Since then, in November 2009, I got a “new” car in that had about 90,000 miles.  Well, I recently hit 100,000 in the new car, my 2000 Volvo S40.

99,999 miles!

100,000 miles!

This picture is also the picture of the day on my Project 365 site.

Woooo!  Still waiting to hit 124,274 miles.  We’ll see if my baby holds out that long.  At this pace, it’ll take until June 2010 to hit.

I’ve set up a new static page on the site where I embed a Google Map I’ve created that plots out the places that I’ve visited since I started college.

http://www.coreyhulse.com/places/

I’m pretty sure I got all the places, but knowing me I’ve forgotten at least a few.  If I have, let me know.

I’ll (hopefully) be writing up more later about the trip, but we ended up at Balboa Island.  If my calculations are correct, we ended up about here.  The water wasn’t terribly cold on that day, so of course I had to run in.  I didn’t travel over 3,000 miles to just stand and let the water hit my feet.

Of course it wasn’t until after I got out of the ocean that I realized that we didn’t pack any towels…

While a week is hardly sufficient time to have adventures like those of my two-month stay here, I still managed to get around town, eat some really good food, and explore some parts of London that I hadn’t been to before.

One thing to note before I go on.  For those of you who lived in Stouffer College House at the University of Pennsylvania, you no doubt have come across the maroon Stouffer pens during your stay here.  Let me tell you, they do NOT travel well in high altitudes.  I had multiple pens explode on me while airborne.

Trip details and some pictures after the jump.

Sights:

Science Museum

For those from the Philadelphia area, this is the city’s equivalent to the Franklin Institute.  And dare I say it was better?  I’m not knocking the Franklin Institute by any means. But I am saying that the Science Museum had an overall greater collection of objects.  I think the Franklin Institute does a better job of interactivity with the exhibits, while the Science Museum has a more robust variety in the exhibits.

Personal highlights for me included Launchpad, a hall with physics exhibits, and a huge hall which mapped out the history of both mathematics and computing.  On the mathematics side, they had a large case of specially designed Klein bottles, that when sliced correctly, produce Möbius strips.  On the computing side, they had huge computers from the 1950′s, one of which was a random number generator which the British government used to assist with treasury bonds.  There was no interest paid on the bonds, however the computer would randomly pick a number, and if you were lucky enough to have you “Premium bond” number picked, you were awarded a cash prize.  They even gave it a name, ERNIE, and it developed a huge fan base where people would send in cards and gifts to the machine to ask that the computer picked their bond number next.  It sounds like a crazy version of a lottery to me.

Natural History Museum

Didn’t say here for very long because it was very crowded, but did see a huge dinosaur skeleton.

Food:

Wagamamas
A noodle bar is the best way I can describe this place.  You go in, you sit at really long bench tables, and the waiter will come over with a hand held gizmo to take your order.  You pick a number off the menu, they put it in their gizmo and write the number you picked right on your placemat.  I ordered a pan-fried panko-crusted chicken breast, slicked up and served under a bed of rice and a mild curry.  A-maze-ing.  The chicken was very juicy and had a slight crunch because of the panko, and while the sauce was milder than I would of liked, overall a tasty dish.

Ben’s Cookies
I heard about this place from a friend of a friend ages ago before I went to London the first time, but never had a chance to go.  This time, however, I stumbled upon their South Kensington location, and they are indeed fantastic cookies.  The are about the circumference of a normal cookie, however they are much thicker.  The consistency was very cakey but very layered.  Interspersed between the layers were the fillings.  I had three cookies: peanut butter, white chocolate, and milk chocolate.  The chocolate pieces were very flat and thin, and were between the layers of the cookie, making for a very tasty treat.  If you happen to find yourself in London, I highly recommend it.

Sunday Pub Lunch
Sunday Lunch is a big thing in London, so on the Sunday I was there I went to a pub near my hotel and ordered the Sunday Lunch Chicken.  It was an entire half of a chicken, served with two different types of potatoes, along with peas, carrots, and two crusty bread shells to make your own shepard’s pie if you wish.  Now, given that I’m adverse to gravy, cooked peas, and cooked carrots, I was left with chicken, potatoes, and crusty bread.  It was still very delicious.  The chicken was falling off the bone and was very moist and juicy throughout.  I am not generally a fan of dark meat but I ate the entire half a chicken very readily.

