Scotland Blog Week 3

Good day…. Week three from Scotland. Well, the highlight of the week had to be my friend Ana from Venezuela via Puerto Rico arriving in Edinburgh. She was routed through Manchester out of Newark for some reason and then the overseas flight was delayed and they didn’t make the connection so I was sitting in the airport holding a bunch of wilting yellow roses and not knowing what was going on. Finally I got Jim on his cell and he told me that Ana had called only five minutes after I left the house and was going to be delayed by a couple of hours. She was on the next flight from Manchester and we were all happy.

This week included a trip to Sainsburys, a grocery store that you take a bus to…We bought a big bill of groceries and had to take a taxi back. The taxi’s are fairly reasonable, especially when there are several people. All of whom would have to pay for a bus ride separately. I will do some photos from the grocery in a later blog to show some of the things that they have that we don’t find in the stores in the states.

On Ana’s first full day in Scotland we walked to the top of the Salisbury Crags. It was a steep climb. We all made it and were rewarded with magnificent views of the city, and surrounding countryside. Jim carried Bo all the time and made it much easier than I did. Ana and Tasca went up the thing like a couple of mountain goats, (very pretty and agile mountain goats.) This day was something of a marathon because we walked down the less steep slope on the northern side to the Scottish Parliament building which looks like it was designed on Sesame Street by children…and then up the Royal Mile as far as the Robbie Burns Pub. Jim and Ana and I tried the Robbie Burns House Ale, called The Exciseman’s 80. Pretty good for a Scottish ale, but I greatly prefer the Irish offering, especially Guinness and Murphy’s.

Saturday evening we dined at an Indian Restaurant named Kismot where we all had Nan bread and either lamb or chicken dishes with Indian sauces. I chose a lamb tiki, in a Madras sauce which was listed as medium hot. It was, plus hot, but delicious.

On Sunday we walked to Princes Street for the Easter Festival. There were crowds, and people playing soccer on stilts, Easter egg rolls, marching bands and salsa dancers. Then the Scottish weather reared its strange head. It was warm, and then about one p.m. it turned quite unpleasantly cold and then it started raining. Unusual for Scotland, thus far at least, and normally according to Jim, it was a hard, cold driving rain. We got wet, and then found a Costa Coffee shop and got big and warm coffees and dried out. While we were there it stopped raining and got warm outside. We went out and it started raining. We walked to Jenners Department store where the shoes ranged from four hundred to one thousand dollars. I didn’t buy any. We caught a taxi home, rather exhausted from the cold rain, and from our adventures on the Crags the day before.

This week we are going to ride the tour busses, visit the art galleries, take a bus to Glasgow, go to Stirling Castle, do the Royal mile and the Botanical Garden. I will keep you posted. Mac