Edinburgh Part 2: The Grand Tour

Edinburgh is beautiful.

Monday morning, Sarah began my tour around the town. This is the path that she takes every day through the park to get to classes.

We are both super jealous of the people that get to live in this building.

Sarah standing in front of her school!

One of our first stops was the Greyfriars Graveyard. This was also our first stop on the Edinburgh tour of Harry Potter because this is the graveyard that J.K. Rowling used to walk in to gain inspiration for her book series. And you can find Tom Riddle's grave here.

We didn't find it yet. But it was exciting to know that it was there nonetheless.

This is the grave of Greyfriars Bobby, the dog of the man Greyfriars. Bobby is known as the most loyal dog because after his owner died, Bobby sat on his grave for 14 years.

And here's a statue of Bobby. There's a lot of stuff dedicated to Bobby around the town -- taverns, stores, restaurants, etc.

The graveyard is also beautiful.

And of course kind of creepy. I can't walk through a graveyard without that eery inkling sitting in the back of my mind.

Next, we went to the roof of a really cool museum.

The view is awesome.

I feel the need to climb things in every city I go to just to get the view. So worth it.

A really awesome street that I forced Amelia and Sarah to walk down with me.

The castle!

While Sarah went to class, Amelia picked up the tour and took me to a beautiful park with tons of doggies running around.

After Sarah's class, we met up for part 2 of the Harry Potter tour of Edinburgh: The Elephant House. AKA where J.K. Rowling WROTE Harry Potter.

Not only is this place awesome because of J.K. Rowling, but also because the food is amazing as well.

If there's one thing they did perfectly in London and Edinburgh, it was pots of tea. This pot was filled with looseleaf chai and may have been the best pot of tea I've ever had.

I also enjoyed a "malteser cake"--a shortbread type thing coated with a layer of chocolate and a malt bar. Delicious.

Sarah enjoyed her hot chocolate and millionaire bar.

And Amelia her coffee and brownie.

One of the most amazing parts of The Elephant House was the bathroom. Every inch of the wall in the waiting area and each stall is covered with letters to Rowling herself.

It was pretty overwhelming. Luckily, I got my pen to work on the wall after a couple of minutes so that I could write my own thank you.

A larger shot of the dining room.

Sarah and I continued the tour after Amelia left by walking the Royal Mile--one of the main roads in town with tons of souvenir stores and restaurants.

As you can see, Sarah and I had success with souvenir-buying that day.

P.S. The unicorn is apparently the official animal of Edinburgh. Or Scotland. I can't remember.

This is where the Queen lives. The building is at the bottom of the Royal Mile and the castle (pictured earlier) is at the top of the hill, at the other end of the Royal Mile.

We decided on a pub for dinner based on the fact that they had food to share.

Sarah and I shared the meat and cheese plate: three different kinds of bread, pickles, sun-dried tomatoes, brie cheese, blue cheese (blech), cheddar cheese, salami, turkey, roast beef, and prosciutto.

No offense Edinburgh, but your prosciutto crudo just doesn't compare to Italy's. Yes, I've become an even bigger food snob since coming to Italy.

Our meal was delicious nevertheless. Oh, and this was supplemented with cider of course.

My one requirement for the restaurant we went to was that it had to have Sticky Toffee Pudding on the dessert menu. Because that stuff is AMAZING.

But Sarah had never tried it! Thankfully, I was able to correct that problem. She's a huge fan now.

Overall, a fabulous tour of a beautiful city.

Next time in Edinburgh: I climb a mountain!

-Meri

London Part 3: We Leave London and Go To Oxford!

As you can see from this first picture, Oxford is really pretty. And generally amazing.

We basically spent our entire time gawking at everything we saw and taking a billion pictures that do no justice to the places themselves.

First we went to the castle.

The castle was pretty cool, but more exciting was this strange face that Michelle made while we walked on the path towards the castle.

And even more exciting that was Sam pretending her head was going to be cut off. She looks pretty psyched about being decapitated.

Escaping near death made us pretty hungry, so we headed to the Art Cafe for foodsies.

Sam got pancakes with mixed berries.

So did Michelle.

AND I GOT PORRIDGE. You have no idea how exciting this was for me. Sam and Michelle can vouch that I was way too thrilled about this bowl of cooked oats. But seriously, I eat oatmeal almost every day at home and it doesn't even exist in Modena!

I was a happy happy camper.

After fueling up, we ventured off to accomplish the many things on our "list of things to do in Oxford."

Instead, we mostly got distracted by pretty roads and buildings like these and subsequently accomplished nothing from said list for a few hours.

It was worth the wandering though.

I love the name of this street.

This is a university's library. Get your act together American University.

I expect campus to look like this when I return.

And we went to this awesome candy shop. I got licorice. Once again a happy camper.

Back to that list of things to do. We ended up having plenty of time to both wander around and also succeed at going to places we originally wanted to go to.

This was the "Covered Market." It reminded me of The Reading Terminal in Philadelphia, but on a much smaller scale. And much more quaint. (The Reading Terminal is still one of my favorite places on the planet though.)

And Alice's Shop! Home to a billion objects related to Alice in Wonderland. Very cute. Kind of like Sam and Michelle's faces in this picture. I bet they wished I would start cropping my pictures...

Then we started wandering again.

And I'm glad we did, because we ran into the most beautiful college campus I've ever seen in my life.

This is Keble College.

Holy crap balls.

Once again AU, I expect better when I return.

There were a bunch of posts with heads on them. I believe Sam said "I just want to put my head on their heads."

This was the best she could do.

Dinner time! We went to this place Quod that was super fancy looking but not very expensive. Win win.

I got a puff pastry tart topped with roasted carrots, roasted butternut squash, ricotta, sage, lemon, and grated cheese. YUM.

Sam got pasta alla carbonara.

Because I'm a nice person and good friend, I'm not putting up the photo of Michelle and her pizza. It's a tad frightening. You're welcome Michelle.

Next time on the blog, I say my goodbyes to London.

-Meri