Indian Restaurant #1
Clearly a half a chicken wasn’t enough for me, so that same evening I ate at an Indian restaurant right in the same complex later that night.  For the life of me, I can’t remember the name of the place, but it’s right near the North Ealing tube station.  It was on the fancier side, with nice linens and place settings and the like, and the food was superb.  I have decided that whenever I go to an Indian restaurant, I am going to get chicken tikka masala.  For the uninformed, chicken tikka masala is standard fare at American-Indian and British-Indian restaurants.  The basic ingredients are chicken breast chunks slow-cooked in a tomato and yogurt based sauce.  However, according to our good friends at the BBC, a survey was done of 48 chicken tikka masala recipes, and the only common ingredient in all of them was chicken.  The chicken tikka masala here was very good, and I might have to designate it as my favorite.  The reason that this particular recipe was so good was that the sauce was of a slightly sweeter nature than normal.  I’m not sure what made it sweeter, but my guess would be that some honey was put into the recipe.  Overall, very delicious.

Gourmet Burger Kitchen
This place is actually an import from New Zealand, and was the closest I was getting to an American burger.  I order a burger with cheese and “streaky bacon”.  From what I understand, what the Brits call bacon is closer to pork roll, and what they call streaky bacon is closer to American bacon.  Well, what I got on my burger was still pretty close to pork roll in my opinion.  This is just a personal thing, but there was too much fat going on for me to enjoy the bacon, so I took it off.  As for the burger itself, generally very tasty, but there were too many bits of grizzle for my liking.  However, this is the only place in London that has asked me how I want my burger cooked.  The fries were a very thick cut, but were golden in color, cooked well throughout, and were nice and fluffy inside and had a very clean taste to them.

Tandoori Villa
Tandoori Villa was visited on my last night in town.  It’s near the South Ealing Tube stop.  The restaurant was opened recently, and if I understood the time line right, the owners of the place last year converted their living room into this restaurant.  I of course got chicken tikka masala, but was fortunate to have gone with eight other people, and tried a variety of different meat and curry mixtures.  I was also introduced to peshawari nan, which is a nan that has a sweeter taste and had almonds baked in.  It tasted like an Auntie Anne’s almond pretzel.  Notice my tendency to enjoy sweet things?

Well, that about sums up the trip in a nutshell.  A very nice culinary adventure indeed.

Here’s a cool picture from the Science Museum.  It’s a lights and LED exhibit that spanned three stories.

And here’s a Klein bottle.  Is it sad that I recognized this only because I’ve seen it on Futurama?

I’ll take another picture if I hit 124,274 miles.

After the jump…pictures!

I ended up down near Big Ben and took a nice stroll along the South side of the Thames. I stumbled upon County Hall which was hosting a Star Wars exhibit that I had seen earlier on my trip about six weeks ago, but it wasn’t open yet. Well, it was open yesterday, and I forked over my hard-earned pounds to see what it was all about. Han Solo in carbonite? OK, pretty cool. Life-size podracers? Also pretty cool. All in all, it was good, and if you’re a Star Wars fan, you kinda have to go.

Lots o’ pictures of Star Wars stuffins in the Gallery.

I also found an exhibition called “Sport in the 21st Century” which had a collection of about 200 sports photographs. It’s located right near City Hall and Tower Bridge. My favorites? A picture of two orangutans in a boxing match where one was knocked out cold and the other was triumphantly standing on the turnbuckle with his hand raised in victory. Putting aside the ethical dilemma of monkeys fighting for the enjoyment of humans (it’s hard, I understand), the picture was hilarious. My other favorite was a picture of Barry Bonds being booed by a Phillies fan holding a sign with a asterisk on it.  The picture perfectly captures Philadelphia sports fans.

The Rundown:
Charles de Gaulle Airport, Oops Hostel, Le Boulanger de Monge, Notre Dame, the Louvre, Deux Magots, Je The Me, Eiffel Tower, Starcooker

As always, more pictures in the Gallery.

The Long Version (with my 12 Pillars of Travel that I created when writing about Scotland):

1. (Get out a map. Pick a place that you’ve never been before.) Paris. Check.

2. (Do research on the place that you’ve picked.) I was armed with a Rick Steves’ book about Paris (thanks Amanda), a French phrasebook (thanks Kristine), and eight semesters of French.

