dublinternship

(want to join me from the beginning?)

I want to introduce you to a very special friend of mine: 4am.

4am and I are acquaintences, saying hello in passing glances to one another every so often. Most of the time its when I’m coming home from the pubs (and I say to it in a matter such as “heyyyyvtheerrreee youu” [<— is this a good enough pub reference, Bethany Jane??]) or a “go away” as I happen to wake up to the sun bursting through my Dublin window. But this morning, I woke up to it purposefully when my alarm was like, “Good Morning, Sunshine! Are you ready to get onto a plane today?” I answered a reluctant “yes,” dragged myself out of bed, and mumbled a sort of “hello, take me to terminal one” at the cab driver. Joining me on my 4am adventure were my faves: Bethany Jane and Chelsea. They were equally “meh,” but our adventure had purpose: we were off to the land de la kilts—Scotland!

Why we chose to country hop at 4am is a bit beyond me, but did I stroll through security, waltz onto a plane and promptly pass out for the next 45 minutes? Yep. I fell asleep in Ireland and woke up in Scotland. Um. Wow.

So we landed in Edinburgh, and this is what I saw:

and

So Edinburgh is pretty cool. It reminds me a lot of Paris because a lot of the buildings look the same, and the streets (see the pic above) are lined with bricks or cobblestone rather than just regular pavement in a lot of places. Edinburgh looks so much more distinctly European than Dublin does. Dublin, at face value, reminds me a lot of big-city-America…like a Chicago or a NYC (though I’ve never been to the latter). There are a lot of big buildings with different facades. In Edinburgh, there are a lot of big buildings, too, but they’re clustered together in a complex pattern in winding streets and with beautiful, old, weather-beaten facades. Lovely. I fell in love at first glance.

After wandering around for a long time to find our hostel, we went out to get our first bite to eat. We stopped at a coffee shop. I bought waffles. With syrup. With bacon on it. Hello, again, to clogged arteries. Hello, again, to enthralled Lorena as she’s taking a swim in the pool of ecstasy.

…and then we just kept eating.

Part of the problem with waking up at 4am is that my eating schedule was thrown off. Nevermind that I am a humanoid garbage disposal and can consume any amount of food at any given time with pleasure; I was starving for most of my first day of my Scottish adventure. So in the middle of sightseeing, we just kept eating. And eating. And eating. But nevermind my obsession with food—off to the sites!

First, St. Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile.

Ooh and aah all you’d like, and then move on to the interior:

Continue to ooh and ahh, and come with me on a brief tour of the place, looking at the stained glass windows:

St. Giles was all sorts of fascinating, and like Notre Dame and St. Paul’s and St. Patrick’s before it, made me fall in love within seconds. It clearly doesn’t take much for me to be interested and get me swooning. We strolled around St. Giles for quite a while, when it occurred to me that there were plenty of crypts in the church. This isn’t entirely unfounded in Europe—when I was in London at St. Paul’s a few years ago I had a crisis when walking over crypts that were in the floor—but unfounded to me, who is used to expertly avoiding walking in cemeteries and mausoleums.

Childish as always, I had another mini-crisis, but instead of having a sob-fest over the amount of crypts around me, I got rather antsy about being in the place at all. There was one particular crypt where there was a statue on top of it with a sarcophagus-esque lid of the person within. (I don’t know who it was…some provost of the church, I think? The writing on the crypt was Latin. And even though I took 4 years of it I don’t remember a smidge. Sorry, Magistra!) I couldn’t handle it and scampered away quickly, so instead of spending what little time I had in a cathedral—a CATHEDRAL, Lauren! How often are you in a CATHEDRAL?—I kept looking around me thinking, “ahhh dead bodies.”

I’ll grow up eventually, I guess.

In other Edinburgh news, we spent the day milling around street vendors and street performers and ate as much as our purses would allow it. My favourite stop of the day was in a park nearby a cliff:

Oooh, pretty! Right? I’ll tell you more about that in a couple of days.

For now, I’ll leave you with an image of my breakfast because it’s just too good to pass up:

Happy Edinburgh-ing!

up next: the one about edinburgh (part 2)