Day 14: The Touristy Bits

This is getting posted a day late, I know. I just didn't want to pay for another 24 hours of internet use so I couldn't post anything last night, but I'm in my new hostel now, so I'll catch up. More on the hostel stuff in the following post.
My morning destination was the Edinburgh Royal Botanical Gardens. The gardens are a few miles away from the city center, so I figured it would be a good way to get out and see a bit of the rest of the city along the way. I took my time getting there, checking out various markets and paths along the way.

No, that's not part of the garden. That's part of my walk to the garden.
Obviously it's a bit early in the year for most of the flowers, but flowers aren't the big draw for me anyway. A few of the big sections of the park were all dug up, probably in preparation for planting annuals. The best looking part of the garden for me was the rock garden, but the most interesting by far was the Scottish Heath garden. In addition to giving the names of the plants, the heath garden also included all the details on what the plant was used for, from eating to making clothes or fences or brooms, etc. The most amusing part is that the end of the list for basically every single tree/bush/grass/other sort of plant was "flavouring for beer/wine" - even the toxic ones. Oh those Scotts.

I wandered back to my home base and after a quick lunch went to the Edinburgh Castle in the afternoon. The weather has been pretty chilly and windy my entire time here so far, and I was wearing shorts, so the castle wasn't the most comfortable. In general, I found it much more impressive from the outside - looking up the sheer cliff faces to the walls - than it was on the inside. The Great Hall was nice, and they had some cheesy but still interesting depictions of the cellars history for holding prisoners. They also had a room with the crown jewels of Scotland and the Corronation Stone/Stone of Scone.

As I was leaving it started to rain pretty hard. I wasn't ready to head back to the hostel, so I worked my way to a cinema I encountered earlier in the day and watched Hunger Games. Not very exotic, I know. At least I got to see English commercials at the start.

Day 13: Bliss

Through the first two weeks of this trip there have been good moments and bad moments, but today was the first with moments of sheer joy and utter contenment. What was this mystery activity from that I alluded to yesterday and had me grinning like a Cheshire cat for much of the morning?

 This:

Holyrood Park is a series of hills and basalt cliffs in the center of Edinburgh, and it was the obvious place for me to begin my explorations of the city. I got started early with a pretty good idea of where to start my hike. My research had indicated that the east side was the "easier" approach. Phew, good thing I learned that, I might have accidently taking the boring way up! Heading straight for the west, I started with the tallest hill: Arthur's Seat. I was a bit worried about my sore leg, but it held up like a champ and only started bothering me hours later when I was just wandering about the city. Sadly, pictures can't really convey the feeling of places like this, but I tried my best. Here are a few of Arthur's Seat and the adjacent Salisbury Crags. I'll be putting the rest on the photo site.

Oh, and the view from the top wasn't too shabby either:

There were quite a few people along the paths and at the top, but I can't really blame them - it sure beats a treadmill. I descended a bit from Arthur's Seat to a steeper, rocky side that had no trails and nobody else on it, and just relaxed there for awhile. Two loose terriers were running around together chasing rabbits but were far too slow and clumsy to catch any (it was very amusing to watch them try though). I then spent awhile going from peak to peak, and eventually walked along the top of the crag before descending the rest of the way.

In the afternoon I visisted the National Gallery, which was alright, but mostly not the style I enjoy the most. I also walked up the much smaller Calton Hill and checked out the monuments there. My understanding is that the city bought the hill about 300 years ago and has just used it as a park and a place to stick monuments whenever they want to put one somewhere. It had a nice view as well (the first picture in the post was from Calton Hill) but it didn't really compare to the earlier ones. I covered more ground walking up The Royal Mile to quickly check out Edinburgh Castle, which I'll probably check out more thoroughly later, and visited a few of the shopping areas just to look around. I'll probably do some more specific targets or local tours for the next couple days, but I wouldn't be surprised if I find my way back to Holyrood for another visit if my leg holds up.

Day 12: Awrite!

Might be a bit brief tonight. The bus rides from Chester -> Manchester -> Glasgow -> Edinburgh went pretty smoothly. I planned to visit the Manchester Art Gallery during my 3 hour wait between buses, but apparently the three holidays it's closed for are Christmas, New Years and Good Friday. I got lunch in nearby Manchester China Town, but as China Towns go it was pretty underwhelming. The bus ride was pretty scenic, but taking pictures through the tinted, dirty bus windows isn't the greatest.

The bus ride also led to an interesting iron in the fire that might come up again later, but more on that in the future. By the time I got to Edinburgh it was starting to get dark, and it took a bit of searching to find the place I'm staying. It is by far the slickest hostel I've been in, but there isn't much space to just hang out, and they charge a pretty hefty fee for internet access, which means that I might not post anything tomorrow if I can't find a more suitable arrangement. Once I dropped off my things I went out for dinner. I've been having this craving for curry for the last few days, and in my search for the hostel saw a place called Curry-in-a-Hurry, so I went there. It was quite delicious.

It started to rain quite hard as I left, so I just came back to the hostel for an early night. I have a good idea of what I want to do tomorrow (those who know me and know Edinburgh can probably figure it out) but it requires at least decent weather. Not sure what I'll do if it's raining, but the city looks amazing so I have no doubt I'll find something.