3. (Plan your travel to get there. Take an unconventional route.) Since there’s a body of water separating the UK from France, I had a few options for travel. Chunnel train? Too pricy. Ferry? Too slow. Swim? Too out-of-shape. Airplane? Decent price, decent travel time, voila! It’s not exactly unconventional, but given the other alternatives, it was the option I went with. I arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport, by far the most beautiful airport I’ve ever been in. High arched glass ceilings, intricate lattice structure holding it all together, and Orangina-a-plenty. It was also where the cover art for U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind album was taken.

4. (Book a hostel ahead of time so that you have a place to sleep and have a map of the city.) Booked the hostel, forgot the map. Fortunately, I remembered the road the hostel was on, and there was a Metro stop with that name. I stayed at Oops Hostel, and all in all, a pretty good hostel. It’s located in the 13th Arrondissement in the southeast corner of the city and had just recently opened. (Think of arrondissements as zip codes within a city. Paris has 20 of them.) The staff was very friendly (and bi-lingual), and the facilities were all new and shiny. Negative points on the lack of lockers in the room and the fact that anyone in the hostel could have taken anyone else’s bag in the baggage room. Positive points for the awesome croissants.

5. (Talk to everyone you can and get their opinion on what you need to do in while in town.)

It was my first excursion into a country where English wasn’t the native tongue. It was time to put eight semesters of French to the test.

Unfortunately, I failed. Fortunately, most of the people I interacted with spoke English as a second language.

For the most part, I did fine.

“Bonjour madame, je voudrais un billet pour la .”
“Hello ma’am, I would like a ticket for the third level.” – Referring to the Eiffel Tower

“Bonjour monsieur, je voudrais une baguette.”
“Hello sir, I would like a baguette.”

“Bon soir madame, je voudrais cinq billet pour le métro.”
“Good evening ma’am, I would like five tickets for the Metro.”

“Bon soir madame, où sont les toilettes?”
“Good evening ma’am, where are the toilets?”

Most of my conversations in French involved buying tickets for things, eating food, and finding out where the bathrooms were.

6. (Make friends with the local people you meet.) and 7. (Experience the nightlife.)

I’d like to start out by thanking Zeynep for being an awesome hostess and tour guide. She went to Penn with me and is now studying in Paris, and I met some of her friends (both Parisians and people from around Europe, so I guess it counts as “local”). Most of my nightlife activities all revolved around food and is covered in #11.

Paris is known as the city of lights, so at around midnight on Saturday I trekked down to the Eiffel Tower. The structure looks cool during the day, but at night the whole thing is lit up and at the top of every hour there’s a “light show”, which basically means that thousands of pulsating lights on the tower blink on and off for about 10 minutes.

At the Eiffel Tower we were having a problem with trying to get a good picture. If we used flash the tower was too dark, and if we didn’t use flash you couldn’t see us in the foreground. Canon PowerShots have special settings for different situations, which is where we discovered “Night Snapshot”. The icon for Night Snapshot? A person standing in front of the Eiffel Tower. We figured if THIS didn’t work we’d have to throw the camera out and sue Canon for false iconiness. We started calling it “Eiffel Tower Mode”, and much to our delight, it worked and the pictures were fantastic.

8. (Do something touristy.)

Notre Dame – Beautiful church. I tried to find the entrance to climb to the top, but for the life of me, I couldn’t find it (it’s apparently on the left side if you’re facing the entrance in case you ever go).

The Lourve – Art museum that is the home of the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo, along with a bazillion other pieces of art. The Venus de Milo was pretty cool, and the Mona Lisa was very tiny. My favorite section was definitely the Egyptian collection, which featured a mummy, tons of figurines, huge statues, a false door, and lots of random Egyptian stuff. My final semester at Penn, I took a class called “Land of the Pharaohs”, and despite that fact that I fell asleep in just about every class, I apparently retained a lot of it because I was running around like a kid in a candy store recognizing the different artifacts. I saw things like that ivory boomerang which was used for warding off spirits, the little scarabs that some pharaoh had carved with stories about his greatness, and Seth, the God of Cabbage. OK, so I’m a little hazy on the details of things I saw, but I am still giving myself a high-five for remembering at least some of that class.

