Scotland take 2- Castles and Haggis!

2 July 2015
traditional meal-Haggis
history-stone of destiny

Ah, our first day in Scotland. At 7:15am, we were finally able to stretch our legs once we got off the plane. Once we got our rental car around 8, we had a quick drive over to the Novotel Edinburgh Park hotel and checked in, and we had breakfast at a cute cafe in Edinburgh. We then drove to the Edinburgh Castle to take the morning tour. We learned about over 400 years of scottish war history, and we also saw the Stone of Destiny. The name makes it sound like a big beautiful gem or something fancy like that, but it's really just a red sandstone block. The cool part is is that it was used in the coronation of the Monarchs of Scotland for centuries. Edinburgh castle is also is the military headquarters of the UK army in Scotland.  After our tour, we had lunch in Redcoat Cafe, which is in the castle. All of the meals and goodies smelled oh-so-good! at exactly 1 o clock, we watched and heard the one o'clock gun, which fired just outside the cafe. it was originally used to tell ships the time out at seaAround one we left the castle and went to to explore Edinburgh city. We visited the National Museum of Scotland and saw many cool things. My personal favorite was the t-rex skeleton in the animal hall. For dinner we went and tried one of scotland's special dishes, Haggis. Basically, for this meal, the chef shoves onion, oatmeal, suet, spices, stock, sheep innards, and a few other things into the lining of an animals stomach and boils it for a  few hours. If you didn't know what it was made of, you would probably think it wasn't that bad. Some people say it tasted like spicy oatmeal to them, and it went great with the neeps and tatties, (Scots for turnip and potato). After that, we went back to our rooms in the Novotel Edinburgh Park hotel and we all had an amazing night's sleep.  Our first day of Scotland was definitely as amazing as we all thought it would be, and we can’t wait for the rest of our trip.

This is a picture of our meal of haggis, we loved how professional it looked when plated!