Scotland, twice, and Strange Visitors

Hi again!

Carly and I have been enjoying our extra 3 week vacation after we came home from Barcelona with some visitors!

My mom and brothers came for the New Year holiday and I was so happy to see them!  I went straight from the airport to their hotel since we had both arrived on the same day.  I had to take 2 buses and cross a highway to get there.  My suitcase almost got taken away by the wind because there was some storm raging across Newcastle that day but I managed to make it alive and with my suitcase intact

After touring Newcastle for the first day and a half, we spent a day in Edinburgh taking in the sights.  First we Edinburgh Dungeon.  It's not an actual dungeon but rather a walk-through tour of the various dark, evil and deadly happenings in Edinburgh's past.  It's a chain actually and I had been to the one in London and I thought it wasn't that scary at all so I decided to give this one a go with my family.

*Edinburgh travellers be warned: The Edinburgh Dungeon isn't some tourist-trap fake scary tour thing. It was legitimately terrifying.  It was dark, loud and just all around skin-crawling.  A family of 5 was on our trip and all the children were screaming to leave the entire time (the parents didn't want to leave so they stayed during the whole thing but that's a conversation for another day).

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Everyone but Bob was freaking out the whole time and I did suffer an injury to my nose when someone in my family decided it was a good idea to run at me and headbutt me in the dark because he or she was scared. Considering all our heights, you can make a pretty good guess as to who this person was.

After the tour we sat in a cafe for an hour or so to decompress from the stress of the Edinburgh dungeon.  Then, we took a much nicer, completely less scary tour of Edinburgh Castle (pictures are a little farther down in the post).  And, of course, it started to downpour as we got to the castle.  We managed to see the Scottish Crown Jewels and the Royal Apartments before we gave up and sat in the castle restaurant until our train arrived to go back to Newcastle.

Scottish Crown Jewels (I didn't take this picture since photography isn't allowed)

For New Years Eve, we went out to dinner and then walked around and planned to see the fireworks later that night.  Newcastle was surprisingly empty so we went to find an information poster with the fireworks times.  We got out of dinner around 830pm and the fireworks started at 730pm. We had missed them.  With nothing else to do, we went back to the hotel and watched the NYE festivities from our television.

After my family left, Carly and I had our noses in books for 2 weeks because we still had papers due! I only had one but Carly had 4 so we only saw each other in the library when we were typing our lives away.

On January 16th we were free! We handed in our papers and started getting ready for our next visitor...MATT DOYLE! 

Now you may be asking yourself, "Who's Matt Doyle?" as many great men and women have in the past.  Doyle (as he will be further referred to) is our friend from La Salle.

We made a welcome poster when we picked him up at the airport in case he couldn't see us through the massive crowd.

He should have wondered why we asked him what his middle name was.

And we took him to one of his favorite places, the Apple Store!  Doyle used to work in an Apple Store and according to him, all Apple stores have their own personalities and atmospheres about them. And Doyle couldn't believe we didn't go inside the one in the Louvre because "it has the best architecture of any Apple Store! We learned about it in training." Our rebuttal was, "um...we were in the Louvre that's why."

Doyle in his favorite store!

We walked Doyle around Newcastle the first day and then went back to Edinburgh (my third, and most likely final, trip)

 We went back to Edinburgh Castle and I got to see much more of it this time since it wasn't raining.

 Armory

 St. Margaret's Chapel

 Edinburgh

In one part of the castle, there was an exhibit on Prisoners of War held in the castle.  They had some POW's from the American Revolution captured in Edinburgh Castle. Below is a picture of one of the original prison doors with a crude American flag carved into it. Pretty cool and inspiring!

American flag attached to a ship

And we went back to the Finnegan's we found!!!  But this time we actually went in for a drink. Surprisingly, it had the same relaxed come-as-you-are atmosphere of Finnegan's in Philadelphia.

"Oh Finnegan's, oh Finnegan's, of all the bars most lovely"

On the last day Doyle was here, we made him get fish pedicures with us.  It was completely and totally against his will but we really didn't care.

He wasn't too happy with us

But all in all we had an awesome time when Doyle was here even when we made him do things he didn't want to do, like get fish pedicures.

Now it's been a while since anything strange has happened to me in Newcastle so needless to say I was really aggravated when my normalcy streak was broken 2 nights ago.

I was sitting in my flat and it was about 1030pm.  I heard the door buzzer go off but I didn't want to answer it.  I figured if it was one of my flatmates trying to get in, they would buzz again and I would get up then.  No more buzzing happened but a few seconds later I heard knocks at my door. Highly confused and slightly nervous, I grabbed my phone and opened to the keypad in case I needed to call the police and I went to my door.  The door to my flat is basically glass so I could see there was a large crowd of guys and some girls standing outside.  I opened the door and the ringleader of the troop asked me if they could come in and see my kitchen.  They were all carrying a delightful array of beer bottles, vodka bottles and Smirnoff ices and they smelled like a basement party so it was pretty evident that they were drunk.  The girls in the group seemed mortified that they were involved in this fiasco and many of the guys seemed completely uninterested.

I knew they were at least students at Newcastle because the only way they could have gotten inside my flat building is with a key, which all St. Mary's residents have.

I honestly thought they were kidding so I asked "What?" Apparently one of the guys in the group had lived in my flat last year and they wanted to check something in the kitchen.  Considering I was alone in my flat and that these idiots were strangers I told them they couldn't come in and wished them goodnight as I closed the door in their faces.  Then, like any normal angry person, I posted about it on Facebook.  A friend who lives in the flat below me said they heard them too and called security.  The next morning I took a look around my kitchen to figure out what they would have wanted to look at. I couldn't find anything and figured it must have been a silly drunk longing to return.

That's it for now! Later this week I'm posting about my reader statistics :)

xo Becca