Le Tour Eiffel – The 90 minute wait was worth it. Beautiful views of everything for miles. Unfortunately, it was cloudy, but being 976 feet up in the air was a good tradeoff. The top level was cool, but the best views of the city were on the second level (377 ft) and the first level (187 ft) has a bunch of shops and a post office.

9. (Do something off the beaten path.) I didn’t leave the city at all, but I found Rue Mouffetard, a road just north of my hostel which was full of farmer’s market stands and had a very festive fair-like atmosphere to it. I also found a bowling alley and resisted the urge to go in. I also happened to have been on a Metro train where there was a group of guys with some horns and a synthesizer playing right on the train. Why doesn’t SEPTA have in-flight entertainment like that?

10. (Go somewhere that you’re not supposed to be.) It was a relatively non-adventurous weekend, so I didn’t feel the need to do number 10.

11. (Eat something that your place is known for.) Ahhh, the food. Très délicieux.

Le Boulanger de Monge – Delicious baguettes in the 13th Arrondissement. I picked a multigrain one with a lot of seeds.

Les Deux Magots – A café in the 6th. Back in the day, it was a hangout for many famous writers and artists, including Hemingway and Picasso. Now, it’s an overly priced café with mean waiters where I ordered a Coke and paid 5.70 € for it. That’s $8.36 for all of you playing at home.

Je The Me – A little bistro in the 15th. I had an a-maz-ing steak along with sautéed mushrooms and potatoes. To top it off, I had a dish of summer berries and crème.

Starcooker – A brunch place in the 4th. For 20 € ($29.30), it was an all-you-can-eat brunch featuring ham, salmon, breads, cheeses, ham, fruits, tuna, croissants, crab, pasta, ham, and various deserts. Did I mention there was ham? It was on everything.

12. (Try not to make enemies with a local resident. If you do, get a good story out of it.) Despite what I’ve heard other people say about the people in Paris being crazy American haters, everyone I met was very pleasant and nice.

I didn’t make any enemies, I ate good food, and finally got to use French in France after eight semesters of studying it. Très bien. More photos in the Gallery.

Friday: Went south of Ealing to a town called Richmond, which has a lot of good restaurants and is located right along the Thames, making for a very picturesque scene, but it was night when I went, so I didn’t bring my camera.

Saturday: Rugby World Cup Finals. England vs. South Africa. After many very exciting quarter- and semi-final games, this game was a sleeper. If you’re a fan of field goals, then this was the game for you. There were seven penalty goals (the rugby equivalent of the field goal) and zero tries (the equivalent of the touchdown). I went into a pub in Central London which was packed wall-to-wall, and the exciting moment of the night was when England made it to the end zone and scored a try, and the entire place erupted. However, it was ruled that he was knocked out of bounds before reaching the end zone, thus negating the try.

Sunday: Took a train then a bus to get to Windsor Castle, one of the residences of the Royal Family. The Queen was busy and didn’t have time to hang out, but I did get some really nice pictures that I put up in the Gallery. I also ate a jacket potato with cheese and bacon, which is what they call a baked potato.

Here’s how I attempted to accomplish the things listed in the guide. As always, pictures are in the Gallery. Unfortunately, it was cloud-cover for most of the weekend, so I was not happy with the quality of the pictures.

1. (Get out a map. Pick a place that you’ve never been before.) Looking at cities on Google Maps, I picked Edinburgh with no particular reason in mind, expect for the vague idea of playing golf in Scotland.

2. (Do research on the place that you’ve picked.) My friend Jess had studied at the University of St. Andrews and said it was a cool place to go. Most of my “research” was done from talking to the people from the UK that I work with, by reading the Rick Steves website, and by clicking around Wikipedia.

3. (Plan your travel to get there. Take an unconventional route.) To get to Edinburgh, I took the Tube into Central London, a regional rail train to Luton, a bus to Luton Airport, a plane to Edinburgh, and a bus into Edinburgh. This doesn’t really fulfill this standard because it wasn’t THAT unconventional, but I flew from a different airport than the one closest to my flat because it was a boatload cheaper. In the terminal of the airport, I met a very nice Jamaican woman who was born and raised in England. She was a fashion designer, and her specialty was shoes. We had the same flight, and she told me gave me a list of things that I needed to do while I was there. On my return flight, I flew into a different airport than the one I departed from, and plotted a different route back to my flat.

