Hello again!
I hope you all had a fabulous Tuesday - mine surprisingly went by really fast yesterday! Which is good (and bad at the same time) because that means that I won't have to work 9 to 5 everyday after Friday! WOOOOO! I'm so excited for that. Although I do enjoy my job, working in the "grown-up world" doesn't really appeal to me, so I'm excited to get out of it and get back to being a student. Thank goodness! But as the end of my internship draws nearer, that means that also my time in Dublin is coming to close :( I'll talk more about that later though...no need to go into it now while I still have a few days left!
Now that I've caught everyone up to speed about Belfast (which I hope you enjoyed, that was a fun blog to write because I enjoyed the trip so much) I suppose the next step is to update about Scotland this weekend!
Well.
It was a long three day weekend, because it was a bank holiday on Monday, and I guess that means that every place is closed for the bank holiday. I don't understand much, but I'm not really complaining! My boss gave both my co-worker and I a half day on Friday, so I went home for lunch and to finish packing, and then headed to the airport around five. Our flight was scheduled to leave at 8:30 but it got delayed only about THREE HOURS. Ugh. I am never ever ever ever ever EVER flying RyanAir EVER again. And we were flying into Glasglow but our hostel was in Edinburgh, and by the time we got into Glasgow at midnight, all of the trains and the buses had stopped for the night, so we had to take a taxi to Edinburgh. An hour and a half drive cost about £25 between 6 girls. Thank goodness we could split it - it would have been way too expensive had that not be possible. We finally got into our hostel and to bed at about 3 am, and then had to wake up really early for the bus tour the next day.
The bus tour was great, it took us up to the Northern part of Scotland, through the highlands, Glencoe mountains and up to Loch Ness. Unfortunately, I slept for most of the bus ride because I was exhausted, but I was able to take some groggy pictures of the scenic areas when we stopped.
This is part of the Glencoe mountains that we stopped at first. I was so groggy when this all was happening I was still pretty much asleep. But I was filled in later by the girls. So pretty! Very Scotland-ish weather - cloudy, foggy and misty.
After lunch we made our way to Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle, where we explored the Castle ruins and then took a boat ride across part of Loch Ness.
This is the view of the castle from the boat that we took to cross the loch. So pretty!
Loch Ness was really cool - a lot bigger than I expected, and it was really neat to take a boat cruise across the lake. Although we didn't see Nessie :( I still believe she is in there though!Our bus got stuck in traffic on the way back to Edinburgh, so we got in a little later than expected, so we just spent the night sleeping because we were all still so exhausted from the late night before.
On Sunday we explored the city of Edinburgh a little before we did a free walking tour, and we also wanted to go and look at the different Harry Potter sights around town.
Because Edinburgh is J.K. Rowling's hometown, it has a lot of "Harry Potter history" or various places that insipred the novels. Our first pilmigrage that we came across on accident was The Balmoral hotel. We were walking to the meeting place for the walking tour and walked right by it! And of course I was the one to stop and say, "Oh my God! This is the Balmoral Hotel!!" Which is, of COURSE, where J.K. Rowling finished writing the series in January 2007. She even wrote on one of the marble busts in her room at the time that she finished writing the series in that room. Obviously we couldn't go up and see the room or the bust that she wrote on, because it IS a hotel, but nonetheless, we went inside and looked around for a second (I don't have pictures of it, because I felt like too much of a tourist to whip my camera out in the middle of a stinkin' hotel for crying out loud).
Next stop before the walking tour was The Elephant House. And for those of you who don't know what that has to do with Harry Potter, may I suggest reading up on your Harry Potter fact, PAH-LEASE?! No, but really. It's where J.K. Rowling started writing the books.
I guess she sat in the back room with a cup of tea, looking out the window toward the Edinburgh castle as she was writing the beginnings of Harry Potter.
We ate lunch there and I was mainly excited to be sitting where she was as she was writing the beginning of the best books in the world. So cool.
After The Elephant House we did a free walking tour around Edinburgh where we saw City Hall, the oldest building in Edinburgh, a really cool graveyard, and a bunch of other touristy things. It was a really great tour though - our tour guide was pretty funny and it was neat to learn about the history of the city.
That night we went on a pub crawl that was put on by the same company that did our walking tour. We went to a bunch of different pubs and got discounted drinks...it was ok. I heard that Edinburgh has a really great nightlife, but I wasn't really impressed. Either no one had a bank holiday on that Monday (because we went on Sunday night) and no one was out at the pubs, or the pub crawl just took us to the worst pubs in Edinburgh. Oh well.
Then Monday we hung out at the hostel for a bit before heading to the bus station and catching a bus back to Glasgow to catch our plane back to Dublin. We got in around 10:30 on Monday night, but man, it felt great to be back in Dublin! After all of these weekend excursions, returning home to Shanowen Square always feels so good. Dublin definatley has the "home" feel for me!
That's it, that's all! A good weekend in Scotland. My favorite part was seeing the Harry Potter stuff, of course ;)
SO nooooooooooow...I just got back from our farewell dinner that EUSA threw for us. It was at a local restaurant called 101 Talbot, and it was DELISH! And it was free, which is even better than a yummy meal. A good last supper meal.
I plan on staying in tonight and working on homework. I'm thinking tonight is a homework night, and tomorrow is a homework/laundry/maybe-the-beginning-of-packing-night?
But I only have tomorrow and Friday left for work! YAYAYAYAYAY! I'm SO ready to stop pretending to be all grown up and having a real job and all that nonsense. I'm ready to go back to being a student! This really does make you appreciate the life you have as a student. Yea, it gets hard and busy and everything, but it works better for me.So that's all for this evening...and it's relatively early enough so I can actually get some good work done, hurray! So I'm posting a couple of special posts for my last posts, so be on the look out for those!
