Woke in Edinburgh today. Ms. Annalee graciously spent her day showing me the town.

First stop was St. Giles Cathedral; a classic old gothic cathedral which is still operating as a cathedral. This can't be taken for granted in Edinburgh. It's a town half built out of blackened old cathedrals and castles, only some of which are still serving their original purpose. The rest have turned into restaurants, or theaters, or whatnot else. But St. Giles! The highlight was the Thistle Chapel therein, where scarce a surface didn't show the sign of care and devotion.



A quick pause from there to pick up a local candy called "tablet" - which is basically a bar of sugar, barely caramelized, with a bit of butter. I couldn't finish mine. The onward to Arthur's Seat, a range of hills overlooking the city.



It's at this point I feel I should mention that Annalee is the only person I've met who walks as fast as I do. Only she does it uphill, over broken terrain, nonstop. So it wasn't long before we summitted. Granted, Arthur's Seat is a mere quarter kilometer up. One 35th of an Everest.. Still, something tells me that if you were to unleash Annalee on Everest, she'd be at the top in a few hours.

After a bit more walking about town, we stopped in a teashop and took "cream tea". That is, tea + scones + jam + clotted cream. Clotted cream? That's something you get local to England that's something like butter, only not quite. And it's expected that you scoop it on in big, hearty dollops.This leads to a condition that Anemilee calls a "scone hangover" as all the blood rushes to your stomach. All of it.

But rather than faceplant from scone exhaustion, we turned to the Scottish National Museum, and ran through three exhibits there. It held samples of some quite good religious art; both Christian and pre-Christian, some lovely historic harps, sundials, glass animals, a WWII Enigma machine, gemstones carved into magnifying glasses, a taxodermic exhibit of old Scotland, and a collection of sacred stones that looked suspiciously like massage implements to me.



From there, around town a bit more, up and down various alleys (or 'closes' as Edinburgh prefers to call them) and a stop for dinner.

We ate haggis.

Vegetarian haggis, of course. With tatties and neeps, which is to say mashed potatoes and the same thing done to turnips. One layer haggis, under one layer neeps under one layer tatties. Plus a whiskey sauce. And it was delicious. Really. Try some.