cathedral (which was, um, very difficult to find). The Cathedral was alright, but basically the same as any other Cathedral. That evening, since we couldn't find a good show to go to (most were far too sketchy looking) we just ended up eating dinner at this baked potato place which loooooked pretty cool but was pretty disappointing. Oh, and we also went to this cool little souvenir shop and met a guy who worked there who was from Orange County. Always fun to meet random people in Scotland who are from Orange County. After eating, we needed to catch the shuttle home, so we started heading down the Royal Mile and we were just planning on turning left on the next street and figured that would just take us right there. Well, not so simple. Every street we tried to turn left on ended up running into the railroad tracks so that we had to go aaaaall the way down the royal mile, through a park, up a hill and down another street for quite some ways. It was torture because I had a killer side ache and could barely walk and we were trying really hard to hurry so we couldn't miss it. Anyway, we caught it and rode it home and just spent the rest of the night emailing people, getting ready for bed, etc.