4. (Book a hostel ahead of time so that you have a place to sleep and have a map of the city.) I used hostelworld and I HIGHLY recommend it for anyone who might be going abroad and is looking for cheap places to stay. I found Budget Backpackers, a very funky hostel with bright colors, clean rooms, and a very friendly staff. I did not have a map of Edinburgh, only a vague paragraph of how to find the hostel. If I had printed a map from home, it would have been much easier to navigate the streets instead of taking wrong turns and walking down the wrong streets. In addition, Edinburgh is VERY hilly, so when I made a wrong turn going downhill, I had to trek back uphill. In short, take a map.

5, 6, and 7, (Talk to everyone you can and get their opinion on what you need to do in while in town/ Make friends with the local people you meet/ Experience the nightlife.) I need to combine these three together to make a sequential story. I didn’t arrive at my hostel until 11:30pm. I asked the staff about where to go on 11:30pm on a Friday night. They directed me to a bar/club down the road called Frankenstein. As you might have imagined, it was a Frankenstein-themed bar, complete with black and green balloons, old horror movie posters, and clips from old black-and-white Frankenstein movies looping on the video screens. There was loud rock/dance music and a good number of younger people, including a segment near closing time when the female bartenders get on the bar and shake a tambourine to Robbie Williams’ “Let Me Entertain You” while a giant Frankenstein falls from the ceiling.

While I was at the bar, I made a “hate friend”. (Sidebar: I heard a comedian once do a routine about making “hate friends”. The concept is that you bond with someone because a third person is being an idiot. One example is that you’re second in line at a checkout, and the person in front of you takes out a bag of pennies and starts counting them to pay for their groceries. You turn to the person behind and make a gesture saying “WHAT is this guy doing?!” When the person behind you silently nods their head in agreement, congratulations, you have just made yourself a “hate friend”.) I made my new hate friend when the bartender kept ignoring us and serving the attractive ladies down at the other end. Not that I could blame him, but I was thirsty. I made a comment about the bartender to the guy standing next to me, and he agreed. Bam, new hate friend. I asked him about fun stuff to do in Edinburgh, and so him and his newlywed wife of three weeks gave me more things to my list of things that I needed to accomplish both in Edinburgh and in London. We hung out at Frankenstein until 1am when they closed, and the couple invited me to come along with them to Espionage.

Espionage is a nightclub down the road from Frankenstein. As I said before, Edinburgh is very hilly. You enter into Espionage on the top floor, but because the whole street is built into a hill, the club has four floors, each going down another level, each with its own atmosphere. The second floor was a chill lounge area and the bottom level was a rave-type party with crazy flashing lights and huge video screens playing 80s and 90s rock music videos. I met some of their friends and listened to Welcome to the Jungle, Basket Case, and Don’t Stop Believin’.

While at Espionage, I found a list carved in the wall of a bathroom stall:

We left the club at 2:30am and parted ways. At that point, I was not tired yet, so I started roaming the streets near my hostel and was giving high-fives to everyone. One of the groups I met were a group of four girls who were all from the area. I started talking to them about America and about where I bought my green shirt from. A random group of guys from Ireland also came up to us, and I partied with them all until 5am.

The next night I looked for a pub that was showing the France vs. England Rugby World Cup game, but the first few places I looked were only showing the Ireland vs. Germany soccer match. I ended up back at Frankenstein and met a guy who had a placed a 20-1 bet on England winning the World Cup. Needless to say, he was very excited when England won.

8. (Do something touristy.) I went to Edinburgh Castle. According to Wikipedia, “Edinburgh Castle is an ancient fortress which, from its position atop Castle Rock, dominates the sky-line of the city of Edinburgh. The Castle stands upon the basalt plug of an extinct volcano which is estimated to have risen some 340 million years ago during the lower Carboniferous age.” There were amazing views of both the city below and the surrounding countryside. Highlights of the castle included the Crowned Jewels of Scotland, The Scottish National War Memorial, and an exhibition of kilts throughout the years.

The castle also plays host to an event called the Edinburgh Military Tattoo, which is a yearly month-long show which hosts the military drill teams from a number of different nations (including the good ol’ USA). It takes place every year in August so I didn’t see it, but the gift shop has a looping DVD of last year’s show, and it looked incredible. I think I’ve added a new life goal to my list.

