This past week I went to Scotland and Ireland, which were two great countries to wrap up my crazy semester of traveling! Great weather and beautiful places made for a perfect week.
A lot of my friends are either traveling with their families right now or are studying for/taking final exams (luckily for me, I didn’t have any finals!), so I decided to plan a little trip to keep myself busy. I went to Edinburgh by myself for two days, and then met up with my friend Lindsay in Dublin for three days.
I got back to school from Iceland on Sunday morning around 1:00pm, and my overnight bus to Edinburgh left London that night at 11:00pm. If that wasn’t hectic enough, I was already running on no sleep from the night before. Allana and I met up with her mom and cousin who got to Iceland late at night before we left for the airport. We hung out with them for a few hours and then left to go to the airport around 3:30am for our 6:00am flight. So we didn’t sleep that night, and I might have slept a little bit on the plane, although I usually never do. Then once I got back to London I had to shower and repack my clothes before I left. I also knew that I couldn’t nap no matter how tired I was because I am the heaviest sleeper alive, and there is no way I would have woken up for my 11:00pm bus (I slept for 14 hours the other night if you needed any more convincing…). I mentioned that I normally don’t sleep on planes, and unfortunately, the same principle applies for buses. I was super uncomfortable and crowded (some guy sat in the seat right next to mine even though there were plenty of empty rows) the entire nine hour ride, and I only slept for a little bit when we took a half hour pit stop in the middle of the trip. This was only because the guy who had sat down next to me had gotten off the bus so I laid down across both of our seats and passed out. Needless to say, I was not a happy camper when he woke me up to scoot over instead of just sitting in one of the various open rows..
When I finally got to Edinburgh on Monday morning around 8:00am, I felt like the walking dead. I couldn’t check into my room at my hostel until that afternoon, but I went there to store my luggage and relax in the lobby. I tried to nap for a little bit, and as you may have guessed, it did not happen. After hanging out for a while and getting some food, I headed out for the day now that the main attractions were starting to open their gates. The first thing I did was head to the Edinburgh Castle. I love walking through castles and seeing the state apartments, and the great halls, and in this case, the Scottish National War Memorial. The castle sits high up on a hill, and you can see the entire city. Absolutely gorgeous! Afterwards, I went to a nearby attraction called the Scotch Whisky Experience. It was cool to get to see the process of how whisky is made, and we even got a free sample (and got to keep the glass too!).
For lunch, I went to a cafe called The Elephant House, which is notoriously known for being the place where J.K. Rowling began writing the Harry Potter novels. For starters, the food was great. Besides that, it was so cool to read the articles throughout the cafe talking about how J.K. Rowling once sat at the tables in the back room and looked out the windows at the primary school and cemetery behind the cafe and used them as inspiration for Hogwarts’ design and iconic characters’ names. I walked through the cemetery later and found Thomas Riddle’s grave (Tom Riddle = Voldemort, for those of you who don’t know, a.k.a my dad)… so cool! The bathroom is even covered with hilarious Harry Potter graffiti. I met some girls in the bathroom, and we were laughing at the fact that none of us actually intended to use the bathroom, but instead we just wanted to get some selfies in there.
I spent most of the rest of the day wandering around the city. I went to St. Giles’ Cathedral (gorgeous!), the Scottish Parliament building, and got to see Holyrood Palace from the outside. Then I spent some time walking along the major shopping streets in the modern part of the city. In the evening I went to a really awesome museum called Camera Obscura and World of Illusions. Basically the camera obscura is a small rectangular mirror at the top of this museum that is reflected through three lenses and focuses on a big circular screen in a completely dark room. The workers can rotate the mirror and give visitors a view of any location in the city. It was so cool to be sitting at the top of a building in one end of town and be able to rotate the mirror and see people at the far end of the Royal Mile walking along the street and see people watching street performers. The rest of the museum consisted of a bunch of awesome optical illusions and fun things like that. Then I got dinner and headed back to my hostel to go to sleep. After two whole days without sleep, a good night’s sleep was well overdue.
The next day, I got up and started off my day by hiking up Arthur’s Seat, which is the highest point in Edinburgh’s main park, Holyrood Park. Once you’ve made it to the top of Arthur’s Seat, you get an incredible view of Edinburgh. The hike up there was harder than I expected (it’s super steep), but it was so worth it. I spent the rest of the day walking around the city and seeing a bunch of monuments like the Scott Monument, the National Monument of Scotland, and the Nelson Monument.
The next day I met up with Lindsay in Dublin! On our first day in Dublin, we pretty much just walked around the city and saw a ton of the main sites in Dublin like Trinity College, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the Dublin Castle. Trinity College was so nice, and randomly walking into open academic buildings reminded me of when I was looking at different colleges. Except not in Ireland so it wasn’t nearly as cool. We went on a free tour of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and went on a self-guided tour of the state apartments of the Dublin Castle.
On Thursday we went on a day trip to the Cliffs of Moher. We had both heard such good things about the cliffs, so we knew we had to go! The trip made for a very long, but fun, day. It’s crazy to think that we drove from one coast of Ireland to the other and back again in a day! Our bus stopped at Galway first where we got led on a short walking tour through the city. Galway was so cute! Then when we got closer we stopped at the Burren, which was basically just a cool landscape area along the coast. We stopped in a very small town called Doolin for lunch, and went to a local pub for chicken tenders and french fries. The restaurant had a collection of signed $1 bills taped along the walls, and Lindsay and I found one that was signed from Joliet, IL! What a small world. We then followed the recommendations of our bus driver and got a treat at the chocolate store next door. We both got a dark chocolate caramel biscuit, and it was seriously amazing.
We finally got to the Cliffs, and they were incredible! I kept taking pictures, even though they all look pretty much identical, but I just couldn’t get over how breathtaking the view was. The pictures truly don’t do the cliffs justice. We walked along the edge for quite a while to get a good view of the cliffs, and we also walked back the other direction towards O’brien Tower. We met these three guys who were also on our tour, and funny enough, one of them had studied at Queen Mary, University of London this semester just like Lindsay and I had. What’s even weirder is that even though this guy is from Michigan, he has family from all over the Chicagoland area. He even has cousins that went to Fremd High School! How crazy is that?! AND all three of them were on the same flight as us back to London the next night. What a crazy coincidence.
We were super tired after our long day at the Cliffs of Moher, so our last day in Dublin was really relaxed. The only big thing we had planned was going to the Guinness Storehouse, which was really fun! It was cool to see how Guinness is made, and we even got to pour our own complimentary pint (we also got a certificate for pouring the perfect pint, no big deal). We went up to the Gravity Bar to have our Guinness and take some pictures. We had a funny encounter with some random Asian woman, which we could not stop laughing about for the rest of the day. This woman clearly didn’t speak English, but she tapped us on the shoulder, held up a peace sign, and pointed to her husband who was eagerly waiting to take our picture (???). Slightly confused, we smiled for a picture with this random woman and then she threw up a peace sign and walked away. We have NO idea why this random lady wanted a picture with us, but we were cracking up thinking about how confused we must have looked in that picture and how they will always have that picture to look back on. Overall, Guinness was super fun, and I even got a t-shirt!
Then we got some dinner and headed to the airport to fly back to London. Of course, things couldn’t run according to plan or it wouldn’t be a typical trip to the airport for me. Two hours before our flight, it got delayed another hour, but luckily we were able to find these cool little pods/alcoves in the walls of the airport lounge where we hung out until it was time for our flight. We finally got back to campus around 1:30am, and it was good to be back! I can’t believe I only have one week left in London!! I’ve got a lot of fun things planned to make the most out of my time left here 🙂
Eva Around the World 