Day 8/Day 9

So i'm going to cheat a little and throw two days in one here... luckily day 8 was extremely uneventful until night time, but day 9 made up for it.

On Friday I didn't really get started until about 8pm. Until then I was on the computer just squaring some things away and talking to a few friends about music for hours. But when nightfall came it became time for a pub crawl! My first Scotland pub crawl. It was a pretty fun night, a pretty big group of us, around 15 I want to say, went out to this pub crawl. We were able to walk around parts of Edinburgh and check out 5 different pubs. I think the pub crawl itself was a scam, but the night was fun. After it ended half of us headed back to Dave and Benny's to relax and hang out.

I ended up going to bed around 330am that night, and unfortunately enough, had a 7am wake up alarm for the train ride to Stirling the next day! We had a big group planned to go, but of course people will always bail when something is that early. So 9 of us ended up heading out to Stirling. It was actually a lot of fun, the first thing we did was walk up and see Stirling castle. On the way up to the castle we walked through an enormous graveyard and numerous architecture masterpieces; of churches, inns and monuments. Once we got to the castle it was about 9 pounds to go in, Sogol and I found the brilliant idea of getting an "explorer pass" for 12.40 pounds. This lets us go to 3 castles for that one time fee. Seeing that Edinburgh castle is right next door, 11 pounds alone, and neither of us have been there yet. This was a very prosperous decision :). Anyway, the castle was pretty cool - there was tons of history about how 140 Scotsman defended Stirling against the strong English army... there was even a set of cannons left out to display. The museum upstairs displayed the rest of the Scottish weapons and battle galore. About half way through exploring the castle a giant rainbow seemed to stem from one end of it and go into the town. I was able to get some great shots with the landscape and the rainbow, if only I could have found the gold.

After the castle we ate and walked around town for a bit. The next stop was the Wallace monument, aka the braveheart monument. This is what is captured in the picture. It is absolutely huge, built on the tallest piece of land in the province. It was a great hike just to get up to it, Jordan and I decided to try and scale the side of it, and succeeded rapidly and momentarily until we realized this was a terrible idea in the rain with nothing really to put our feet on ;). We enjoyed the sights for a bit up there, then headed exploring through the nearby woods (also where this picture was taken).

Then we headed to an old bridge, where apparently the battle was fought! It was the battle of 1297 if my memory serves me correctly, pretty insane to be standing on that same part of the world where an epic battle in history went down, ya know? Afterwards we headed to the grocery for some quick snacks before the train ride back. Which, Jordan and I missed, and headed to a nearby pub until the next train arrived.

We got back around 8pm, and now I am officially exhausted. Yet sleeping isn't allowed here, we met up with a group of friends, hung out for a while and then all headed to Shannon and Rebeccas house for a little get together with close friends. Great night! I pushed hard to play beer pong (which apparently doesn't even exist here), and we were able to scrap up some necessities, although not the best (only one ping pong ball, and 12 oz cups vs 16 oz cups), it worked. Everyone had a great time, I went *ahem* undefeated ;), and the night was a success. Jordan, Dave and I walked back instead of the whole taxi thing, we had great conversation about everything regarding life and humans from the moment we left until deep into the wee hours of the morning. Hence, I just woke up at 230pm today. Sunday, the day of rest, I can deal with that.