seasons change...

so it's getting cold in edinburgh. every day, anna and i, for some reason, are more and more surprised at how much colder it is than yesterday. i think i figured out why, though. because the city of edinburgh is so compact, there are no trees except for in prices street gardens, and i don't normally see those on an everyday basis. and at home, the way we can tell the seasons is by the way the flora changes. the green of the trees begins to change to oranges, yellows and browns, the grass begins to die, and the flowers of the summer begin to disappear.

edinburgh doesn't have trees, flowers, or grass.

edinburgh has buildings. stone, grey building. i don't mean to give the impression that the city isn't beautiful, because it is. there is so much history here! (speaking of the history here, we took an amazing tour the other week. stay tuned.) but there are no trees to let you know that the summer is gone, fall is definitely in full swing, and it's getting close to winter. all you have is the weather itself--and it has gotten noticeably colder over the past few weeks. a few weeks ago, you took a scarf with you just in case it got gusty. today, anna and i both wore scarves, pea jackets, i wore leggings....and we were both freezing. my nose, hands and feet were so cold. i told anna that it was straight-up december weather. but it's only mid-october. ::sigh::

so this tour i was speaking of earlier. it's called "the real mary kings close." in scotland, a close is basically an alleyway that connects a main road with another road parallel to it. this particular close, mary king's close, has been excavated in the last few decades after it was covered and a new government building was erected. also keep in mind that back in the day (i'm talking like, hundreds of years ago), people tried to stay inside the city instead of moving outside of the city, where they would have no protection and might have to pay a fee to exit and re-enter the city wall. so instead of building outward, like we do in america (there was no such thing as "living in the suburbs"), they built upward. so building could be twenty stories high, and have several of them actually underground. so, all the homes/stores/whatever underground was paved over, and forgotten about until people wanted to rediscover the old edinburgh.

a favorite saying of our “tour guide” (dressed to the nines in his 18th century garb) was "drink the beer, not the water." i've often heard of people drinking alcoholic beverages in the more rural areas of the world since water supplies are often full of little bacteria that foreigners aren't used to. in argentina, i drank coke, bottled water, and anything boiled. in china, well, i drank the beer in china. here, the water is fine now, but it didn't used to be. Nor Loch (now Princes Street Gardens) was the water supply of Edinburgh up until the point it was drained in the 1820s. at which point they found female bodies (=witches), animal carcasses (= “carriers of the plague”), and if it didn’t decompose by itself, they would have found lots and lots of poop and urine. so not exactly the cleanest water supply. hence, drink the beer, not the water. but it was an amazing tour—things you’d never know about are buried below stories of government building. and the closes are tiny—these would have been full-sized streets—and weren’t even an arms-span wide. TINY! I’m definitely going to have to take the parentals and family there when they come.

exciting plans for the weekend—we’re going to london! I’ve been before, but not since ninth grade when we went to visit my step-sister in geneva, switzerland. we were only there for about four days, which is the same amount we’ll be there. but I’m excited to start the real traveling—I say real, and mean that we’re going outside of scotland. I think I might facebook my “friend” (i've never actually met her...we are friends strictly on facebook so far) kelly who is doing bunac in london. hopefully, she'll be in town and maybe we can hit her up for some night-scene knowledge and maybe even go out with her and her friends? aaanyway. also, we hope to see a show at some point and also to visit my step-sister, lynn, who is currently living in london. maybe we'll get a free meal? we shall see.