Livejournal, my reticence and absence has been excusable! I'm sorry!
I just got home from a ten-day trip to the UK. The circumstances of my leaving make me very, very sad so I was tempted to pretend the trip never happened, but it'd be unfair to all the amazing people I met, and mostly to myself. This is going to be a weird post (posts, actually. a weird posts) because the dude in the post and I are not together anymore so I feel extremely extremely creepy and weird (and progressively creepier as I write this post), but no matter what the weather he and the clouds will still be beautiful and it'd be creepier to pretend like he wasn't there or anything. Anyway, it was great and I worked all summer to afford it and forgetting it would be impossible and unnecessary.
I arrived in Edinburgh on a Friday morning and the skies were predictably grey. James and I took a taxi to his sister Victoria's house where we were staying, and mostly spent the day napping and watching "2001 A Space Odyssey", which is a good date movie because it makes you want to die and throw up both at the same time.
We woke up on Saturday to a great change in weather: grey and rainy. I put on my 80s business suit and we hopped on a bus into the center of the city to see James's studio where he makes the books of comics. After dragging my dead body around on the floor, we took another bus to George Street and I giddily shoved James into every department store in the city. We were mostly searching for haggis, and if you'd think the one place you might be guaranteed to get haggis would be the middle of the, uh, SECOND biggest city in Scotland, then you are so wrong. I got my mom some Highland Koo shortbread from Marks & Spencer and ran through the aisles yelling about Jelly Babies. We bought a swede (THIS IS A RUTABAGA WOW), some carrots, and some potatoes and hopped on a bus back home. Mary is a dumbass and Scottish bus drivers do not abide dumbasses, so when I was alighting from the top part of a double decker bus, it lurched to a stop and I fell and slid down:

If you are thinking "ow", you are right for once. I doubted you when you thought you could get haggis in Edinburgh, but now I know you're really much smarter than I thought because OW. I hobbled back homewards and James drew an upside down face on my face (that's what that Dr. Burgers post was but I am pretty sure no one saw the upside down face) and maybe at 11 we finally started making the haggis, neeps, and tatties. We are master chefs, let me tell you. Instead of consulting a recipe, we sort of just boiled everything and hit it with a tennis racket and VOILA. We sat down to eat it on a beanbag, which is one of those things that are hard to get up from when you are sitting down. You might be tempted to put your feet in some haggis for leverage, and that's exactly what I did. And then James ate it.
( haggis, neeps, and tatties )On Sunday we went to see "Fantastic Mr. Fox", and it was great! It was a perfect Thanksgiving movie, and something very familiar and American (a Roald Dahl story American?! Noo) when I was so far from home. We came home and watched Coraline in 3D, which is extremely beautiful but not very good!
We really packed all of our adventure into Monday, which we started off with climbing the 287 steps of the
Scott Monument (and we did indeed get a certificate for hoisting our lazy asses through the narrow stairways). Every time another set of tourists passed us I was sure someone was going to die, and I hope you guys won't think me a bad person for admitting I hoped it wasn't me. We went to H&M to replace our respective pairs of skeleton gloves (we weren't just getting matching gloves duh shut up). We walked across the bridge to the Royal Mile, and saw the cafe where J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter and ate at this crazy place called Frankenstein. It says "1818" on it so you know they actually built this burger pub the year Mary Shelley published her novel, which makes extensive mention of her love of burger pubs.
We went to (THE GODDAMN REAL AND AUTHENTIC AS OPPOSED TO THE FAKE)
Mary King's Close, which is a medieval stretch of road in Old City that was built over in the 19th century. It has a lot of history associated with the plague outbreak and ghosts, and the tour involves the tour guide repeatedly scaring the shit out of French tourists by making loud stomping noises. We finished off the day with gingerbread latte!
( in a fairytale city with a fairytale burger )Soon is the time when I will post about our trip to London! It involves vomit and the trumpeter from Madness!