Edinburgh, Scotland

Dana in the Castle
Us in front of Edinburgh Castle
Steve using the phone, ok... not really

We walked 30 minutes from the bus station to our next hosts apartment. A polish couple working and studying in Scotland. In the morning we walked into town, a fox ran right across the road infront of us. We took a quick look at the Royal Palace before walking up Royal Mile Road to Edinburgh (Ed-in-bur-ra) Castle. Our first real castle, but not worth the 22 pounds to get in! Afterwards we had some food at the Elephant house cafe. This is where Harry Potter was first written! We had a virus on our memory stick, and had lost some pictures. Lukasz had a program to recover pictures from our memory card. So fortunately we got them all back and even got rid of the virus on the memory stick. The next day we did some shopping and went to the National Scotland Musuem. The museum has a huge interactive section which we spent most of our time in; building robots, driving a Formula 1 simulator, and testing our reaction time. We made Lukasz and Wiola dinner, then they walked with us back to the bus station. We caught a bus back to Glasgow to catch our over night bus to London, England!

Glasgow, Scotland

Us in front of Glasgow University
Us, Marianne, and Dave at Ketchup
Dana opening up our haggis!!

Our flight from Dublin to Glasgow took 55 minutes, and cost us $75 for everything! (way cheaper than a ferry and trains) We found our hosts easily from the airport, Dave and Marianne had done a 6 month trip around the world two years ago; so they had a lot of stories to share. We went to a great burger joint called Ketchup where we got two for one burgers which were huge and delicious! They showed us around a bit before we called it a night. The next day Marianne was off so she went with us to the Kelvingrove Museum, and the University and Park. We got haggis, mashed potatoes, and mashed carrots and Rutabega for a late lunch. It was quite good, wouldn’t be first on our list to order again, but definitely tastes better than it sounds! We left shortly after to the bus station where we caught a bus to Edinburgh to meet our next couch surfers!

Dublin in two parts!

Central Dublin
St. Patrick's Church
Dana at Ha-Penny bridge

So the first time we arrived in Dublin was on Jan. 13^th, it was cold and raining as we were fleeing... ah...silently leaving Berlin and the Shengan Area. We stayed with a couch surfing couple; Rod who is from Brazil, and Maret who is from Estonia. Really easy going friendly people so we got along just great. The first day in Dublin was spent speaking to embassies to try and see if we could get back to the Shengan Area. When not doing that we walked to the Temple Bar area (Like Cordyon area in Winnipeg), saw St. Patrick’s Church and the courtyard of a castle. The crosswalks make a noise like you are being warped across to the other side of the street. Steve thouroughly enjoyed each intersection, Dana became less pleased with Steve with each intersection! The next day we left in the afternoon for our help exchange in Tralee.

The second time in Dublin was on Jan. 30^th. We stayed with Rod and Maret again. The weather was a little nicer this time, not raining or windy. We bought some luggage for our next two trips we will be taking to the Ukraine and Morocco. We mostly hung out and watched movies with Rod and Maret. We stayed up too late the last night watching movies when we had to be up at 7am in order to catch our trains and bus to the airport to fly to Glasgow, Scotland, oh well! Time to go from green to plaid!