Edinburgh and Stirling, Scotland

We got up at 10:00 am and checked out of the hostel at 10:30 am. We didn't take showers this morning--we wanted to use every minute of the day for sight-seeing! Plus, when you're traveling with your sister, there isn't really anyone to impress. :) We left our luggage at the hostel to make it easier to explore the city of Edinburgh. We found this really cute restaurant called Cafe Florentin and decide to get breakfast there - tea and croissants.





After breakfast, we went to lots of tourist shops and bought souvenirs....and at one of the shops, we bought an umbrella which we desperately needed! It looked like it was going to be another rainy day.



The tourist shops were filled with "Nessie," the Loch Ness Monster, except in these shops he was cute and wore a scottish outfit, haha.



The Scotch Whisky Heritage Centre (They are definitely proud of their whisky here):


St. Giles Cathedral:


A Kilt shop!


Starbucks:


An artsy structure outside a door that I liked (it was kind of random and didn't seem to belong to a shop or anything):



We saw these faces on a wall and couldn't resist!! :)


















We found something else we couldn't resist....there was a knight statue in the street with a sign around his neck that said "Take your picture with me," and then there was a website where you could send the pictures you took and they would be posted online. We never did that, but here are the pictures! This was fun. :)






















It was 4:30 pm when we were done exploring Edinburgh. We got our luggage from the hostel and still had one hour before we were supposed to catch a 5:40 pm bus to Stirling, our next city to visit. We were going to spend the night and most of the next day in Stirling and then return to Edinburgh. We went to a pub and ordered coffee and talked while we waited for our bus. The bus took us to Stirling and we arrived there at 6:30 pm. We were pretty exhausted and it was nice to sit and rest on the bus.





Leigh Ann had made reservations for us at the Willy Wallace Hostel :) ....it was really close to the bus station so we just walked there and checked in.



The front desk of the hostel:



The stairs leading up to our room:



A mobile made of beer cans hung by the stairs, haha:



Our room had 10 beds in it, and each bed had an actor's name on it. We figured it made it easier to tell beds apart when they were assigned to guests. Leigh Ann was lucky to get Tom Cruise's bed, but I slept above Brad Pitt's bed so I was okay with that. :)









We left to explore Stirling a little and find a place to eat dinner. We came across an Italian place called Italia Nostra and split a Margherita pizza there.

We passed an "All-American" restaurant called Longhorns. :)





There was a cute little girl staring at all of the ice cream flavors. :)



After dinner it was pretty dark outside but we really wanted to see Stirling Castle, so we walked there and it actually looked really cool at night. It was foggy and the lights on the castle shone through the mist and made it look kind of spooky.







At 9:30 pm, it was sprinkling rain so we headed back to the hostel. We walked by a gate that had lots of spiderwebs all over it, but they were covered by raindrops and looked crystallized and pretty. We tried to capture it on camera but couldn't do it justice.



When we got to our room, someone else in the room had already turned off the light. We weren't tired yet so we went to the lobby to check our internet and write in our journals. We ended up going to bed not when we were tired, but when this guy named Pedro started hitting on us, haha....when we were getting in our beds, we tried to unfold our sheets and they were pointed at the end, forming a sort of pocket! It was dark and we couldn't see really well, but they were definitely not normal sheets, unless we got them mixed up with something else. It was quiet and the other people were asleep, so we had to muffle our laughter as we confusedly got situated. :)