The bench

The old ferry dock is now gone. Like it was never there.

The 2 girls on the right asked me to take a photo of them sitting on that bench. The bench you see, was used in the movie "The fault in our stars" and is now a little bit famous... The bench was already famous with me since about 5 years ago though because I got a fuckin' panic attack whilst on the phone with someone. After that I only walked on the other side of the canal for over a year. Just looking at the bench could make me cry at the time. Funny how the mind works sometimes.

Today I was gonna have dinner and a couple of beers with my best friend Mic. We decided we needed some quality time together.

Ain't that quality? ;-)

The dinner

Good morning. Looks like one of the new neighbours has been trying out their balcony and needs to get educated on social behaviour. There were just as many in my downstairs neighbour's yard... Fucking anti-social pigs.

Late arvo I walked in to town to meet some friends for dinner. I noticed the little house in the middle. It's an odd set of houses.

Guinness was good for me :-)

And so was the cottage pie!

Remy, Martijn and Mara. Patricia refused to be photographed. Must be a women thing...
We had a nice dinner and had ice cream for dessert and then one more drink somewhere else.

Want some shoarma with that garlic sauce?

Tonight I met up with Mic. We both could use a bit of a drink. Guinness for strength!

But also I was dying for some shoarma (kebab).

Mic was so kind to make sure I wasn't short of garlic sauce.

After dinner we went back to the pub, had a few more pints and then switched to whiskey. We tried a new one called Writer's tears and it was rather nice.

The pint(s)

The weather was fantastic but I really needed to stay home for a day and clean and do house-stuff. Had the window open playing music all day long.

But in the evening I crawled outside and walked to the pub to meet Mic. This tree is in bloom on the Leidsegracht.

And then there was Guinness. And everything was good :-)

The break-up

Today is a very sad day. Inge told me she couldn't continue in to a relationship with me. After I cleaned up the mess in my own head I thought everything was fine and I totally didn't see this coming. But in the end you cannot force love so what can I do except cry? I actually quite can't believe this is happening...

We had a wonderful 6 weeks and I learned a lot about myself for which I'm grateful. No regrets and no hard feelings. I think Inge would have loved to see it work out just as much as I do but hey...
I hope I can somehow give her a place in my life. Time will tell.

And then I hit the pub with my best friend Mic. Gerrit joined for a while as well.

We drank.

And then we drank more. In fact so much I didn't think I'd live the next day ;-)

But the shoarma saved me! This was good shit man.

On my way home Mic and I did some late night shopping. I am so happy to have great friends. Wouldn't know what to do without them...

Meeting G.

A tiny little insect somehow landed on my desk. I gently helped it outside again :-)

I  met Gerrit in the pub after work. I also met Guinness.

The Munt-tower on my way home.

The new blinds

Early morning, getting breakfast. It was dark and rainy. The streets were nearly empty. Urgh.

A guy with this poor dog came walking past. Her legs don't work no more but her poophole works beautifully which she demonstrated by leaving a gigantic load right in front of my door. I saw it happening and I was stunned. Even more stunned when the guy walked off, just like that. So I grabbed my keys and ran out on my slippers (not easy running on those...). I told him his dog crapped in front of my house and he says "that's not from my dog". So I explain to him in detail what I'd just seen happening and I told him he was welcome to feel that it was still warm if he wanted! Then he believed me and walked back with me and cleaned it up claiming he had not seen it happening and he wasn't expecting it cos she'd just been somewhere else. As if. This was SO much there could not have been a "somewhere else" already. Glad I caught them.

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Another HDR image, this time showing that this orchid has THREE stalks with flowers.

My Guinness goodies arrived today! A bottle opener and a 2GB usb stick. Nice :-)

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I put up some blinds today. Now I will not be a one man show anymore when it's dark and people walk past. See the full report here.

Arthur's seat

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Good morning! The B&B we were in was lovely. The lady of the house had broken her ankle just before we arrived which meant she couldn't clean our rooms or the bathroom. We didn't care much as long as it was warm and the bed was soft and the shower was hot and the breakfast was good.

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Today we wanted to climb Arthur's seat. So early morning we set foot to the hills of Holyrood park in the centre of Edinburgh and pretty soon we already could look out over the city. Here is a good walking map of Holyrood park.

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Edinburgh is actually built around a volcano. A dead one, but still... The views while going up were great.

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Or even greater!

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Of course there is not just the hill itself to be seen. We were about to visit a few sites on the way. The second place of interest soon showed itself. However close it looks, it still took nearly 20 minutes climbing to get there.

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On our way up we passed St Anthony’s Well. The boulder above it is an ancient stone as described here and here. It is said to have healing powers and it used to be a place of worship in days long gone. A wonderful little historic site with so much more to it then one would think at first site. Who made this? Who put the stone there and why? Did the stone have a purpose? Where did the water come from?

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And then there was St Anthony's chapel. A small ruin with records dating back to 1426 when the pope paid for its repairs. It's demise is believed to have started around the year 1560, what a pity. Now it just feeds the imagination.

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The information board tells about the history of the little chapel.

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Marjolein standing in the doorway of what once was the entrance to St Anthony's chapel. For how long  have people walked through that door? Did anybody live here? Who belonged here? Was it safe and secure? What happened here during the day?

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And then it was up, up, up again.

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Some parts of the path were actually quite steep.

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The views were fantastic.

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The wind today was insane. At the top of Arthur's seat there's a landmark. We climbed up to make a picture but we had to hold on for dear life not to be blown off. Since my camera was not on a strap I was a little worried ;-)

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The view over Edinburgh as seen from the Arthur's seat landmark. The wind was so strong that I had to wait 5 minutes before stepping down because I would have been blown over while standing on the one leg. Little did I know that by this time Marjolein had already been blown over, the result of that is shown in the very last picture of this blog post. It was an awesome climb with fantastic views. The wind was a bit dangerous though so we decided to not have lunch here but to go down a bit first ;-)

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Beautiful views while walking down again.

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We walked down the piper's walk which was a small and narrow path. Funnily enough we didn't encounter a living soul on this part of the walk.

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Marjolein posing in a spot that reminded us a lot of our walk along the "Sentier des douaniers" in Brittany last summer.

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More great views.

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And then the fourth site of interest showed up: Hutton's section. This is an old dig site where a geologist called James Hutton developed the ideas founding todays geology.

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The site was produced long ago when the volcano here was still active and tore and pushed the rock apart making it show the layers of different materials it's made of.

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All the different layers are clearly visible here.

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There is also a repository of iron ore. This particular bit reminds me a lot of the mining spots in World of Warcraft ;-)

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After having lunch at Hutton's section we continued our journey down again.

When we came back to the city we had a drink and cake. I was totally ready for a shower at that time.

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This is a piece of ore that I "found".

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After a quick visit to the B&B for a shower we walked back in to town to have a few drinks at a session that our friend Chic (bald guitar player in the back) had arranged in a pub called "The Hebrides", which I mentioned in my earlier post about Mary King's close, the close that used to exit right next to this very pub.

The session was great!

The Hebrides.

Chic having a chat with Min Ha and her sister.

Our drinks.

By the time we got home, Marjolein's finger had swollen and discoloured dramatically. It got bruised during her fall on Arthur's seat where she was blown over by the wind.

It was a great day. We have seen lots of interesting sites, had a great walk and awesome views followed by drinks with friends and wonderful songs played by good musicians and (not pictured) fantastic fish and chips in The Doric.