Stirling, of the Castle Variety

Today, instead of going hiking in the Highlands because it was far too far, we went up to a town just North of Edinburgh called Stirling. The major sehenswuerdigkeit here is the castle, which sits on a hill and is really quite lovely to look at. Plus, it’s a medieval town, which is always nice. On the train there, while writing postcards, Sean and I met an American (Philip) and a Liverpool-ian (Joy) and started hanging out. They were awesome! Philip did some LA and Broadway dancing and is now a member of Urban Poets, a group I once looked at for a CC Conference. Joy is part of a performance company that helps the inner-city kids deal with tough teenage issues. In any case, they were super and we are probably going to be meeting up with them again in Liverpool and Belfast.
So, we explored the castle, had lunch in the Porticulus restaurant where we met a cool waiter. Then Sean/I bused over to the Wallace Memorial near Stirling University. What appeared to be a long hike was, in fact, only 20 minutes or so and we got a super view of the city. Then we bused back to the town, explored a little bit and had coffee in this fantastic Old Towne Coffee House on Spittal St. (we think) run by this Western Canadian who moved to Scotland to be with her Scotsman. She was really sweet and the café was fantastic. Two earl Greys and Carrot Cakes later, we went back to Edinburgh.
There we met up with Kathi, a teacher at my school in Goettingen, who assistant taught near Edinburgh 3 years ago and came for our easter break (like we did!). She also ran into this German guy who had been hiking the West Highland Way for the last five days and wanted some company. So we all met and went to the Bad Ass Pub for Haggis and cider. This you should look up. It was delicious, but I definitely paid for it later in the night. Then we tried to meet up with Vroni in Sandy Bells, but ended up just chilling out to some music and heading home.