Honeymoon Time: Edinburgh, Scotland

We arrived to Edinburgh, Scotland after a very brief hour and a bit bus ride from Glasgow on September 6th. We got to the Edinburgh coach station around 11:30am and tried to contact a private room rental on airbnb that we had been messaging the night previously. We were looking for hotels for the night in Edinburgh, but everything was really expensive so we tried airbnb.... never again!! After a $5 phone call trying to connect with this person, he said that he left for Glasgow for the day and wouldn't be back til night. So... we were homeless for the night, Edinburgh was 95% booked as per booking.com and the cheapest rental was around $400 a night. It was a great moment. Aleksy contemplated renting a car to sleep in for the night, but I just kept refreshing my webpage... and a miracle of a last minute cancellation came up!!! Best news ever! Aleksy and I high-fived to the amazing deal of a $200 a night hotel and headed to the Brooks Hotel.

We started walking toward our hotel, and immediately were crazy impressed by Edinburgh... just walking along the street with a castle in front of us, gothic buildings within sight, and tons of architecturally impressive buildings everywhere. We knew almost immediately this was gonna be a good one... and Edinburgh was the favourite of our vacation!

Our hotel, the Brooks Hotel was adorable (behind me in the pic... just mind the rubbish cans). We just dropped our bags at this point, but it was super traditional with a big lounge, dining room, and the staff were so nice. We dropped our bags and began exploring!

We quickly grabbed some lunch sandwiches to go and headed up to tour the castle! We very casually had our lunch right in front of the castle before heading in for our tour... you know sandwiches and donuts in front of a thousand year old castle... no big deal.

It was a bit of a line up to pay our 30 pounds or so to get in (with an opt out/cheap out on the audio tour).. but we both decided that it was so worth it to get to go inside the castle walls... so much history and so beautiful. This picture is taken about the centre of the castle, which had so many separate old buildings within it. We saw a couple of different weddings happening there at the castle while we were there too... so amazing.... but not as awesome as ours... There was a little chapel in the middle of the castle that was dated from the 1000s.

After our tour of the Edinburgh Castle, we headed down the Royal Mile: A street that is elevated to the city, close to the elevation of the castle and is filled with touristy stores like scotch, and scottish souvenir shops. This is St. Giles Cathedral, which is about halfway down the Royal Mile and we could go in freeeeee (with everything costing so much... we really appreciated when things weren't 20 pounds to get in)! It was absolutely beautiful and huge inside. We also saw a man propose in front of the church (it was the fastest proposal ever).

After walking along the entire Royal Mile, we headed up to an outlook viewpoint of Edinburgh, which had the most beautiful view of Edinburgh. It didn't take much effort to get to the top point, and we could see everything from this view: behind us here you can see the castle, and the royal mile along with the rest of the city!

After our amazing views of Edinburgh, we headed to the Grass Market for some grub! Well, not exactly... we got caught in the rain, looked up and down the streets of Edinburgh outside of the touristy places hoping for a less expensive place to eat, then ended back at the Grass Market for supper! And I'm glad we did, because it was an awesome supper: This is me enjoying my chicken and haggis supper with mashed and veggies. I may not be the biggest fan of haggis by itself, but with chicken and mashed... extra salty... Mmmmm. And of course my go-to beer in Scotland: Tennants.

After supper, we grabbed some drinks from the store for the hotel, and decided to spend the night booking the rest of our trip because I really didn't want to sleep in a car at any point of this vacation!!

When we got back to the hotel, we saw our amazing room (you get what you pay for!) and were shown the "honesty bar" where you take whatever scotch, wine, drinks you like and just write it down on the paper there. And we got a round free because it was our honeymoon... the only real perk we got for being on our honeymoon during our vacation!

The next day, after an amazing eggs benedict breakfast at the hotel (Aleksy obviously had more haggis... the "traditional scottish breakfast"), we headed to Edinburgh hotel #2, dropped off our bags and the man at the hotel made some suggestions of site seeing: he told us about this market in the picture that was just down the street where we ended up getting our to-go lunch for our day of hiking, and he also told us about a tour called the "Mary Kings Close", which is a tour of the Underground world of Edinburgh. He was super nice and informative and the "Guest House" we were staying in had tall ceilings and huge crown molding.

After grabbing lunch from the market just down from our Guest House, we started our hike at "Arthurs Seat", which is the very top point of the mountain that outlines Edinburgh. Contrary to what the name suggests, the top of the mountain wasn't a seat, but was 2 pillars and a concrete pad... yup we made it to the top.

And this was about halfway up our hike: The history to this city was so amazing... ruins were all over the UK and this was halfway up a mountain.

This is heading up to the top of the mountain... Aleksy is quite fond of taking routes that are not part of the pathed way up (we went through this on our hike in Chile) so we had to go up the alternate route... which was actually nice because there weren't a million people going up with us. The top of the moutain behind me doesn't look so big but if you look really closely you can see some tiny dots along the top... and those tiny dot are approximately 283422847728 people... it was quite the hike up there.

And.... the top! So high up and we could see all of Edinburgh! It was quite windy up there... It didn't take too long to get there... maybe about an hour.

After spending some moments taking in the amazingness of the views of our favourite Honeymoon city, we sought out a place or lunch that was slightly less filled with people. This was our lunch at the top of the mountain: white wine, a homemade loaf of multigrain bread, jam preserves, and a scottish pie! And... we ate and drank it all!! (well.. there was some jam left...).

We probably spent about a hour at the top enjoying our lunch and view, then headed down the mountain... and a whole bottle of wine = a little wobbly on the way down...

Our hotel for the night: The abercraig guest house. We had an amazing big room, and the gentleman who ran the guest house gave us some great history of where the Guest House is located (where the wealthy used to live, just removed from the city centre) and suggested that we go to the Mary Kings Close tour of the underground world of Edinburgh. So we booked the tour for 8:30pm after our hike, headed to our room so we could put some warmer clothes on (because temperature at night and during the day are like different seasons) then headed to Rose St. which is known for restaurants.

Our supper on Rose St.: I had bangers, mashed with some yorkshire puddings and Aleksy had the fish pie.... its all about the traditional style foods.... so delic!

After this we started our underground walking tour and learned that during the 1600s when the plague hit Edinburgh, that the Royal mile buildings were built on top of existing buildings and that the purpose was to seclude those infected with the plague. Thye talked about how the plague was spread with poor hygiene (emptying buckets of human waste onto the streets) and it was when the guide was explaining how the Dr's treated victims that I started feeling light-headed... then fainted, right to the floor. Embarassing... it was a mix of no oxygen and the gross content of what we were learning and I was done!

So a manager was called and I was escorted up out of the underground world and we started back to our hotel.. wah wah wah...

But.. we did take a second to take in how beautiful the castle was all lit up at night!

This was our last night in Edinburgh. The next morning, we had breakfast included at the Guest House where we both had a scottish breakfast (although sans haggis for me because I couldn't do anymore, but did have black pudding) then headed by bus to the Airport in Edinburgh to fly to Dublin, Ireland on the Monday!