Orienting ourselves with the grisly history on Edinburgh

After the past night's raging, it was no surprise that Ruth and I were a bit hungover/exhausted this morning. We only ended up getting up because of a strange fire alarm that went off early in the morning. We grabbed a simple free breakfast downstairs at the bar before passing out for another few hours. I got back up around noon to get in a quick run before the walking tour at 1pm. I still wasn't feeling great but the excellent running weather and discovery of a 1.5 mile loop around Meadows Park made the run more bearable.

I got Ruth up when I returned, which has become somewhat of a ritual by now, and made our way to the walking tour. Again, we lucked out and got a really awesome tour guide, Brendan from Ireland (an Irishman talking about Scottish history was quite interesting because of the throughlines he drew like joint conflict with Great Britain). I won't recap everything from the tour but the highlights were Ruth volunteering to be an example of someone who would be tortured in Edinburgh's past, finding out the origins of "getting shit-faced", and finding out about the immortalized dog Greyfriers Bobby (who looks exactly like our little dog Donovan!). We met some nice people on the walk such as two girls from UNC-High Point (who of course Ruth shared mutual friends with given her enormous social network) and a nice woman from Boise. Brendan finished the tour in the Princess Street Gardens looking up at the castle and told us the truly epic story of how four Scottish college students from Glasgow returned the Stone of Scone, a symbol of national pride back to Scotland when they stole it from England. Overall, the tour was a really great historical snapshot and provided plenty of intrigue with its grisly details of torture, execution, ghosts balanced well with lighthearted stories like the one just mentioned.

This was more of a chill evening as Ruth and I watched Ghostbusters (ironic since we are in one of the most haunted places in the world) with more people from Chico State in the hostel's chill out room, got our discounted dinner at the bar downstairs of the hostel while watching the Eurocup match of Ireland and Croatia, and booked our travel/hostel's for the remainder of the trip. Tomorrow will be a big day of doing all the things that interested us on the tour today!