We've been staying in a ten person dorm here at the Castle Rock Hostel, which has been awesome so far. With a ten person dorm you get a cool rotation of different people rooming with you. We've had two Aussie friends, a Spanish couple, a few American students, some cute girls from Quebec City and a few American girls who've been traveling solo. We started talking to one this morning, I guess she just turned 30 and felt like she had to do something youthful. Her names Patricia she's a paramedic from Tampa Bay. Apparently she's a hockey fan and seemed to actually know her stuff. It was her first day in Edinburgh so she went to see the sights we said we go out with her tonight.
Bryce and I visited the Scottish Parliament building, unlike most political offices in North America this one is incredibly modern and looks amazing on the outside. We headed inside it was a little boring other than the architecture.
We grabbed some beers and pizza for supper and sat with Patricia and invited over two Australian guys. Unlike some other Australians we've met these guys had really thick accents. They joked that they were bushies (rednecks) and decided to join us for another pub crawl. This one was put on by a company in town and unlike the one our hostel does on Thursdays this one costs 8 pounds and happens every night, but you get alot of free drinks.
Pub crawls are the best way to meet people so far on this trip, there were people from Brazil, Germany, America, more Aussies and Canadians from Halifax and Winnipeg on this one. Our guides were a girl from Regina and a Irish guy. Everyone was really friendly and no one really got left out from what I could tell. Unfortunately you don't meet many locals, but at our first pub Bryce and I were roped in by two cougars who really loved Canadians, especially our accents. I guess they had both back packed in their 20's and had some cool stories to tell, they said we should spend more time in the highlands and that we'd be incredibly well revived up north. It was pretty difficult to understand them at pints, the pub was loud, they had thick accents, and they were pretty drunk. The prettier of the two cougars spilt two wine glasses in the span of 40 minutes, which she tried to blame on me. Luckily after the second one it was time for us to leave.
We then visited Belushis which is located in a hostel near the train station, everyone in our pub crawl (about 30 to 40 of us) got a free jaeger bomb and they lined them up on the bar and Bryce knocked the shots in creating a pretty cool chain reaction. I've got a video of it I'll post on Facebook. I talked to a guy from New York about his travels and what it was like to live in Brooklyn, but when we got to what we did for work back home I think my humor faded on him. He said he wrote articles for a Energy Economics Magazine, I replied with "well I drove a garbage truck but you don't hear me bragging." my joke went right over his head. I felt like such a douche bag. Thankfully I explained to him my shitty sense of humor and all was well.
We visited Globe again, the backpackers bar with Canadian beer. There was no karaoke for us to butcher, but the third period of the Bruins/Caps game was on. And after talking to these younger Australians guys about hockey I was eager to share the game with them. It was only on one small tv in a particularly busy section of the bar but all of the Canadians in our crawl and even most of the Americans crowded around. The guys from Halifax were Habs fans and cheered for Washington, but I swung the Australians onto my side.
Bryce and I joined two guys from Winnipeg outside while we waited for the rest of our group to join us. The guys from Winnipeg were much better looking than Bryce and I, but with Bryce's persistent yelling and moronic charm we managed to strike up a fe conversations with some local ladies having a cigarette. We tried to get them to join our crawl but they wanted to stay at their night club.
We got home at decent hour, and we don't leave for Belfast until 11. So we got a good enough rest. We didn't have enough time to walk to the bus depot so we grabbed a cab. One of the typical black English ones, I thought it was kinda cool. We met a Lithuanian guy at the depot, he was a student and told us if we visited Lithuania he could hook us up, we exchanged emails and took off to Belfast. It's a few hours by bus, then a two hour ferry.
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