shotgunwedding does the scots: part 3

tuesday was the first day i really got immersed in scotland weather. the first couple of days were sunny and mild and deceptive. i was told not to expect it much longer. sure enough, tuesday morning i walked out into an obnoxious mist. arthur's seat was swirled with fog and haze and looked like mordor. i can't say it was raining; this precipitation was far more irritating. it was the kind of mist where you don't take an umbrella because you'll look like a pussy and you don't think you'll get wet anyway, but after about 20 minutes yr soaked through on account of persistent tiny droplets. and for me, being a nerdy four-eyes, my glasses got all wet and i couldn't see and of course i don't have one dry article of clothing with which to dry them off. this kind of weather went on for the rest of the trip, and having experienced it for a week i admire the scots so much more now. it takes the right kind of mindset to be able to live somewhere where the sun is a novelty and yr always wet.

we went to holyrood palace that afternoon and took the audio tour. holyrood palace is the queen's residence in edinburgh. mostly, very stuffy and british and historic. prince charles gave the pre-recorded welcoming address on the audio tour. the best part was holyrood abbey. it's a ruin attached to the palace.
i was really excited to be there, mostly on account of the nostalgia. when i was little and living in england, my dad and i would go on excursions to ruins every weekend. we'd get the red vw golf and comb the uk looking for something that i could climb on. ruins of castles were my jungle gyms. and while i was climbing and looking, my dad would be following me telling me the history, which i was legitimately fascinated by. i'd reconstruct the building in my head and daydream a scenario where it was 1100 a.d. and i was there. apparently fourteen years later, if you put me in ruin, i'll still play medieval make-believe in my head and want to climb on all the slippery stones. i think tom was worried that i was going to hurt myself, and given my track record he was justified.
there are about a dozen slabs on the ground marking graves, and i felt very solemn and quietly excited to be walking over so many bodies. it'd be a great place for a scene in a zombie movie; i'd love to see the decomposed corpses of old scottish nobility rise up from the ruins to feast on fat american tourists and their children.

on the way home, it was deemed necessary to stop for chocolate. so tom takes me to this place that we'd walked by a few times. they had the most absurdly delicious-looking baked goods in the window; cakes and things made out of candy bars and such. inside there were so many sweet things hanging from the walls and piled up places that you could only walk single file in a narrow aisle, and if you were tall you probably needed to stoop a little. tom got this muffin. a fucking cadbury cream egg muffin.

yeah, that's a cracked open cream egg. look closer...

it was magical. take the best muffin you've ever eaten and multiply it by 100 and then fuck it because it's still not as good as this one. i mean come on, look at it. imagine a pile of those in a window next to mars bar cakes. it was too rich to eat in one go, even between the both of us, which was fine because we got to eat it again later before we went to go play beer pong.

yep. i paid $600 and flew for 9 hours across the sea to watch people play beer pong, solo cups and all. there were pint cans of tenents instead of natty light and intense german competitors instead of issac and connor, but all the moves were the same. apparently it was something of a tuesday night tradition to play pong at this flat. it was actually really enjoyable. i'm really awkward in social situations and it's only amplified in strange surroundings, but it was really comfortable to be in a familiar setting. so i leaned against the wall and watched the games and talked to everyone (most of the kids i met were really friendly and great to hang out with) and explained to everyone how i don't play because i'm awful and how that rule transcends national borders. later i quietly rescinded, on account of i met this kid who's also from (the periphery of) baltimore and also terrible at pong who needed a partner. i was 2 tenents into the night and buzzed enough that i agreed, and as soon as i stepped onto the table i got called out by everyone in the room.

i actually started pretty well, making two cups in a row which is a record for me. the guy i was playing with (who was every bit as terrible as he said he was) started to doubt me and i think, for a minute, suspected me of being a liar and something of a pong shark. but i relapsed; i'm actually still as awful as i was last time i played. i know that we all hoped for a "rookie of the year"-style return to beer pong after my surgery, but clearly my pitching arm just continues to suck. however, even though we lost the game (which was fine because i get really bored after just one), most of the cups that team baltimore made were mine. owned(!), kind of.

after pong we went across the street to a bar that was really crowded. tom was approached by a german girl - who was obviously coked out of her skull - who wanted to know if he was interested in buying pot from spain. she talked for a good 10 minutes about the merits of such a transaction. when she left i almost fell off my stool from laughing. i mean, this is his life.

(next installment: we get real drunk and end up at burger king.)