The National Gallery

We walked past The National Gallery every day and it took till the last day before we went in and explored it.  It's free like all the museums we saw in London.  We walked through the permanent collections and they allowed photography, so we took a lot of photos of the French Impressionism gallery.  I was also interested in the Scottish painters, so I took photos of that.

Scottish National Gallery

Holyrood Palace

We didn't pay for the tour, so this is as much as we got to see for free.  If we'd had Edinburgh Passes like we had London Passes, then the Palace and the Castle would have been free.  As it was, we chose the Castle and paid for that.

Here's the inner doors behind the archway.  The unicorn is the symbol of Scotland and the lion is the symbol of England.

Street stuff

I don't know who Wullie is but he sure likes sitting on his bucket.

A Cow in a Kilt.  Edinburgh really likes their coos.  I guess the coo is Wullie's friend.

Here's another one on the roof of the building we were standing by.

And here's an aptly named pub.

Speaking of weird pub names, here's some weird pub signs.  Apparently Edinburgh has a problem with wild animals?

Because, yes, it really was that cold all the time.

And if that's not weird enough, here's two cigar store Indians.

Another Graveyard behind a church

Patisserie Valerie

Once we discovered this tea shop, we ate there every day.  It's WAAAAY better than Starbucks.

Patisserie Valerie

Four cups of tea in the pot and scrumptious desserts to boot!  I had an apple tart and Rob had a strawberry gateau.  It's more expensive to eat in the restaurant than to get it as take-away, but you can't take four cups of tea back to your hotel room so we paid the extra sitting down fee.

The Leaving Feast

Because it was a school trip they weren't allowed to serve us whiskey, even us adults, so we got irn bru instead.  Irn bru is basically orange crush/big red.

Here's our entertainment.  It was Am-Dram at its finest.

Here's the haggis.  I ate it and it wasn't that bad, but I did get sick later.  Also, there was shellfish in the fish course even though the waitstaff said there wasn't and I was already sick from that.  

This is the mousse fantoosh.  It was good.

 And that was it.  We walked back to the hotel, I took a benadryl to combat the shrimp allergy and went to bed to combat the naseau from the haggis.  Rob went back out to take more night time photos.  We woke up the next morning, had our free cornflakes, and got in the van to take a death defying, way too fast and reckless, ride to the airport.  24 hours later with no sleep we were eating Tex Mex at Rosa's in Killeen. 

 I have never been happier to see a breakfast taco in my life. ​ 
​Rob got migas.