Edinburgh Christmas Market and Linlithgow Palace

There is so much more that I want to see in Scotland, so I will come back! I am trying to maximize my time here so that I can see as much as possible, so the first weekend in December when we had a three day weekend we went to the Edinburgh Christmas Market, which was a blast. Yesterday, we went to Linlithgow.

This post is going to have a lot of pictures, I hope you don't mind!

November 30 was St. Andrews Day. St Andrew is the Patron Saint of Scotland so we got work off. I think we got work off because we work for the SNP. But in any case, we didn't have to go in to Parliament and it also happened to be the day that the Christmas market opened in Edinburgh. It's on Princes Street (the big shopping street near our flat) and in the gardens below the castle. The night before it opened they had a tree lighting ceremony and they lit fireworks over the castle, which me and two other interns went to. It was absolutely freezing, so when the show ended, we hurried home to defrost.

On Friday we got to the market at 3:30, which is after the sunset. It was still light out, but quickly got dark. Erik told me the market is run by some Germans, so it made sense that it looked like a Christkindlmarkt. There were little wooden booths selling knitted items,  mulled wine, and ornaments. It was packed. There were also rides.

Taken at 4:30

We then went ice skating, which was our primary goal. It was a blast. 

We also went on the Ferris Wheel!

Arthur's Seat is in the background

On the Sunday after Julianne and I got home from Barcelona, we went to Linlithgow with some of the other interns to check out Linlithgow Palace. On Saturday morning, I had a Facebook message from Oriel saying to meet at Waverley train station at 12:30, so we got dressed, walked to the train station, bought our tickets (student discount with our railcards!), and hopped on the 12:35 to Linlithgow. I really like taking the train places in Scotland. It's a pretty comfortable way to travel and you get to look at the scenery. It was only a 25 minute train ride. We got off, walked around aimlessly until we found a map, and then walked to the palace. 

Everyone at the palace was really nice. Linlithgow Palace is in ruins, but it is still really cool. It overlooked a loch and some beautiful Scottish countryside. Scotland is incredibly pretty. 

I've been to palaces that are still intact and furnished to make it look like it was back in the day. Those are really cool to tour because they're pretty and you can picture what life was like back then. However, I had so much fun exploring the palace ruins. First of all you're pretty much allowed to go wherever you want and climb on whatever you want because it's already in ruins so there aren't any like valuable breakable pieces of furniture or anything. So we spent a couple hours just wandering up every nook and cranny of the castle, running up one of the many spiral staircases, ducking through narrow hallways, wandering through open wide windowed ceilingless rooms, and looking out at the views through the glassless windows. 

It was spooky and cool and so much fun to explore. There were dark, unlit basement rooms where the floor was covered in gravel, crumbly stairs and columns, and pieces of rock sticking out from the walls. 

The best part was all the picture taking though. It just kind of started accidentally, with Oriel and I climbing on a ledge to take a picture, but we started a photoshoot. We kept taking more and more pictures and the building was so cool that I love how all the pictures turned out. We kept trying to do stranger things and we had a blast and were cracking up at all the pictures when we went through them on the train home. We took a ton of pictures and it was so much fun because we were just goofing off running around a ruined palace. 

There was also a tall tower that we climbed up to watch the sun set. The whole thing was really cool and I'm very glad we went. Julianne filtered all the pictures we took and I think it makes them look cooler, so I included those.

We got on the train home. My only complaint about the palace was how cold it was. But it didn't have any ceilings or windows or heating, and it's Scotland, so it made sense. When we got back to Edinburgh, we decided to go out to dinner. We found an Indian food place tucked off the Royal Mile. It was so delicious. It's been a while since I've had high quality Indian food. We had butter chicken, spinach chicken, creamy vegetables, tandoori chicken, and garlic naan bread. We kept saying "Naan for you" when we passed out the delicious bread and thought we were really funny. 

Today I had work and I wrote another motion about an award that was given out in the region my MSP represents. I also wrote a paragraph about the potential post-independent economy in Scotland for a Q&A my MSP is doing next week. I have a lot of papers to write for my class that are due soon, so I've been working on those as well. I have stuff going on every day this week, so it should be a good and busy week! I'm looking forward to everything!