Edinburgh

Woke late this morning at 9 to try and make up for all the missed sleep in last week or so. Breakfast was provided by the hostel and included cereal and toast. Spent a bit of time planning out today's route and ended up leaving at 11. 

First stop the swatch store to get bini a new strap fro her watch. Thr lady her served us was very nice and had recently come back to Edinburgh after spending 5 years on Sydney. Has a good chat to her however bini watch strap is a little big as they refused to put an extra whole in it because it effects the strength of the strap. Australia didn't seem to care about that. Ah well it'll do and if it gets too annoying we can always ask somewhere else. 

Next up we walked around the town continuing on a route. Went to a little cemetery and had an orange. Very peaceful. It's a wonderful sunny day today and the cemetery was beautiful. 

Next we past went into  the elephant house Cafe. This is where J.K. Rowling wrote harry Potter. The place was nice and had a great veiw but was very touristy. As bini wisely said "it was the room at harry Potter was written in but not the place" due to the fact that it had changed so much. Her we had two average hot chocolates whuch room forever to come. 

Edinburgh castle was our next stop. It was a short walk away and we went all the way to the entrance but didn't go in as it cost 15 pounds a person. From here we got  a good veiw of Edinburgh but sadly not ad good as we were hoping as they were building a huge arena which was a cool civil engineering  project. 

Next the search for lunch began. We were both very very hungry but didn't find lunch for at least 20 minutes. Ended up going onto the train station near our hostel and had a pizza and a drink for 7 pounds. Was good decent lunch :). 

Next we decided to to walk up The hill outside Edinburgh. Up to a place called arthers seat. First we walked down the royal mile a path of great old buildings in Edinburgh. We had three houses to walked up to the top. The green path a "gradual" walk, the orange path + red path a flat walk around the cliff face then a sharp stair climb up to summit and the blue and red path. An unmarked scramble across the too of the cliff then the sharp climb. 

We chose to do the green route up and the red and blue route down. The walk up was gooD. It was a bit gravely and lots of steps were needed. A good climb though. We walked past a heap of nettle and the whole mountain side was bright yellow due to nettle and broom. Bini got a bit adventurous at point and powered ahead of me up super steep bits whereas I went around the longer flatter way. 

The veiw from the top was great. We had some chocolate croissant and bananas and enjoyed ourselves. Spotted something that looked like a huge rock in the distance but we have idea what it was. Watched two kids almost kill themselves. Two boys about 5 and 6 were sitting right on the edge of the cliff throwing rocks over and pushing  each other with no adult supervision. Grandad turned up eventually but it took him a while. The red route was as expected but we needed to do a little bit of unexpected scrambling which  was great fun. I've had plenty of experience doing stupid stuff like sliding down rock faces but bini needed some tutoring. She's an expert now though. (Don't worry it was completely save but good fun). The endless stairs was hard but we survived. The blue route was fun and we got a great veiw from the bluff/cliff thing and then got down without any difficulties, got a bit steep at some points but nothing too hard. 

Walked home and arrived at about 8. Rushed out again and got  dinner. Made pasta with shop bought sauce. Simple but sufficient. I really good day. :) finally a day without any issues. Sorry blogs so late. I was very tired