Edinburgh One

I got one broken hour of sleep last night. And I had to move twice because they can't clean the floor when people are laying on couches or benches.

The flight is only half an hour. Ryanair is so sketchy. I was thinking when we were taking off about how it's cool that I don't freak out about flying anymore. I was totally calm. But as soon as we got up to alititude we immediately dropped. That freaked me out bad.

They make it really easy to get into the city from the airport. There's a big blue city bus and it's right out the main doors from the arrivals gates. Cheap. You don't have to have exact change. It's huge. They announce every stop. It was brilliant.

Scotish accents win.

I got to the hostel at 8am. Ridiculous. You're always allowed to leave your shit in a storage room though, so I just dropped everything off, got online to look up what I wanted to do, eat some "breakfast" and take off again.

Right down the street from the hostel going toward the castle--which you can see everywhere and it always looks awesome--is St. Cuthbert's cathedral. It's the oldest sacred site in the city. The cemetery is pretty cool and I'm sure if I'd been there at not 10am it would have been creepy. The guy that invented logarithms is buried there. I couldn't find him though. I don't like walking on graves. That's superstitious isn't it?

Ross Fountain is right on the other side of the cemetery. It's pretty cool. A lot bigger than I though. And I got the picture everybody gets--the flowers and the fountain with the castle in the background. Beautiful.

The castle itself is pretty cool. I was expecting it to be less of a museum. I was there for two hours though. The Scotish crown jewels are not nearly as impressive as the British ones. The One o'clock gun is pretty cool. I took a video of them shooting it. The coolest part is the oldest little building. It's 900 years old and it's St. Margaret's chapel. It's tiny and they still have weddings and batisms in there. There's also a really cool and huge memorial for Scotish soldiers in every war ever.

The Royal Mile is cool. Pretty touristy. I bought a painting of the city during festival. I ended up giving a Buddhist guy 5 pounds. I'm too nice. I feel bad for people who stand around and try to talk to people and everyone just ignores them. He's good at what he does too. He doesn't even tell you what the hell he's doing until he's been chatting you up for 5 minutes. I got a copy of the Bagavad Gita though. I think I'll leave it here. I read it already.

I had Bangers and Mash at a pub for lunch. Also Caledonian 80 beer. It was alright. Kind of hoppy.

Then I got lost for an hour. I really was lost too. I don't know what happened, but I wasn't on the map. It's okay though cause you can head for any tall pointy building to get your barings again.

That was that. It started raining so I ducked into a couple book stores on the way back here to the hostel. And when I got back I was able to actually check into my room and I have a top bunk. I hate the top bunk. I got up there though and just totally crashed for a few hours. It wasn't the plan, but whatever. Then some Spanish girls came in and turned the lights on and were being all loud. I came down here and made some ramen for dinner and dodged the Italians who had taken over the kitchen.

Don't know what I'm going to do tomorrow! There's still lots to see though.