Wow, these past few weeks have been crazy! What have I been up to? Let’s see… finished my 2nd “module” at school, celebrated my friend Andrew’s birthday, went to a nice Easter dinner with friends, celebrated my friend Amanda’s birthday, and went to Scotland! I’ve been busy.

After finishing up the module with 2 final presentations, we were all ready to relax. Luckily, we were able to do just that with a weekend full of birthdays and Easter. Andrew’s birthday was a great time, we all went to Hyde Park on the hottest day of the year so far in London and ate good food and drank good drinks. We had so much fun.

The next day was Easter and a bunch of us went to Andrew’s to have a family dinner. Andrew made a ham from scratch (they don’t sell them pre-cooked here for some reason), and we all contributed side dishes. It was lots of fun. I brought cupcakes from Hummingbird Bakery and had them write “HAPPY BDAY A & A” on them for Andrew and Amanda. The day after Easter was Amanda’s birthday and we all went out to dinner again to celebrate. It was a very full weekend!

And the very next morning, Andrew and I had to get up nice and early to catch our train to Edinburgh. We left London at 8am and the train took about five hours to get up to Edinburgh, so we got there in time to get lunch get a full day in of sightseeing.

We started with Edinburgh Castle. We weren’t very impressed with what we got for the admission price, we really though we’d be able to see how a castle really looked on the inside, but everything inside was just mini museums and stuff. Other than that, the views from the castle were awesome and we had great weather so all our pictures are great.

After the castle, we walked down the Royal Mile all the way to Holyrood House, the Queen’s palace in Edinburgh. It was very enjoyable there, since we got to see Royal rooms and get a little taste of how they live. We also got to see the Abbey that was attached to the palace, which is in ruins for some reason (not big on the audio guides). Then we were able to walk around the royal garden and see all the pretty flowers and the views they have of Arthur’s Seat, one of the big hills in town.

We were going to go do a whiskey tasting after seeing the palace, but when we got there at 5:30, they were closed! They open at 10am, but close at 5pm… I ask you, who wants to drink whiskey that early? Why would it be unusual to want to do a tasting at 5:30-6? Insane. Oh well. We went next door to a restaurant Andrew had wanted to try.

He really wanted to try the haggis there, and I promised him I’d try it too. We walked inside in our traveling garb after walking the city for 4 hours only to realize how underdressed we were for this place. They still let us in and were really nice, and then other tourists came in wearing not much better than us and we felt a little better.

The haggis is an appetizer there, so we decided to just do appetizers and drinks – and I got the only appealing appetizer to me, a poached pear with blue cheese. Then… it came. And I had to try it. And it wasn’t actually that bad. In fact, it was pretty good. But nothing changes the fact that it’s haggis. (google it.) I think I had 4 bites and couldn’t manage anything else, but that’s 3 more than I thought I could do.

After that culinary experience, we went for drinks at this bar we found that had great student discounts. Then we headed back to the hotel so we could get up in time for our big tour the next day.

We had to be at the tour office at 7:45am the next day for our tour, the Monsters, Mountains, and Massacres Tour. We covered 350 miles in about 12 hours, stopping a few times but spending the majority of our time on the coach. We were up in the Highlands, and we got to see some gorgeous lakes and the highest mountain in the UK (couldn’t understand the name).

Our only long-ish stop was at Fort Augustus, which is where Loch Ness is. We obviously opted to take the boat tour so that we could go monster hunting. It was a lot of fun. No sightings of Nessie, but it was a beautiful day and a beautiful lake. I never knew how big the lake is; it’s something like 900 feet deep! I bet Nessie doesn’t need to come up, she’s got plenty of room to groove down below.

After that, we made our way back down south, and our last sightseeing stop was to see the mountains of Glen Coe. It was so beautiful and picturesque. The Highlands are definitely worth seeing if you ever get a chance! We passed so many hills, fields of sheep with their babies, and some really adorable Highland Cows – which I didn’t get a picture of, but they are so stinkin’ cute.

Man, 12 hours on a bus is no picnic though. Gets a little uncomfortable after a little while. When we got back into Edinburgh by about 7pm, we were ready for some food. We ended up going to the Hard Rock to stuff our faces. As we were obviously exhausted by the end of the day, we just did a little picture-taking of Edinburgh’s gorgeous evening skyline and then went back to the hotel for a good night’s sleep.

On our last day in Edinburgh we had like 6 hours to spend there before we had to be at the train station at 5pm for our 5:30 train. We slept late because we had already covered so much of the city (not to mention how tired we were from our tour!).

So we started at a pretty leisurely 11am, and decided to find Mary King’s Close, which we had read and heard is a great tour to take in Edinburgh. The city has a lot of underground “haunted” tours, but this one is sort of creepy while still being historically accurate. It was very interesting to see and hear about what life was like 500 years ago.

We then decided to just go walk through the park on sort of the other side of town. It didn’t take too long, so we walked up the street about 10-15 minutes and found a cool cemetery, and then went across the street to climb a hill where they seemed to have some monuments. We found some great views of the city, including a view of Holyrood House. Very cool.

We still had some time to waste, so we went for lunch, then back down to the park to lay down for awhile. On the way there we passed a museum that had coin striking for free from 2:30-4. The museum had an exhibit about money, the history and how it’s made, which was actually sort of interesting. We wasted some time learning before we got to strike our own coins. It was cool, they gave you a little metal disk that you put on a mould, then put another one on top, and hit it with a hammer to put the patters onto the sides of the metal disk. Presto! Coin.

Then we walked around the National Gallery of Scotland for a little while, before hanging out in the park until we had to get back to the hotel to get our bags and get a cab to the train station.

It was a really fun trip, and we did a lot of stuff without having to stress out about how to fit everything in. I think Edinburgh is one of my new favorite cities. It’s super pretty, and the people are much nicer there than they are in London. Tomorrow is the Royal Wedding, so London will be a zoo, but I have all of next week off as well for Spring Break, so I have plenty going on. It’s probably the busiest spring break I’ve ever had, but it will be great!

Since I’m too lazy/tired to upload tons of pics to this blog, here’s a link to the rest of the pictures from my trip: Scotland 2011.  Enjoy!