edinburgh, scotland

my original intent in going to scotland was to see the loch ness monster. i was going to take a picture of the lake and tag nessie. scotland is also home to glencoe, a famous and beautiful glen also featured in "skyfall." that kind of sums up what i knew about scotland, with a little sean connery and groundskeeper willy thrown in for good  meaure. really pitiful.

i ended up really loving edinburgh. it actually felt a lot like berkeley, strangely enough. there are a lot of college students, and home to the greatest concentration of asian people we saw in europe. if i ever open an asian restaurant, edinburgh will be my first stop - we were shocked at how much thai, korean, and chinese food cost in edinburgh. korean tofu soup was 12 GBP, or 19.60 USD (i think it's about 10 dollars in the bay area) ouch! though, this could just be attributed to the very weak USD.

edinburgh is the capital of scotland, and part of the united kingdom. scotland's population is about 5.2 million, edinburgh a city of about 500,000. they use the british pound as currency, but their bills are different and apparently, there are some places in england that won't accept it as "true" currency. in 2014 a referendum will be brought to scottish voters for independence from the united kingdom. i found it a little hard to understand their accents. they of course, had no difficultly understanding our flat american english and seem to enjoy a lot of american television.  

edinburgh castle 

we stumbled across "edinburgh's christmas," an outdoor christmas fair of sorts that had lots of hot drinks, hot foods, and crafts. the whole set-up was very bavarian ski-lodge and very family-friendly, kids everywhere. it was pretty cold out (sometimes under 30F), but there were small kids in strollers everywhere, bundled up in mini-sleeping bag cocoons. there was a similar christmas fair in london at hyde park, but i think i prefer edinburgh christmas. i'm hoping the bay area moves from food trucks to bavarian fairs in the very near future. 

we stayed at a bed and breakfast, which was really lovely. i want to live there. there were only eight rooms and each morning had a full breakfast in the dining room, featuring a buffet with fruits and cheese, crackers, and then a made to order hot breakfast plate.

 bert and ernie beds - because it's scotland, they had free scotch whiskey waiting outside our door.

the national dish of scotland is haggis - a savoury pudding containing sheep's pluck (heart, liver and lungs); minced with onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, and salt, mixed withstock, and traditionally encased in the animal's stomach and simmered for approximately three hours. it's usually produced commercially nowadays in sausage casing. it's even featured in homer's odyssey, it's that old school. i really wanted to try it and was excited to see it featured on the breakfast menu at the b and b. this is me picking at it. it sounds kind of vile, but if i had to compare it to something it tastes most like a falafel ball. it's featured in a lot of other food items, like haggis pizza and haggis chips. they like to serve it with neeps and tatties (boiled and mashed turnip and potatoes). we were also introduced to something called the potato scone, bottom left of the plate above, which was like a chinese green onion pancake.  

 this is the famed arthur's seat - legend has it that this is where camelot was located. a healthy hike.

i got an email the day before from the tour company saying that the loch ness tour had been cancelled and would we like to take their other scottish highlands tour and feed cows? being that winter days are very short in scotland (8 am sunrise, 3:50 pm sunset), we'd be spending a lot of time driving around in the dark anyways, so we agreed to the second tour and had a fun time! we drove around in a large orange van.

the main purpose of the tour was to visit the scottish highlands, as you will see below, aptly named. the highlands are very sparsely populated.

here are some sights that we saw:

this is the castle featured in monty python's the holy grail. because of the low budget, while many different castles were featured in the movie, it's mainly different shots of this one castle.

they are really into their meat pies, pasties (pronounced "past-eez"). it's like a handheld pot pie, which i guess is what a hot pocket is. this one had ground beef and onions in it, bought in a tiny town called Aberfoyle.

one of my favorite parts was feeding these special highland cows, nicknamed "hairy coos." nowadays they're bred less for actual beef purposes and more for cute pet reasons. the girl next to me held her hand out for too long and got a solid lick from the hairy coo and she said it felt like a piece of wet leather, awesome. they really were very very cute though. overall, i couldn't believe how green and expansive everything was. i imagine that the effect is even greater in the springtime when everything is in bloom and the sky is blue. we saw lots of fog and clouds which made it all seem very dramatic.

view from the national wallace monument - william wallace defeated the english army in 1297 and was defeated in 1298, later  hanged, drawn, and quartered for high treason and crimes against English civilians by Edward I. he was also famously portrayed by Mel Gibson in Braveheart. the fog was crazy. i understand that in sf, we're all very proud of the sf fog and even named it, but this scottish fog was out of control. this picture can't really capture the vastness of it, but you can kind of see how it completely covers the cities below, with only the castle in the distance visible.  

okay ttyl!