Day 11: Wandering

The weather was a lot nicer today (still a bit chilly, but dry at least) and my leg was feeling much better after the day of rest yesterday, so I decided to go on one of my aimless walks that I enjoyed so much when I was in Japan. I just start walking in a random direction without any goal, and just follow whatever seems most interesting as I go. The entire point of this is somewhat of a Robert Frost "Road Not Taken" thing. Sure, seeing all the buildings and monuments and doing all the touristy things is interesting, but that's the stuff everybody sees and you can just look up online. The true fun is when you take the side streets, turn down the unmarked paths, and discover things you didn't even know to look for. These usually lead to me getting horribly lost, but I was pretty confident as long as I kept track of which side of the river I was on I'd be able to find the city center again easily. Of course, that all was with the assumption that I'd stay inside Chester...

I began doing a walk around the city center walls, which are a mix of different periods, some dating back 2000 years to the Romans. Quite a few people were out for walks in the same area, and there were a few artists selling their pictures along the walls. This artist particularily amused me (Jessica and Paul will get this):

After walking the perimeter I crossed over the bridge to check out some of the rest of Chester, which I hadn't ventured into much yet. Following my "whichever way seems most interesting" rule, you'll see a pretty clear progression of the way my route took me...

After wandering in the woods for a good 2 hours I finally emerged to find myself way out in the countryside entering into some little village. Luckily I could see Chester rising up in the distance, and following the road back made the return trip much quicker. At least I got to see some of the countryside other than through a bus window.

My leg was starting to get sore again by the end, but it held up a lot better than it has since I hurt it, so that's promising. It should get more rest tomorrow since I'll be on a bus most of the day.

Day 10: Resting and Planning

It's another cold and wet day in Chester. I was out for a bit to get food and go for a walk, but for the majority of the day I've stayed in. Did all my laundry in the morning, and spent a good bit of time planning out and booking the next stage of the trip. I've decided to just go on straight to Edinburgh, as bus rides and new cities bring extra costs and stresses and I'm already running short on time before my flight to Ireland. Booking a place to stay was a bit of a challenge as everything is booked up for Easter weekend, but I finally managed decent accomodations spread between two hostels. The transportation also wasn't trivial as nothing is going to run directly from Edinburgh. What I ended up doing is an 11 hour ride from Chester to Manchester, switching to a different bus to Glasgow, and then switching again to Edinburgh. It feels a bit silly to go through Glasgow since I'm coming back there 5 days later, but that's just how things worked out.

Notice: Pictures

If you check the right-hand of the blog you should now see a new link to a picasa site I uploaded pictures to. Other than deleting the obviously bad or duplicate pictures I haven't touched anything yet, so the quality on some won't be great. I'm heading out for a bit and leaving the uploading tool so hopefully everything should be in there in the next couple hours (it's a bit slow since there's a backlog to work through). Let me know if anybody has any problems.

Day 9: Chester Troubles

(First of all, since I'm doing a bunch of posts more or less at once and it puts the most recent at the top, reading the previous ones first will probably help in understanding why I'm in some place called Chester in the middle of the night).

When you're paranoid about missing your stop on a bus, sleep becomes incredibly hard. I slept for maybe an hour off and on, but by the time we finally go to Chester I was feeling pretty sore and tired. I then got off the bus in the pitch black of night, weighed down by my backpack and satchel, into the very cold, windy drizzle of Chester, having no idea where I was in town or where to go. I hadn't slept significantly since 4:30am the previous morning, and after wandering around the nearby streets of the bus dropoff the weight of my bags started to feel pretty heavy. I eventually found the local train station, and I knew roughly where my hotel was from there, so I found it pretty fast. Check-in time wasn't until 2pm though, so I wandered back to the train station (which was open-air and still very cold, but at least had cover from the rain) and huddled there spacing out and listening to my ipod for a couple hours until 7am or so, when things started to open. I went back to the hotel, and they were gracious enough to let me stash my bags there until I checked in later. Since I had a good deal of time and didn't really have much of a plan I just started walking. Despite my exhaustion and soreness the town is a very neat place. Most of the buildings around the city center have an old, charming look, and there are lots of cobblestone alleys and old city walls and bridges. There are lots of shops and restaurants very close by and it really is a nice mix of modern convenience and old history. I bought a word puzzle book in one of the shops and found a neat little alcove in the Cathedral's garden that had shelter from the rain and did some puzzles until I got too cold, then wandered some more until I found a library which I hung out in until I could check into my hotel. I finally got my hotel room with much relief only to discover I had lost the charger for my tablet at this point. The part I was most worried about was the USB to tablet charger since I wasn't even sure if UK had compatible models. Luckily they do, and I bought the charger, as well as an global socket converter thing (amusingly even when I return to Canada I'm going to have to have to use one to convert our sockets to the UK plug the charger has). Now I plan to get a good night's sleep, do some laundry in the morning and hopefully have a quiet, uneventful day tomorrow. I have 3 nights here (considerably more expensive then the hostel was, but it's only for 3 nights and the extra comfort and privacy is much appreciated right now) and then I'm debating if I should dip into Wales, go to York, or move on directly to Edinburgh.

Here are some pictures from the day. Since it was just wandering around I was playing with my camera more and trying to find interesting pictures instead of just snapping photos of buildings and monuments like in London.

This is one of the main streets in the commercial area. This was around 7 or 8am so it's still pretty quiet. It picked up a lot later in the day.

Fishermen: The only other people crazy enough to be out and about in the cold drizzle so early in the morning.

The Cathedral through nearby cherry blossoms. I have normal pictures of the Cathedral I'll put up tomorrow, I just find this one a bit more interesting.

A typical restaurant/shop in the city center, just to give an idea of the architecture and style

Anyway, that catches everything back up to date. Should be a bit less drama for the next couple days at least!