What a gorgeous city.  I came away thinking I’d truly made a mistake with my decision to live in London, I would love to live in Edinburgh.  It is just beautiful.

I went to meet my Scottish friend who now lives in New Zealand.  He’d found a great place for us to stay, right in the centre of town, very close to Edinburgh Castle.  The place was so cute, had split level staircases up to each room.

The crap thing about this trip was it was only a couple of days; due to me going to a 21st the weekend before and my friend had to leave for NZ.  But we totally made the most of it.  We wandered all around the city, climbed up to look out points and generally stood in awe of the amazing architecture.  They have a graveyard called Greyfriars in the middle of town, dedicated to a small dog called Greyfriars Bobby.  When Greyfriars master died, he stood guard over the grave for 14 years.  When he died, he was given a tombstone close to his master and people still put little soft toys and things at the foot of his grave. I love these kind of stories.

Our second day, we headed out to Rosslyn Chapel, made famous by some book you may have heard of, called the Da Vinci Code.  The chapel itself had a huge temporary roof and scaffolding put over it, in an attempt to dry it out to preserve it.  Hence, no photos of the outside.  The inside was just amazing.  Every inch of it is covered in stone carvings.

The interesting part about the chapel is its vaults.  According to scans done to the ground, the vaults underneath the chapel are as tall as double decker buses and are said to contain all sorts of magical secrets.  One, of course, being the Holy Grail, the lost treasure of the Knights of Templar plus other random goodies such as God’s mummified head.  The problem is, no one knows how to get down there.

This sorta thing drives me a bit nuts.  According to the guy doing all the talking, they are going to work on restoring the chapel first before trying to get into the vaults.  It should take around, ya know, 20 years.  If it were up to me I’d be diggering my way in there by now.  Patience, I don’t has it.

At night we did a ghost tour round the vaults under Edinburgh.  They’re meant to be the most haunted place in Britain and have had swarms of psychics and scientists down there.  Everyone feels weird going down there, Gavin and I being no exception.  The best word I can use to describe it is, it’s blurry.  Your head gets all blurry and the air feels thick.  Our host told us “true ghost stories” of things that had happened to visitors down there.  I’m proud to say we have a story of our own.

Nope, didn’t see anything, didn’t feel any invisible forces.  But the next day we both had bruises.  Not your usual bruises, mine were little lines in a perfect zigzag down my thigh.  A perfect zigzag.  Gavin had something similar on his thigh as well, we were a bit freaked when we both realised.  Yay for weird happenings!

We spent a bit of time out in Gavs home town which was very cute and made me very homesick.  Would love to live in Edinburgh, it’s something I’m definitely going to look into.

Edinburgh also has odd names for their pubs… More Scotland Photos