Edinburgh--Part 2

Our last day in Edinburgh I started the morning at the National Museum of Scotland, which was my absolute favorite thing I did in Edinburgh.  The museum is huge!  It has so many different areas, it's like a history museum, natural history museum, science museum and culture museum all in one!  I could have spent all day in that museum, and barely had enough time to rush through the one section of the museum I focused on this day.  I spent my time in the Scottish History section, which was fascinating!  I saw so many neat things!  I really loved all of the stone carvings they had.  There were so many from all different time periods!  My favorite part was seeing the Lewis Chessmen.  I had seen part of the set before in the British Museum, so it was nice to complete the collection.  I love them so much, and this time around I decided to buy a chess set made out of the pieces.
The rest of the day was spent souvenir shopping, and while doing so, the owner of a kilt shop informed me that the last name Chambers in Scotland comes from the Cameron Clan.  I thought that was funny, since my dad's name was Cameron.  So if you made his name completely Scottish, it would have been Cameron Cameron.  Or if it was completely British, it would have been Chambers Chambers.  I also found out that the last name Taylor in Scotland is also a branch of the Cameron Clan, so my brother is kind of in the same boat with his "Scottish name".  The shop owner also showed me the various tartans of the Cameron Clan and gave me a little scrap of one of them for free!  It was a lot of fun to see all of the different tartans and all of the clans that they represented!!

Edinburgh--Part 1

Our first day in Edinburgh, the first thing we did was climb to Arthur's Seat.  This was a lot more strenuous than any of us had been expecting!  Even though it was a cool view from the top, I liked the view from halfway up a lot better.  It was still a nice view, but not too far away.  We then went to the Elephant House, a cafe where J.K. Rowling started writing Harry Potter.  The bathrooms are full of writings from people in honor of J.K. Rowling and the Harry Potter books.  I had to leave my own message there as well!  We then walked by the Edinburgh Castle and got some neat pictures of that.  We ended the day doing a tour of Mary King's Close, which was a tour of an underground part of the city where people lived in the 1600's and 1700's.  It was a super neat tour and gave a really good idea of how people lived back then!
The next day was Sunday and was a pretty chill day for us, since we were so worn out from everything we had done so far!  But I did get a few neat pictures of things on my way to church.