Day 32-August 2

This morning we woke up way early. I don't even remember when it was...like 6:00 or something. I had a pb&j for breakfast. I think I should done with pb&j for this week. haha. Wow, I just realized that half of my blogs are about the food I eat! I am just obsessed with food I guess. Sorry. Anyways, we tried to go to the coast this morning and it took us forever! First we had to figure some stuff out at the train station and then it took a while for us to figure out if we should take a taxi or the bus. The whole time I was thinking "I could be sleeping right now" but it was ok. We ended up taking the bus and it was only 3 pounds for a day pass. The only place they could drop us off though was by a loading dock so it wasn't super gorgeous or fantastic but it was cool.

We got to see the Royal Yacht Britannia. That was cool I guess.

This sign freaked me out because I'm terrified of the ocean! I just thought it was random that they had this sign there though...whether it's super deep or not, you could still drown

There were still some pretty things to see even though it was a loading dock.

We didn't stay for very long because it was freezing cold. The next thing we did was walk The Royal Mile, which is where all the little shops are and stuff and that was cool. We found the coolest Scottish music! It's the Red Hot Chili Peppers combined with bagpipes. Kylee and Michelle left at 10:30 to go to Liverpool and shortly afterward the rest of us went to church.
On the way to church we passed an H&M and I had to get one more picture to add to my collection of "H&M's around the world"

This was the beautiful little church building. Notice that they have a gate and they only have it open for a certain window of time while people are coming into church. Then they lock it up.

It was SO good to go to church! After not being to church for so long, it makes you appreciate it so much more. They were really friendly and cool and it was fast and testimony meeting which was really neat. There was a really good feeling there and I was just so happy to be there! We only stayed for sacrament meeting and then the usher had to come let us out because they lock the gate that goes out to the street for safety reasons. I've never heard of that before! I wonder if there's just a lot of opposition to the church here or something. There's only one ward in the entire city but it was pretty good sized...not huge or anything, but not tiny. It took like an hour to get to church and an hour to get back. I had another pb&j for lunch...haha. I was grateful for it though because if I hadn't had it with me it would have been a long time before I ate. We went to Edinburgh Castle next and it was way cool! It's supposed to be one of the top ten castles in the world.
The castle from the front gate. SO cool!

There were these huge masses of rock everywhere and the castle was kind of just built into it. It was sweet!
This was the part of The Royal Mile leading up to the castle. I loved the banners.

Amanda and I headed to the train station after that and got some pasties for dinner. They were yummy! We were just in time to take the 6:00 train back to London and although it was a 5 hour ride it didn't seem that bad. I definitely prefer trains over airplanes. They just don't seem as cramped and there's never any turbulation or taking off and landing. We ended up just talking for the first hour or two and then we finally started working on our sketches. I have so many to do still! These teenage boys were sitting in front of us the whole time (and I'm sure they were listening to our conversation the entire time) and they started talking to us right before they got off. It was so hard to talk to them! They had the thickest Scottish accents and I couldn't understand half of what they were saying! They would have to repeat like 3 times. Sometimes we couldn't even tell if they were talking to us or themselves. We just laughed a lot and it was kind of awkward but it was really funny. I got three sketches done and a couple of patterns! yay! For the last hour we slept and as soon as we got off we booked it to the metro because it closes at 11:30. We were so tired when we got home and my shoulders were dead from lugging my backpack around all day. It felt way good to get into my bed. I was way glad that we were able to go to Scotland. We were originally going to just do a day trip to a castle on Saturday, but instead we got to see two castles and do a ton of other stuff! Even though we were technically only there for 24 hours I felt like we were there for a while and got a ton in so it was good.