Spring Break-- Edinburgh, Scotland

On Tuesday morning we took a train ride to Edinburgh, which was potentially the most beautiful part of the entire trip. The weather was perfect, the sky was bright blue, and the whole time we were riding through beautiful countryside full of heather, sheep, and the occasional golf course! I took about 40 million pictures out of the window, and I do believe that this was the only train ride that I have ever not slept on this entire semester. When we arrived in Edinburgh we loaded into our cute little room on the top floor of a hostel and then headed to the main attraction, the Edinburgh Castle. Inside we got to see a few exhibits and read about the history of Scotland, but by far the coolest thing was to see the Scottish Crown jewels and the Stone of Destiny. Okay the Stone of Destiny was cool just because of the title—for some reason every king of Scotland had to stand on that stone when they were crowned. Oh by the way,, it was St. Patrick’s day, so we went to a Scottish pub which was decked out in green and Guinness for lunch. After lunch we continued walking down the Royal Mile—which leads from the Edinburgh Castle down to the new Parliament building. Along this road there is a lot of shopping, so we took our time walking down the mile, and we stopped and had some tea and biscuits. When we finally arrived at the Scottish Parliament building we were quite shocked, it is a very modern building by Miralles which is quite unique. The whole building is inspired by the land, so it grows out of the land and crags from one side and becomes the conglomeration of leaf like spaces with concrete and sticks, but it is very neat. One of my favorite parts is the “meditation” spaces which Miralles created for the members of parliament to go and ponder their decisions. They jut outside of the façade and give great views onto the city while providing a small, comfortable, functional space for the parliament members. It makes for an interesting façade outside, but once you know the story they are pretty cool. That was about all we saw that day!

The next day we devoted almost the entire day to climbing the crags in Holyrood Park. This place is very interesting because it is a very large mountainous park in the center of the city, undeveloped! We found that many people come up here on nice days with their dogs and go hiking around, and it was definitely the perfect day for it (I know I am beginning to sound like a broken record with my perfect weather comments, but I really can’t overemphasize how awesome it was). So all day we climbed around the park and took almost all of the trails as well as climbed through some fields of heather and other very spiky shrubberies. After climbing to the uppermost point, Arthur’s Seat, we headed back around and found a good picnic space with a fantastic view of the city. After lunch we walked along the upper edge of the crag (basically a rocky cliff) first and then walked underneath it and witnessed some serious rock climbers. We stopped for coffee/hot chocolate on the way back, did some more shopping and then went to a Chinese buffet for dinner! I know, how Scottish of us. What was neat was while we were eating the guy beside us started talking to us because he could tell we were American. Turns out he is from the states but is currently in grad school studying at Oxford, so we ended up talking for quite a bit.

Our last day in Edinburgh we went to the National Museum of Scotland which was supposed to have very neat interior architecture, but what Lura and I found most amusing was the kid’s discovery center where we got to do cool things like control a robot and save the world from the energy crisis. Next we stopped by the Elephant House, which is the café where J.K. Rowling conceived the ideas for Harry Potter! I really don’t know how she came up with witches, wizards and dragons from this coffee shop which was just covered in elephants, she must be very imaginative. Next we had another picnic in Princes garden which overlooks the train tracks,,, well they are usually well covered but they were redoing the gardens so it wasn’t the best view. Most people who work in the area come down here for lunch on nice days and sit on the millions of benches, as we found out. Next we worked our way towards the Royal Botanic Gardens where we went inside the greenhouses, which was very cool. They had a greenhouse for every climate basically, so we spent a while just wandering through all the different tropical plants--- we even saw some carnivorous ones, but they were in glass boxes so they wouldn’t eat us… After this we went to Calton hill for sunset, and then had dinner at an “Italian” restaurant but we made sure not to order pasta or pizza. The people that ran it were Italian so they were impressed by our ability to order in Italian, it made us feel good about ourselves! That night we took an overnight train to London, which was very comfortable except the fact that it was 1 billion degrees inside and they didn’t serve you free water. But, nevertheless, we got sleep and said goodbye to Edinburgh, my favorite city of Scotland.