Last weekend I went on a trip to Edinburgh put on by the Leeds Uni Student Union. We left around 3:30 on Friday afternoon on the bus. It was cold. It was also cold when we got there at like 9pm. So yeah, it was a long ride and I think our busdriver got lost a bit and we made this stop that lasted like 45 min....which was longer than we really needed to buy some food and go to the bathroom...but whatever.

Our hostel ended up being in the middle of nowhere, even though on the itinerary it said the hostel was in the city-centre....we had to take a 15 min. shuttle TO the city-centre! And here's where it gets frustrating...one shuttle holds 14 people. There must've been about 150 students there from Leeds. Originally they were running two shuttles an hour, and then they started just doing shuttles back and forth so it was more like 4 shuttles an hour. But that still only accounts for 60 people an hour, which means that if you didn't get on the first shuttle, you had to wait until you did get on a shuttle, which was a huge waste of time. And then the shuttle stopped running at 11pm, so if you wanted to stay out you still had to pay for a 10-pound taxi ride back. Don't get me wrong...the hostel was nice in itself...lots of facilities and the beds weren't bad, but just totally out of the way.

Once we got there on Friday night we took a shuttle into town to see what there was to do...and all I can is that once we got dropped off...you get off the bus and see this:

(The things that are lit up are the castle up top and the art gallery.)
Everything is so pretty because it's done up for Christmas. There was a German Christmas Market going on and they had lots of rides and a skating rink.
Unfortunately, though, there wasn't a whole lot to do at night because most pubs close before 12 and then there weren't many clubs around. We went into one club called Espionage and they had pictures of Native Americans on the walls...not sure why exactly...kind of random.
On Saturday morning I went to the castle and took the audio tour which was really good...lots of history and stuff. It's one thing to look at something but it's so much better to understand why it's there and why it's important. I have lots of castle pictures....just go to my picture album and look up the Edinburgh pictures. I didn't realize that Mary, Queen of Scots was made queen when she was only 9 months old! That's nuts. Oh and it was so cute cuz there's a chapel on the top of the hill where the castle is (it's actually the oldest part of the castle) and a wedding had just finished so I got some video of it. That'd be so sweet to get married in a castle! Oh, and you can't see the video yet cuz I'm working on a video for all of Edinburgh and I'm waiting for some critical music for the soundtrack before I finish it....but I will let you know when it's done!!

After the castle (which I spent 2 1/2 hours in!) I looked in all the tartan shops and stuff....then I met up with the other Canadians again and we went on this tour of Mary King's Close, which was really cool. To see what it is, click on the link before. It was so awesome cuz it felt like I was in some medieval movie or something...like I could actually picture people from the 1500s dumping their crap in the street at 10 o'clock every night and we heard stories about the plague and a couple ghost stories...ya, very interesting.

We went back to the hostel for food...I was starving cuz I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. Then we tried for another night out on Saturday. We ended up at this crazy pub called the Jekyll & Hyde. It was SO cool!! When you walked in the door there was a bunch of old torture equipment hanging in the window, and fake cobwebs everywhere, and freaky chemistry flasks and tube hanging on the wall along with skulls and other crazy stuff. There was an old silent horror flick playing on the tv. Their cocktails are named after the 7 deadly sins and are kept in creepy tall skinny flasks. And the bathrooms were so cool cuz the doors were hidden in the bookcase wall!!! AND it played good music!! It was great!

Sunday morning I got up a bit earlier and took the 9:30 shuttle in. I looked around the shops a bit and then went to church for the first time since I've come to the UK. I go to a Presbyterian Church at home and figured, if I'm gonna go to a Presbyterian church it should be in Scotland (because it's Scotland's offical church). It was the first day of advent so I was expecting to light a candle and have Christmas carols and stuff....but no, no candles, no organ, they didn't even sing hymns...they sang psalms to tunes that everyone kind of knew already so I didn't even have music to sight-read from. So I was pretty much lost the whole time. But it was a good experience anyway, just to see how they do things. The sermon's main message was "Choose Life", which gave me an amazing inspiration for my Edinburgh video, which hopefully you will see soon enough. Anyone who's seen Trainspotting will know where this is going, since the book/movie was based in Edinburgh.
After church I went in more shops, bought myself a 100% lamb's wool scarf...very warm!...and a bunch of postcards and a sew-on Scotland badge. I've decided that every country I go to I'm gonna get a badge.
In the afternoon I went back to the hostel and walked around the countryside there...took some pictures of the coastline and I found this really cool castle/house thing a bit down the road from our hostel.

The bus left for home at 3pm and I was so dead. But there was hardly any leg room on the bus so it was really uncomfortable. Boo. Yeah, I slept pretty well that night when I got home though.

So that was my trip. Edinburgh's really nice though, I definitely recommend the visit!!