- 1. 8/25 Arriving in Edinburgh
- 2. 8/26 Edinburgh
- 3. 8/27 Scotland – West Highland Lochs & Castles
- 4. 8/28 Edinburgh Castle
- 5. 8/29 North England – Holy Island, Bamburgh & Alnwick Castle
- 6. 8/30 Edinburgh – Palace of Holyroodhouse
- 7. 8/31 Scotland – Loch Ness, Glencoe & Highlands
- 8. 9/1 Edinburgh – National Museum of Scotland
- 9. 9/2-9/7 Family Visit in Dawlish
- 10. 9/8 London
- 11. 9/9 The Tower of London
- 12. 9/10 London – Westminster Abbey
- 13. 9/11 London – Buckingham Palace
- 14. 9/12 London Museums
We found a little café near our hotel named Caffe Forum. They served the full English breakfast, which turned out almost the same as the full Scottish breakfast except without haggis and black pudding. I finally concluded that I don’t like English sausages because of their low meat content. They tasted like those meatballs in China in those days when you couldn’t get proper meat.
We visited Westminster Abbey. It was founded in 960AD as a monastery and has been the church for Royal Coronation since 1066. Inside the abbey, we marveled at the medieval architecture. Unfortunately photography wasn’t allowed and none of the pictures here gives you any idea how magnificent the interior was. It is the burial place for many kings and queens, including those who killed each other out of political rivalry. Seeing them buried together after death made you feel how pointless everything was. Here you could also find the tomb stones of many famous scientists such as Newton and Darwin, famous writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and the Germany-born Baroque composer, Handel, who lived in London most of his life. From the audio guide, you would learn how unexpectedly the tradition of burying writers in the Poets’ Corner started.
We paid a brief visit to the Natural History Museum before going to a British restaurant called The Shed near the underground station of Notting Hill Gate. The food was absolutely fantastic and the service very attentive. Here we tried deer meat again just to better answer Dan’s question. Stephen was right, deer meat tasted somewhere between beef and lamb, with a stronger flavor than beef but not as strong as lamb. The Vienetta ice cream looks like a piece of cake in the picture, but it was so tasty that any other desert seemed ordinary by comparison.
Oh, yum! Yum yum yum. Yum!!
What was I going to say?
The morning’s café was pretty good. Les Nuages might not like our sausages (why not? These are sausages, not steaks!) but the pain au chocolat peeking into the picture at the back was pretty good. And the policy of a free croissant with every espresso drink results in, well, eating a lot of croissants, but that can’t be bad, can it?
Not sure what to say about Westminster Abbey. I agree about the political irony, and am equally annoyed by the anti-photography rule (Be quiet? No question. No flash? Of course. But I want to record my memories… and since they charge admission—an uncomfortable thing in a church—the usual excuse that they support themselves by selling postcards—not that I’d buy their postcards, I admit—doesn’t apply). Grumpy grumpy grumpy, sorry!
The Natural History museum had closed its dinosaurs for cleaning! Can’t they just shower in the morning like normal people, instead of waiting until September and doing it all at once?
…And that brings us back to the yum. Ooooh, yum…!
Oh, here was something I meant to say: The Shed is decorated in a sort of studiedly shabby sort of way. In the bar area you sit on old tractor seats. It makes me wonder what I missed out on by not living my life on a farm….