I'm about done being a tourist in Edinburgh.

I'm not so much being a tourist as actually...living in Edinburgh. Granted, living in a hotel room, but I've been buying little groceries and necessities, I have restaurants I like to frequent, and on Thursday I even got a haircut. £9, not bad, I think that's less than I pay at home. And of course, I've seen about everything I really wanted to see. Today (Saturday), I was thinking about seeing the Palace at Holyrood House, at the opposite end of the Royal Mile from Edinburgh Castle, but tickets are expensive, at least £16. So I might walk down and see it from the outside, but it won't bother me if I miss it.

I had a conference call with work last night. 7:30 pm my time, with someone in Atlanta (2:30 pm) and another person in Colorado (12:30 pm). We used one of our products, GlobalMeet, which is great for small companies up to enterprise level corporations (shameless plug). It's great. It and iMeet both provide a website you pull up in a browser, and it gives you the option to let it call your phone (usually a local call, but no charge to you anyway) or call your computer, which uses Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP). It also lets the host of the meeting share his screen, promote someone else so they can share their screen, has a little chat window, etc. And happily, it worked with no problems because my hotel room has a strong Internet connection. But, since I had that meeting, I couldn't do much. I can't actually remember what I did on Thursday or Friday. Nothing strongly memorable, anyway, but that's not a bad thing. I seem to remember riding a bug into New Town, but that might have been a different day...

Well, I feel like I've lost a bit of weight. I was hoping I had gone down a pants (trousers, for any British readers) size, so I walked down the street after breakfast to the Cameron Toll Shopping Centre, and check Sainsbury's jeans selections. I tried on the next size down...nope. Apparently I have a half size to go. So, I got my laundry together and rode up the road to the laundrette. £3.90 per wash, £1 per 16 minutes for the dryer, did 32 minutes, jeans not completely dry. I chatted with a girl that works there, she's funny. She's short, and they have this metal grate they pull down over the counter whenever they count out money (so they don't get robbed) and the last time I was there, she had to find a pole to reach the grate, haha. I overheard her tell someone she's almost 20. Wow, I was still an adult when she was born.

After I took my laundry back to the hotel, I hopped on the bus to Newhaven, which is a district of Edinburgh, so only about 15 minutes by bus. It turns out it was the exact same route I took to Leith that time before, and the route ended at the exact same place, right next to that Newhaven church and facing the water. At least this time I was somewhat expecting it. I got out, wandered around, took pictures of the water and buildings nearby.

When I was there before, to the left (north) was a pier going way out in the water, and I decided this time I was going to walk down to it and all the way to the end. It's a good thing the weather was partly cloudy and I have some stamina, because according to my rough calculations, it was about a mile just to get to the pier. It was bigger than I expected. Then the pier to the end was about 1428 strides. It's all stone, probably about 15 feet wide, and 10-15 above water from the edge to the water's surface. There is a relatively smooth walking surface on each side about 4 feet wide, and the middle is a bunch of rough-hewn stones that would not be fun to walk the whole way on. There were a lot of small boats anchored on the left side. When I got to the end of it, I took pictures of the land on the opposite shore, which I could just barely make out. I also saw a rainbow and grabbed that, and some kind of bird diving for food. At the end of the pier it looked like a stone support and then a badly broken wooden pier about 20-30 feet long. I may be calling it the wrong name, but "pier" is the best I can come up with.

After I walked back the entire way, a couple of black men with French influence-sounding accents (probably some country in Africa like Cameroun or Nigeria) asked me to take their photo. Actually what happened was they accidentally caught me in one photo, so one guy asked if I would stand with him in the picture (okay...I guess they thought I was a local), then asked me to take a photo of both of them. I guess I should have gotten them to take a picture of me, but I didn't think about it. But, walking to the bus stop, I got a man walking a dog to take my picture so I got that covered.

While I was walking, I saw several patches of what looked like thistle (but I may be wrong, as the edges aren't sharp). Remembering that thistle has some significance in Scotland, but not sure what, I picked a good looking one and carried it with me. I'm pressing it in one of the books I brought with me.

There's a church south of where I'm staying that I'm going to check out tomorrow. I think I'm going to head to London on Monday and fly home on Wednesday. We'll see how that goes.