Beyond Your Borders: Adventure to Edinburgh

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Adventure to Edinburgh

At the Student Union Bar!

by Mary Evans

This past weekend was the trip to Edinburgh with GSE. It was amazing. Scotland is more beautiful than I had imagined. We took a train to Edinburgh on Friday afternoon to arrive at about 5:00pm. There was some really nice scenery along the way as well as a lot of sheep! When we arrived we went to our hotel and got everything unpacked and then went to a little area called the Grass Market. We ate at a really nice little Italian place for dinner and then Michael took us to the Student Union Bar which was a lot of fun! There were a lot of locals there and it was a great experience. After that me and another girl in GSE went to a different pub for a little while and then decided to head back to the hotel.

View from the castle!

The Elephant House

The next morning we woke up and went on a bus tour of Edinburgh which was really nice and then we went to the Castle which was beautiful. It was so big and there was a wonderful view of the city at the top. After that we explored the city and found a couple really nice parks around the campus and we also went to the Elephant House which is where J.K Rowling wrote Harry Potter! The group met for dinner at a Mexican restaurant near the grass market. The food was amazing! After that I went out with another GSE member and we ended up meeting some really nice locals that took us out to some really fun places. It was nice to experience a bit of the local life in Edinburgh.

The whiskey tour!

The next morning I decided to take a later train home so that I could do the whisky tour and hike the hills in Edinburgh. I am so glad that I decided to stay because it was fantastic. The whiskey tour was a lot of fun and hiking up the hills was absolutely gorgeous. That was, by far, my favorite part of the trip. The view was like nothing I had ever seen before. I can’t even describe how much I enjoyed that hike. It was a bit rough at times but it was well worth that struggle. As I was walking down the hill it started to hail really bad so I decided to go into a small café and grab a coffee and some food. It was really nice. I took the 4:30 train back and the entire ride home I was thinking about how wonderful the weekend was.