Day 19

Being the true royalists we are, we started the morning off with a trip to see the Royal Yacht Britannia. For those who don’t know, this is a ship built for the English Royal family, and was decommissioned a few years ago so that people like us could desecrate it.

It was alright. It’s a boat. The funniest thing was getting told off for dancing like a spaz so that my shoes squeaked more.

Next, we made our way to the Nelson monument. At 1pm, they drop a giant ball on top of the monument to signal the ships that it’s 1pm. They did this before the cannon, and introduced the cannon because of those days when the weather prevented the ships from seeing the monument. So at 1, we saw the ball drop, and the cannon go off. I think it would be cooler if they used the cannon to knock the ball off.

Near this monument is a replica of the Parthenon in Greece. Well, actually, it’s unfinished. They ran out of money, and therefore dubbed it “Edinburgh’s Shame”. That was pretty cool.

The weather started to turn bad , which I hear is rare in Edinburgh. So we decided to do an indoor attraction. We went to the Camera Obscura. This is an optical illusion house, with the world’s first camera obscura on top. A camera obscura is basically a mirror reflecting the image of outside into a lens which displays in onto a white canvas inside a dark room. Mostly, this is kind of lame. But the cool part is that this was done in 1850. It was a tourist attraction then, so it is likely to be the longest running tourist attraction in Edinburgh.

Camera Obscura was pretty fun though. There was some really cool stuff like a heat camera and a mirror maze and there was this awesome tunnel thing:

The bridge is stationary and the whole tunnel rotates around so that as you walk across the bridge you feel off balance and actually have to cling to the rails for support. Weird but awesome!

We went out for dinner to celebrate our last night. We went to a traditional Scottish Thai restaurant. We think they forgot to charge our drinks to the table.