Day 15 in Edinburgh

Edinburgh — By Ryan on February 12, 2010 4:06 pm

Day 15 – 4^th day in Edinburgh

Today Paul decided to take me on a tour of the town, joy! I was working my usual hours and we left the house around 1pm or so to a nice scotish drizzle. It felt the way it should have felt for some reason and I didn’t mind it at all.

While Paul was invaluable to have around for directions the man was useless with his history, something he admits doesn’t stick in his brain well. So ever time I asked ‘what’s that building all about’ I’d get the standard reply ‘Aye, they make haggis there’. What about that one? ‘Oh, that’s where haggis was invented’. We wandered throughout the maze of crooked narrow streets, to the lower city, back up again and then down the Royal Mile, stopping in an ancient cemetary to appreciate the tombstones from the 1700 and 1800′s. After we had our fill of the dead we headed down to the Palace, a 400 year old haunted house, climbed up an extinct Volcano and then eventually headed home to dry off after the hours of rain. The rain had definitley started to pick up near the end so the idea of curling up infront of a PS3 with my good friend was appealing indeed. Which is exactly what we did. I was introduced to the splendor of Flower on the PS3 and was moved more than I’ve been with most of the video games I’ve played in my decorated carreer. It was Robbie Burns day coming up so the family went out for a wee party that evening and it was me in the house with Flower to keep me company. Which meant a bit of that and then a nice 30 minute nap before the ceaseless ringing of the house phone woke me up. It was Melissa on the other end and she informed me that there would be a cab coming to grab me in 10 minutes to take me to the birthday party where they all were. I tidied myself up and sure enough the cab was there prim and proper in 10 minutes.

Mr. Canavan had really stressed the importance of the house alarm before they left so I thought I would make sure that it was set before heading out. I read the instructions on how to arm it 3 times and followed it to the letter. As expected when it was armed there was a high pitched tone which was supposed to shut off immediately after the front door was closed. So I turned it all on, got the tone went out the front door and shut it… Well the tone didn’t turn off as it was supposed to, and the front door locked automatically, and I had no key. I was pretty sure that something didn’t go as planned and in a few minutes the house alarm was going to start going bananas. The cab was waiting there so I got in headed to the pub and informed Melissa of the fact that there was probably a very nice house in Scotland with an alarm system going balistic right now. This was all but verified when I told her the alarm tone didn’t shut off when I closed the front door so we had to wait for Paul to get to the pub from his dinner and then him and I caught a cab back up to the house so that he could properly disarm it and then re-arm it. What happened is that one of the doors in the house downstairs wasn’t fully closed, tripping the alarm. Good thing we got there in time before someone called the Police. No harm, no foul and we headed back to the pub to rejoin the birthday celebration.

It was a fantastic night and Paul’s friends were all fabulous people to chill out with. Definitely proven by the fact that I was able to stay away no problem until midnight or so. The pub we were in was obsessed with American culture. Flags hanging all over the place, elvis and other celebrity posters on the walls and the music was all american rock. Have to say that I would have gone a different way but that’s just me

Around midnight or so we walked home but not before I was able to try chips with chip sauce, a famous Scotish variation on regular chips. It was pretty good, I’ll admit to that but I think at the end of the day I prefer a little vineagar, some ketchup and salt on my chips. Melissa stayed over for a little while before catching a cab to her Car and Paul and I played a game called Trine for an hour or so before hitting the hay. He’d never played Trine multiplayer before and we were just both amazed with how awesome this game was with another person. Just blown away with how the team work was setup and the possibilities of gameplay when you worked together. We promised ourselves that my last day would definitely consist of much trine sprinkled in with our work. Yay life!

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Tags: col, Edinburgh, ps3, pub, robby burns, scotland, trine