Today was the all-ISS excursion to Edinburgh! So I got the chance to explore this town a little bit more, which is awesome. What did I choose to do first? See the castle of course.
It was really cool seeing this castle because it is a bit bigger than the one in Stirling. In addition to being bigger, people actually still work at this castle. I'm not entirely sure who, but I'm guessing people who work for the government get to work there. Wouldn't that be sweet? Getting to work in a castle...anyway, it was basically a small village. There were many different parts to this castle, including a Great Hall (not the one from Harry Potter, sadly), a war memorial, a prison, and the crown jewels of Scotland. There were also a few museums in this one, which were kind of fun to walk through. They were mostly war museums, so I got to see all the old weapons and uniforms and the like. Which was fairly interesting. The crown jewels, however, were slightly more interesting. They call them the "honours" of Scotland, because they were used when crowning new kings and queens I believe. It basically includes a large crown, a very, very large sword, and a stone called the Honors Stone, which is where the new kings would be crowned. The cool thing about these honours is that they were actually hidden for about a hundred years, in order to protect them from the English I think? Someone was coming for Scotland, and they wanted to keep these safe. The whereabouts of these honours was unknown for a period of time, and I'm not exactly sure how they found the chest, but they did, about 111 years later. And everything was still there, intact. I think that's a really neat thing about Scottish history.
That was basically the castle. Nothing too exciting, other than it being a sweet castle. After that we walked around for a while. We went down the entire length of the Royal Mile, which was actually kind of chaotic today. They are just kicking off the Fringe Festival, which is basically a very large art festival. So there were people everywhere, and it was very crowded. There were also many people who would come up to you and shove fliers in your face until you took them. I think I got about 15 different fliers in 5 minutes. All of which were useless to me, but try telling it to persistent artists.
After getting through the enormous crowd of people, we stopped to look at the Palace (I'm not sure who owns or lives in this palace, but it had really fancy gates) which is located on the opposite end of the Royal Mile from the castle. It was pretty from the outside, but we didn't pay to go in. We also saw the Scottish Parliament building, which is an extremely modern building. I was very surprised by how modern it was, actually. Those were basically the big ticket items of the day. Other than that we found a nice park that overlooked the city, which was beautiful from higher up. We also saw the Google street-view guy walking up and down the park, which I thought was really cool. I waved to him in case I was on the camera. You never know.
That was the day today. I am pretty tired now, but tomorrow will be much worse. I get to go on an excursion to Belfast, Northern Ireland this weekend, and we leave at 4:30 in the morning tomorrow. Which is awesome. But I'll hopefully have some awesome stories to tell after this weekend. Until next time...
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