Week 4

               Class went well this week, and we were all anxiously awaiting out weekend trip to Edinburgh , Scotland with the entire Newcastle program. We left Friday at 6:30 pm, so during the day Colin and I went to lunch at an awesome burrito place (no Chipotle but still), and watched a lot of Prison Break. We got on the bus with the whole group (about 40 in total) and embarked on a 2.5 hour ride north. Kendall and I sat next to each other on the bus and I recommended watching Pitch Perfect so we watched it on my computer and shared the headphones. We arrived at the hostel around 9 and got situated in our rooms. Our room was: Me, Matt Marsh, Kevin Collins, Colin Teeter, Justin Thomas, and Anthony (don't know his last name), but I was pleased with the overall group. We settled in, and a lot of us went out to a pub to get food. That's all we really did friday night because we were all tired and had to be up early on Saturday.
               We woke up Saturday at around 9am and all met downstairs outside the hostel. We walked to a meeting point to meet our tour guides and broke off into 3 groups. Our tour guide was named Billy and he brought energy, enthusiasm, and humor to the tour which helped wake us up and made it interesting. We went and saw scenic things like the castle, the café where J.K. Rowling sat down to first write Harry Potter, the gravesite of Tom Riddle (the dark lord from Harry Potter), and a lot of other local landmarks of various Scottish tradition. The tour was about 2 hours in total but went by rather quickly because it was all so interesting. We had free time until 2:15 so we went to McDonalds and then went back and attempted to nap but couldn't (I'm the worst napper in the league). At 2:15 we had another tour of "Mary King's Close (Alleyway)" which is an old alleyway that ran under the buildings beneath the city of Edinburgh. Out tour guide was a little dry, so I found this tour itself less interesting but it was still cool seeing exactly how this looked in the 17th century. After this, we went back to the room and I was actually able to nap which was nice in preparation for the night. We went to this pub called Finnegan's Wake (also the title of a song by the Irish Rovers on my annual St. Patty's day playlist) which had a cover band which sang a lot of American classics so it was kind of one big sing-a-long which was awesome. When that closed we went to another place called Espionage for a little bit before heading back to the hostel for the night.
              Sunday morning we had a 9:30 wake up call in order to check out of the hostel, but were able to leave all our bags there until we left Edinburgh so we wouldn't have to carry them around all day. We had a scheduled tour of the Holyrood Palace which is "the official residence of the British monarch in Scotland." It was massive and had a lot of really cool pantings and statues, and the garden outside of it was really beautiful. This was an audio tour which allowed us to move at our own speed which I liked, so we finished in about an hour or so. After the tour, Kevin, Collin, Marsh, and myself began our voyage towards the tallest mountain in Edinburgh, King Arthur's Seat (882 feet). We got about halfway up and Marsh decided he wasn't going to make it - high winds scared him off, but the other three of us would not be denied. We got to the top and the view was breathtaking so we took many photos before heading back down. We got back to the bottom and self-proclaimed that we did it in world-record time (even though theres absolutely no chance thats true) and everyone was impressed. Tired, yet proud, we headed back to the hostel and ate lunch at the attached restaurant and waited for everyone to come back for the bus. We arrived back in Newcastle around 6:30pm and at the end of the day, it's just another country down. #locals

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