Last last weekend I went to Scotland with one Miss Nicoley Guillen. It was great. We arrived after our separate 6 am flights loopy, cold and loopy and wandered the dewy grey streets of Edinburgh trying to find our first hostel. Favorite sights during this walk: Cockburn Street housing the lovely Cockburn Hotel, 3 men in kilts (true Scots go commando…), a guy sporting a sherlock holmes status cap with a ridiculous tartan bow on top walking two grey hounds with disturbingly crooked tails and Karen’s Designer Knit store.
Buget Backpackers was found on the ghettoist part of Cowgate street and turned out to be a dorm like, campy feeling place that smelled like college kitchens and laundry detergent and was painted in numerous highlighter colors like a pediatric dentists’ office. It was neat. The desk clerk, a scrawny iced blonde aussie was clearly smitten with Nicole because he forgot to give us our sheets and proudly stuck out his flakey skinned chin to show off a swelling chin piercing, “hey, do you like my new piercing,” she laughed and said, “yep, can we have some locks?” It was hawt times.
We were only there for the weekend but we took in as many sights as possible on our first day: The Sir Walter Scott monument (the biggest monument in le globe ever erected for a writer…mmmhmm), the graveyard (our super great Buget Backpakers tour guide, Tom Australian with both sides of his nose pierced like a bull, who had only been there three weeks made a point to take us to all the creepy spots, and also to makeout with one girl on the tour later that night and then hit on me when she was in the bathroom…creeper!) where many decadent tombstones sank into the apparently packed ground (he said if it rained for seven days straight the rumor was bones would start poking out…), the musuem where we saw a real live guillotine, ancient torture tools, a big ol’ tartan loom and the stuffed carcass of Dolly the cloned sheep (complete with hay and cloned poo), the castle (heck no we didn’t go in, I’m starting to learn the euroage and poundage required to go into all of these empty castles all reupholstered and newly stuccoed and smelling like Home Depots isn’t the mystically medievally reverent experience I always thought it be…), the writer’s museum (ah, hello, english majors?) a neat vintage shop where we had the required movie montage dress-up party, a pretty little park that used to be a sewage drain where they also drowned witches and an amazing but dead silent hat shop with thousands of hand-crafted caps set on sticks like a victorian velvet conrad island. In order to do all of these exciting things we climbed approximately 700 flights of stairs.
