today's tsunami warning level: HIGH

so, scotland.

i took a lot of pictures in scotland. here are many of them. oh, and we're back to center-alignment because the Ireland pictures in left-align had some spacing issues, as you might have noticed.

so un-pause and rewind your mind to the image of natalie and i, having had no sleep the night before, staggering off our shuttle to be greeted with the beautiful skyline of edinburgh. (it's pronounced "edinbruh" or "edinburra" said really fast.) these pictures definitely don't do it justice, but we were duly impressed.
i actually took one this later on, from a turreted, cannon-bespeckled roof on edinburgh castle. but it can better fit in the "edinburgh skyscapes" section of the tour. here are some pictures of the streets we walked down during our search for a hostel...

and here, natalie has a bit of shut-eye as she walks down a "close" (a narrow alley connecting two larger streets).

and, looking the other direction down the close. i really like how dark and tall the buildings are. they're pretty much all like that.here's a guy bagpipe-ing near our hostel. i like how the crowd just walks by...you could take him out and you'd never know he was ever in the picture.

here's natalie being swept off her feet by william wallace. the blue striped face didn't really do it for me, but she liked it.
for some reason there was this church with a red door that said Bedlam on it. i thought it was cool.

we visited Edinburgh Castle. that's the famous one up on the hill for those of you who know your scottish castles. but it's not much how you'd think of a castle. most of it was like a museum, but some parts of it were really neat, like dungeons and siege chambers and dark, ancient looking stuff. that does it for me.
this is a stained glass window inside the oldest standing building in edinburgh. it's St. Margaret's Chapel, which was dedicated in 1090 or so. and it's not magnificent or dramatic. it's rectangle-shaped and really small, with a tiny altar in the front and tiny windows. this window is about a foot and a half high. it was very cool to be there, and even though we visited zillions of chapels and abbeys, it never got old to be where people have been worshiping for centuries.
this is the inside of the chapel. i found this picture on the internet (i only took the window one because i feel weird taking pictures inside churches).
this is the view from a little turret-window on the roof of the castle. that's the scott memorial down there.
this is the roof and matching cannons.

after staying a night in edinburgh and visiting all the aforementioned sights (plus a lot more), we took a day tour of the Highlands, Glen Coe and Loch Ness. it was about eleven hours in all.

the first cool thing we saw on our tour was a highland cow. they are like hairy versions of texas longhorns. although, have you ever seen a Siberian cow? i'm thinking they look like normal cows. you'd think they'd be shaggy, but they're not, i don't think, even though siberia seems a lot colder than scotland. i guess there's only enough gene-pool to go around.

this is a place called Glen Coe. it's "way better than the pictures." it's this valley with these green sloping mountains on all sides. it was beautiful, stunning, and breathtaking...but not the jagged, rugged kind of stunning. it was peaceful and foggy and it smelled really good.

some tourists taking pictures. glen coe from inside the bus.

here are some other assorted pictures taken from a speeding tour bus. they'd be good, if they were, well, any good. so sad. i did like that it was cloudy/misty most of the time...but i wish we could have stopped every ten feet or so to take pictures. that would be a great bus tour. "alright, everyone buckle up, again!"

there were lots of sheep in scotland. LOTS of them.it was rainy and foggy when we were in St. Augustus (the town next to Loch Ness). here is our umbrella and corresponding view from underneath it.
and this is the mighty (not all that impressive) Loch Ness! no monsters sighted.

this is loch ness again, but with us next to it. the rain stopped for about 20 minutes while we were next to the lake.

ok, back in the city (our bus tour got back around 8 that night). this is the Walter Scott monument. it's almost black in color and is quite stunning, i think. it's right in the middle of the city. this is as close to it as we got. i took this while we were waiting to cross the street to get on a train to Wales.
this might not look like much, but this is our very last view of Scotland. this is the ghetto train station (i can't remember what town it's in) where we waited for our connecting train to Cardiff, which we weren't sure we could even get on because we didn't have reservations. a security guard felt sorry for us and let us sit inside for a little while. the train guy did let us on, but for double the price. grr.