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The events described occurred on May 26, 2009.

After returning from the Highlands, the weather improved dramatically, and we thoroughly enjoyed our day in Edinburgh. Tom and I explored Edinburgh Castle, Holyrood Palace, and the Princes Street Gardens during our walk about the city.

Unfortunately, I woke up Tuesday morning still not feeling well (Probably a side effect of the anti-malarial medicine I had taken the day before… :-(), so we didn’t get started as early as we were hoping. Tom still enjoyed the hearty Hilton Grosvenor breakfast, but I stuck with bread and other easily digested foods. Eventually, we checked out of the hotel, leaving our bags there for the day.

Wanting to save time, we took a cab down to Edinburgh Castle. The Scottish Highland Guards were on site, due to a session of the parliament of the Church of Scotland being held in the city, (All the royal sites were being so guarded.), so Tom and I posed with them outside the gates. We made our way inside, and joined a tour about to start.

The guide told us all about the castle’s history, before taking us up to a lookout point to see the firing of the one o’clock gun. While most medieval ports fired a noon gun, we were told the Scots in Edinburgh were too tight-fisted to waste the extra ammo. (The true story is that when the Scottish and English time zones were unified to London time, the Scots were too stubborn to change the actual time of their gun.)

We toured the building holding the crown jewels of Scotland, which were quite beautiful. (Not as spectacular as those of England, but then I guess the Scots haven’t done quite the job of being right bastards over the years…) We walked around the castle a bit more before deciding to walk down Royal Mile to Holyrood Palace.

Along the way, we stopped for lunch. Feeling a bit better, I had a tuna melt and lots of water. (It is possible, although I’m not sure now, that this was the first non-breakfast meal of the trip that I did not wash down with some sort of beer. Haha…) Tom probably had a burger or something… We continued on our way to Holyrood, only to arrive and discover that Prince Charles was in residence and so it was closed to the public. Oh well, it was a lovely walk.

We thought about touring the Scottish Parliament, but were deterred by the invasive security. Not that we had anything to worry about, you understand, but we didn’t want to deal with the inconvenience.

Tom led me up to the Princes Street Gardens, which lie below the Edinburgh Castle. We walked by the Bank of Scotland, and just enjoyed a leisurely stroll through the park.

Eventually, we headed back to our hotel, which was only about a mile or so away. Along the way, we tried to find a pub Tom knew about, but after circling around for a while, we decided to settle on an Italian restaurant we found. I don’t really remember what I had, but I know I enjoyed it. The service wasn’t particularly great, though.

Once we collected our bags from the hotel, we went to the nearby train station and bought tickets to Stirling.

We arrived in Stirling fairly early—around 8 or 9 p.m.—and met up with a couple of Tom’s friends from school there. We did a pub quiz with François, a Frenchman, at a place on a corner downtown, before heading up to another smaller pub a block or two away. On our way there, we met another of Tom’s friends, an American whose name I cannot recall.

At this second pub, François told us that he was refusing to eat pork, because he was afraid of catching the swine flu from an insufficiently cooked preparation. We berated him for his ignorance, but I don’t think we changed his mind. (Incidentally, why would one assume that eating pork would give one the H1N1 virus? Isn’t it just as reasonable (that is to say, not at all, but equally so…) to assume that eating pork would grant one an immunity? Never mind the fact that the flu is a respiratory disease—that certainly seems the more delicious assumption, and therefore, the one with which I’m going…)

Eventually, we called it a night. Both of Tom’s friends were leaving town the next morning, and we wanted to get an early start to our sightseeing around Stirling. We all caught the bus back to campus, and Tom and I went to bed in his flat.