Day 13 (September 26, 2025): Edinburgh

The Last Scottish Hurrah

(by Rain, Luzie and Ffion)

Today, as we woke up a bit earlier than yesterday, all of us had a semi unpleasant but also good feeling of excitement. Today marks our last day in Scotland - tomorrow at this time we will be sitting in the almost comfortable seats of the UK trains, watching as the landscape shifts from Scotland to England. To begin our day, we all had breakfast in the apartments and met at 9AM in the lobby. After Ms. Ruf’s announcement of not being able to be late on the following day, we made our way to Calton Hill once more (we were there before on our first day in Edinburgh).

We endured the steep hill whilst trying not to break our ankles on the old and used pavement. Out of breath after our short “hike”, the first group of the day presented the history and beautiful buildings and monuments on top of the hill, where we learned that the beneficiaries of the National Monument ran out of money and therefore, it still stands uncompleted atop the hill. 

 

After we made our way down, trying not to get run over by cars and buses and doing our best to avoid dog poop on the sidewalk, it was time for the second group to present their mini presentation about Holyrood Palace. During the presentation, “the Duchess Maragret” (Rain) and “the Viscountess Kortney” (Ffion) introduced and “crowned” (put burger king crowns on to the royals, our classmates). After learning about the history of the palace and its inhabitants, we put on our headphones and turned on the audio guide, exploring the palace just like royalty had done in the past 900 years.  It is fascinating to think, that Queen Victoria, Queen Elizabeth and King Charles had walked down these same halls before us. 

 

And that was (almost) the end of our Scotland program. After some more reminding that we cannot afford to miss our train tomorrow, everyone set off either to walk up to Arthur's seat (a hill overlooking Edinburgh), explore the city one last time or enjoy the coziness of our apartments. We had a lot of cleaning and packing to do, since we had to have the apartment in spotless condition before 6PM. The state of them looked more like a college dorm room than an apartment in the nicer part of town… so we had some work to do. After some cleaning, packing, rest, Harry Potter movies, bookstore visits and hikes, we spent one more dinner together in Scotland. We made our way to the brightly colored, lively and loud food court down the street, where we enjoyed different dishes. The place offered a range of food from south American cuisine to Indian, all the way to Japanese street food. Bathing in moonlight, we wandered back to our apartments and then met up in one of the living spaces where we began our final activity of the day and the trip: a pub quiz where we fought for first place in groups of three. We had to answer 16 different questions about everything and anything we had learned or experienced during the trip. After a lot of shouting and laughter we concluded the night with a prize-giving ceremony and were reminded one last time not to be late the next morning. With that, our Scottish chapters are coming to an end. We will miss them, but we are also excited to finally be able to enjoy the comforts of our own beds in 24h time.