The other very touristy thing that I did was climb to the top of Arthur’s Seat. “Arthur’s Seat is the main peak of the group of hills which form most of Holyrood Park, a remarkably wild piece of highland landscape in the centre of the city of Edinburgh, about a mile to the east of Edinburgh Castle. The hill rises above the city to a height of 251 m (823 feet), provides excellent panoramic views of the city, is quite easy to climb, and is a popular walk.” I would disagree with the “easy to climb” part, but that’s because I’m fat and out of shape. I got up early on Saturday morning and trekked down from my hostel to the bottom of the hill. Again, I didn’t have a map, so I picked a random path that looked like it was going up and I started walking. I was climbing higher and higher, when I suddenly turned a corner and discovered that the path I was on was now going down. I apparently picked the wrong path to start out on, and took a grand tour up and down the outside ring of the hill. Now that I was back at the bottom, but on the opposite site of the hill. I saw the ACTUAL path that I was supposed to take, and began the climb up a zig-zagging path. I made it to what I hoped would be the top, and then…

Oh crap, more hill. The angle that I was on was very deceiving and when I reached the top, it revealed a gorgeous view of the city and one more small mound to climb to reach the true top of the seat. I finally reached the top and took the required celebratory pictures and listened to Third Eye Blind’s “Motorcycle Drive-By”. I felt very proud of accomplishing the climb and was wallowing in self-awesomeness when I saw a kid who couldn’t have been more than five come trekking up to the summit with his family. Oh well, I still thought what I did was cool. I sat up there for about 45 minutes and watched as some clouds started to roll in, engulfing the hill. It started to rain, and I started the climb down.

9. (Do something off the beaten path.) Number 9 comes into play here on my trip back down the hill. I took a wrong turn somewhere near the top and started to climb down. At this point, I looked down and realized that I really wasn’t on a path but was instead on a rather steep rock face. I looked back up and realized that there was no way back up, so the only way was down. Wearing my trusty tweed blazer and my Stouffer College House bag, I called upon my rock climbing skills I learned in Adventure Bound back at Jackson Memorial High School and slowly made my way down the rocks. It was not at all graceful, and at one point a group of tourists down below all had their cameras pointed up at me as I slowly made my decent. Good times for everyone involved. By the time I reached the bottom, I was soaked, but I made friends with a goose swan I found at the bottom of the hill.

My second off-the-beaten path adventure was hopping on a bus, traveling south of the city, getting off, and walking until I found a golf course. Granted, I was in Scotland, so golf wasn’t hard to find. The placed I stumbled upon (Hermitage) was a twelve-hole course in a green valley in between two bigger hills, and £15 ($30) got me all-day access to the course, club rentals, tees, and balls. I played my best (and only) round of 12 ever. I made par twice (my first two times ever making par) but on the 12th hole I scored a 12. However, I didn’t care too much, because I was still playing golf in the middle of the birthplace of the sport. Life was good.

10. (Go somewhere that you’re not supposed to be.) I didn’t do a very good job fulfilling this one, but I did manage to work my way into a University of Edinburgh student union party where they converted the basement into a crazy night club and the library into a bar. A message to the University of Pennsylvania: You’re “on-notice” for converting Houston Hall from a student union into a catering facility to host weddings and bar mitzvahs.

11. (Eat something that your place is known for.) Edinburgh always smelled like food. Sometimes the city smelled like sugar, but most of the time the city smelled like pulled pork. Edinburgh apparently has a large Italian immigrant population, so of course I had to sample the cuisine. I found Vittoria, a place close to my hostel. The decor had a very funky red squares theme and they played Italian pop music over the speakers. I ordered asparagus chicken in a white sauce with sautéed vegetables. In true UK fashion, the default side dish was “chips” (french fries). The chicken was very tender and tasty, and the white sauce was a great accompaniment to both the vegetables and the potatoes. I topped off the meal with two scoops of ice cream, mint-chip and mango-passion fruit. The mint-chip was spot-on, but the mango-passion fruit was too much passion fruit, not enough mango.

12. (Try not to make enemies with a local resident. If you do, get a good story out of it.) I did indeed get a good story out of it, but I will save it and tell it at parties and fun social events so that I can properly re-enact all of the appropriate events that took place.

And that my friends, was my weekend in Edinburgh. Pictures are in the Gallery.