Edinburgh - The Lighter Side

Ever seen a self-confessed lightweight try and knock back a dram of 45.8% Scottish whisky in one go? Yours Truly belongs to the privileged elite that have...

Having already encountered Talisker (a brand of whisky) with Jochen, Yours Truly took it upon herself to introduce Gez to the experience.

Now, as anyone who's not an "experienced" drinker will tell you, when someone introduces you to a new drink and has one themselves, you watch how they drink it before approaching your own, i.e. the 3 Taps and Down System for Shots, etc. So, when presented with a dram of Scottish whisky by Jochen, I watched as he took his own and sipped it. There you go - the clue's in the action.

So perhaps I could be forgiven for thinking that Gez was already familiar with this. Not so. I bought us a dram each and we happily clinked glasses...I kid you not, in the time it took me to raise my glass to my lips, he'd already attempted to knock his back, failed miserably, sprayed half of it back into his glass and was sprawled across the table gasping for air. (Photographic evidence is available to those with my mobile number and a camera phone) He then went on to bet that Yours Truly couldn't knock back a dram in one and not react...some of the easiest money I've ever made has been out of bets with Gez.

(The other notable occasion was when we went to go and see Romeo and Juliet at The Birmingham Rep. Having read the massive notices stuck up around the theatre saying that another actor in the cast would be taking the part of Mercutio due to injury, I bet Gez £5 that the guy playing one of the Friars would be playing Mercutio. Having shaken on it, I flipped to the corresponding page in the programme and took his money. Anyway.)

On one of the nights we decided to go on a City of the Dead ghost tour, which I'd already been on the last (and first) time I'd been to Edinburgh, in October 2004. The main purpose of this tour was to wind up in the Black Mausoleum in Greyfriars Kirkyard, and then lock you into a tomb with the Mackenzie Poltergeist. It's absolutely brilliant and scares the b'Jesus out of you, so I wanted to take Gez along. He'd wandered happily along with the rest of the tour party, listened to tales of Old Edinburgh and body snatchers, people buried alive, death, decay and the ultimate ownage of Greyfriars Bobby; but when it came to actually going into the Black Mausoleum, I felt a drag on my hand that hadn't been there before, and he sheepishly muttered to me and the tour guide, "I can't do this" before making a swift exit stage right and waiting outside the gates for us all to return. Next time...!!

Staying in the backpackers' hostel was brilliant. There were 14 of us in a dorm, with the majority being Aussies. Friends made included Jess, Tegan, Colin (American), Christie (Canadian), Dave (ditto), Abe (American), Nathan, Jordan, Haley and Louise. (I've now been offered enough free holidays to set me up for life.) I had conversations covering all topics, from the Carlsberg-beer-can-Christmas-tree ingeniously constructed by Alex to how much sex people have had in the last year. Just pretty normal stuff then, really...

I've played "Up and Down The River" with Dave and Christie, "Uno/Blackjack/Whatever It's Damn Well Called" with Nathan and Jordan, borrowed a genuine Australian hairdryer from Haley, had dinner and extremely intelligent convos with Colin, laughed with Abe about his drunken antics at his work's Christmas party ("So I kissed her when her boyfriend had left! Well, he'd turned around...that counts as left...doesn't it?"), told my life story to Tegan until 4 in the morning (poor girl), and what have I got out of all this? A whole heap of culture awareness and the decided opinion that backpackers' hostels packed (pardon the pun) with today's youth can do wonders for international relations. Seriously, it's fed my passion for travelling and now I want to do even more...with my aim being to do as many of the European capitals as I can while I'm at uni!

That's it for now, folks, tune in later for another exciting episode...! xXx