when skies are grey : Day #78 in Orvieto (Edinburgh trip!)

May 11, 2013 - Saturday

On Saturday morning, we walked around Edinburgh and went to a sandwich place for lunch (because it was closer to lunchtime than breakfast time by then). Laura and I split a FALAFEL sandwich. I feel like I’ve been talking about falafel more than I’ve been talking about anything else on this trip. Which is embarrassing but at the same time, it was delicious so I’m not ashamed. So we ate our sandwich, saw the biggest sheepdog ever in the sandwich place, got a sneaky picture of the dog, and then continued on to walk. We made our way in and out of a few charity shops (thrift shops that donate to a specific charity) and a few bookstores. We were on a hunt to buy the first Harry Potter book but we couldn’t find one. Eventually, we arrived at the Elephant House, which is one of the places where JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter! We stood in line for a while because it was packed, bought a few souvenirs, took a picture outside (and inside), and have a cup of tea and coffee. I could see why she wrote a book (if you can call Harry Potter just “a book”) in there because it was really nice/cozy.

After the Elephant House, we walked by the Scottish National Gallery and Kelly casually mentioned that it was free and that there was a lot of art in there. Long story short… Laura and I went CRAZY in there and we had about an hour of being extreme nerds. We were literally running (but we were pretending not to run) around to all of these paintings, exclaiming, “Vincent van Gogh! Monet! Degas! Rafael! PICASSO! Over here there’s DaVINCI! Come quick! Look!” The grand finale of our nerd-out (like “freak-out” but more nerdy) was when we were led to the HUGE sculpture in the middle of the gallery, only to instantly recognize that the sculpture was of Paolo and Francesca, two characters in Dante’s Inferno. Like… we were casually jumping up and down with excitement. Anyways, it’s probably safe to say that Kelly was embarrassed at the big nerd-out but she was a good sport and even let us run around in the two different gift shops for a while.

Later on in the afternoon, we went to a pub for fish and chips because Laura and I were set on getting fish and chips while we were there! It was really good and I forgot how good fried fish and French fries are when they’re together with ketchup. We went back to Kelly’s flat for a while before going to Finnegan’s that night, which was another pub with live music and it was really fun! I was so tired though so I kind of crashed... but then I was wide awake when we tried to go to bed at 1:30am. Not sure why. But we packed up our stuff for the morning and set our alarms for 3:30am (we pretty much just took a short nap).