from modern glasgow to retro edinburgh - day 2

anders is back in chalmers using the SEM and will probably stay until friday~~ so happy to see him again ^^
and jason balik kampung dy... one less malaysian in sweden...
anyway, lets continue the journey shall we? :)

our breakfast room that second day... was a lounge...
biscuits and tap water for breaky anyone? XD well, we knew we were likely to have heavy meals later that day, since we were meeting choy lan and lily, our private tour guides in edinburgh at noon ^^

and easter was coming

aye, glasgow was juz a stopover, lets go to old school edinburgh~ taking peynie's words, we alloted two full days for edinburgh where glasgow the capital city of celtics and rangers and fergie has only earned two miserable nights XD

on de bus to edin~

we bunked at the border of the "new" town in edinburgh, which is 300yrs "new". climbing up to the hostel is like climbing batu cave...

our hostel bathroom, ahem... 18PL wei...

looking out of the only window in our dorm...

lets go out a bit~~
the view of old town from new town :D






we met choylan and lily at burger king, high calory lunch there and off we go to rosslyn chapel! aye, there lies the holly grail! (according to da vinci code the novel la...)

here are our lovely hosts on the doubledecker to rosslyn that was constantly approaching lamp posts and traffic lights and corners of buildings at too high a speed ^^
oh, right, it was right-hand-drive again~

a shot of edinburgh castle, one half of original hogwarts, and a church at the foot of the castle from the moving bus :P

bus is good~ 满天满地de daffodil~~~

again on the bus~

to be honest, rosslyn chapel was a disappointment :P probably becoz of too high an expectation i had. anyway, true to dan brown's descriptions, it is a baby of a chapel. gothic, planed to be build in the shape of a cross, the chapel is less than half finished when war came and the Sinclairs fled, abondoning the construction and the chapel, as it was 1/4 its planned length, and 1/2 the width.

moreover, the originally pinkish/orangy stone the chapel is made of is weathered black and green as it stood abandoned by its family. when the victorians came for restoration under the order of the queen, they painted it grey as it looks today, and that sealed in the moisture that was eating the stone like acid ="= so, now, they build a dome on top of the chapel to shelter the abandoned little orphan against rain, and keep the wet baby constantly airy in an attempt to ventilate and hopefully finally dry it out again.

cameras are prohibited inside the chapel, and the skeletal scaffold of 7850kg/m3 (steel, my friends, density of steel. pls forgive a mechanical + material engineer) cradling, or maybe a better word would be engulfing, the baby from outside. on top of that, we did arrive in a windy + rainy not-quite-spring-yet afternoon. so, pictures? forget about it...

nah, i do have a few to show :P this one is peeping in from the side door. you can see de pinky/orangy colour is comingling with the green and black.


having said that, still, like many famous medieval catholic churches, the carvings in this one, on the window frames, walls, pillars, roofs and basically all over the interior of the chapel are breathtakingly done with exceptional details. the well-debated controvertial figures regarding christianity, among which lurked the famous green man, the swap between greed and charity for their respective places in the 7 holy virtues and the 7 deadly sins, and more... aiyah, go wikitravel and look up la... XP

in the rainy afternoon and in the tea house outside de chapel, our very nice and patient hosts waited on ^^

end of rosslyn chapel and half de day had barely gone by!! back in the centre of edin nxt post, where the two real life models of hogwarts will be revealed~~ and the spooky Mary King's Close to haunt ur nightmares ^^ well, believe it or not, they say edin is one of the most haunted city in the world ^^