Last evening I made my way back to Scotland and back to the continent, here in Belgium. My last week in Scotland was great, with a lot of running around. One day I went out to Edinburgh. The place is incredibly beautiful, I can understand why people are so drawn to the town. Since Lea had some guide book I kinda followed some of it's advice and did some walking around town. Mostly I spent a good hour trying to find this cafe to get some lunch. It was good, I had a humus and olive sandwich. Next I walked around New Town a little and then decided to walk the Royal Mile to find this museum. I found this pretty cool museum called the People's Museum and spent a few hours there wandering around. I then made my way to this pub called the Three Sisters, it was really nice. They had a large outdoor area and a bunch of smokers inside. I drank my first pint out on the patio until it got too cold and then went inside. They had Gladiator on the TV so I watch that without sound while I enjoyed my second Guinness. After getting sick of the smoke I decided to head over to Rose Street where there was a bunch of pubs. I had a beer at one pub that was supposed to be brewery, but they don't brew beer anymore. I moved down to another pub where they were playing disco on their TV and after a while I realized I was going to miss my train so I left and headed back towards Glasgow where I hooked up with Lea and Gerry for my last evening in Scotland.
We were back in Tennants, downstairs, and just hanging out. I was talking to these two other Scots and we were just getting silly. We stayed at Tennants until they closed down for the evening and then we made our way to the curry place for some take-away, mmmmm it was good. Some other fun things that happened was when I was trying to leave Ireland. The day I got back into Dublin from Galway I was pretty tired and thought I'd just head to the pub and have a bite to eat and then head back to the hostel and crash. Well that didn't quite happen. While I was enjoying my Guinness some Norwegians wanted to sit at my table since there was going to be a game on in a few minutes. Later, these two Irish guys joined us and we watched the game. We were having a really good time. The Norwegian couple was really nice. They told me why the Scandinavians have an easy time with the North American accent. Likely it is due to TV shows being broadcast in English and not dubbed. The Irish guys were a riot as well. One of the Irish guys had a shitload of songs he could sing about football players. He was about the whitest guy I ever met, so I told him. He took it pretty well. He told me in his little Irish accent that his country was cold and rainy, that they didn't get much sun, yeah no shit! Anyway, soon it was getting late for the Irish so they bailed. The Norwegians and I hung out there for quite some time drinking and talking. Eventually we moved to another bar closer to their place. It was a really nice bar, by this time I was getting very hammered. When the bar closed down we parted ways and somehow I made my way back to the hostel.
When I got to the room there were a bunch of women there getting ready for bed and they informed me that I was the only guy in the room. I was really drunk so I decided that I would only speak Italian to them. I'm not certain how it went over, but I soon crashed so I could catch my flight back to Scotland. That morning I was supposed to get up at 4:30am to make the shuttle out to the airport. My flight was at 6:50am and I had managed to get back from running around sometime after 2:00am. Well I managed to wake up at 6:00am, check out of the hostel, get a taxi and some cash only to miss my flight, d'oh! RyanAir is ruthless about their check in policy so I had to go to the local people to see about another flight. They told me I could only be on standby on the next flight, as it was booked. I was sweating it for 5 hours, but managed to get on the flight and made it back to Gerry and Lea's place just as they were beginning to roll sushi.
That night was Gerry's surprise birthday party. Gerry and I went and met Neal at Tennants for the game and we were supposed to be back at 8:45pm. We were having such a good time, and we ran into Frank on our way home as we stopped into Russel's, another pub. Gerry was really surprised. I always thought he knew something, but he said he didn't. The party was really nice. I passed out at 4:30am or so, mainly due to the lack of sleep from the night before. There was a large mess the next day which I cleaned up while Gerry and Lea slept, Happy Birthday Gerry! Later on that day we made our way to a movie, some Thai western that was very good.
During the week I had caught a cold, which I'm still recovering from. Most of the week was spent just chilling out and relaxing. It looks like I won't update my web page until I get back to the States for Tracey and Bill's wedding. Today in Brussels I mostly just walked around downtown. I hope to hook up with Lien on Tuesday evening and maybe spend the day with her on Wednesday, but I'll have to see what her schedule looks like. I'm looking forward to Gent, it's likely just as picturesque as Edinburgh. Gent only seems to be about 30 minutes or so away from Brussels via train. The train is very cool, well at least the one I rode on yesterday from the airport to downtown Brussels. I was going to shave and shower tonight before I forage for some food so I'll be signing off for now.