Yesterday, on an amazing Thursday, Jonmikel turned.... one year older. :-) I bet last year at this time, he had no idea where he'd be now.

For his birthday, I... well, went to class first. As luck would have it, there was a guest speaker coming to the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures that many people wanted to go see, so we got out of class early. So we went shopping, of all things. Didn't buy anything, but we did stop at this Middle Eastern hippy store that had a lot of way cool things in it with which to decorate our new (and wonderfully white) flat. Some exotic pillow covers will do wonders, I'm sure. We ARE starting to accumulate some cheap but tasteful nick-nacks, so the place doesn't feel so sterile. We did spill a bit of wine on the white couch, and were fairly upset about it, until we found a half-empty bottle of Oxy-Clean under the sink. Obviously, the owner has done the same thing many times before. I guess you can't have a white couch, white walls, white carpets and a white rug without having Oxy-Clean.

At any rate, after some window shopping, we wandered down to Rose Street, which is the fancy pedestrian street full of shops and pubs and restaurants, for dinner. During the summer, I hear this place is hopping with sidewalk diners and drinkers, but as the temperature has turned chilly (in the 40s for you Yanks), all the action has moved indoors. We stopped at the Mussel Inn, a place I saw in all the guidebooks and, upon looking it up online, found rave reviews for it. It's a small seafood place that specialized in, you guessed it, mussels. I was worried about reservations, but it turned out all right: they had one table available, but only for about an hour and a half. Would that be enough time? Now, you would never hear such a question in the US. An hour and a half? Most American diners are and and out in about 45 minutes. Here in Europe, everything is slower. After a hard day's work, you're expected to go out and drink and eat slowly and just relax. Which is nice, because that's how Jonmikel and I operate anyway. And honestly, an hour and a half for us is NOT enough time, but we wanted mussels, so we made an exception. The staff was wonderfully polite and hovering without being obnoxious. And if it wasn't for the ghastly exchange rate, it would have been a fairly inexpensive meal. But we figured we go out to one of the fantastic victorian-looking pubs we saw on the way.

Which we did. We found a wonderful little place with low lighting, a more mature crowd (think 30- and 40-something professionals instead of college-age), and a huge, mohogany island bar. Talk about ambience. We sat and people-watched and had a beer, then headed off for home.

Once we got home, even thought it was pushing midnight, we noticed how light it was outside. We could see the path sup Arthur's Seat perfectly. There was a full moon somewhere beyond the clouds, but it was so hazy that it was trapping all the lights from the city. The effect was amazing, and we had to take advantage of the situation. So we decided to climb Arthur's Seat. At midnight. We rushed home, changed into more rugged atire, grabbed a bottle of wine, and took off. We climbed up to an old chapel on one of the hills, St. Anthony's Chapel, which looked down over the city and a small loch, housing some swans, swans that appeared to be glowing orangey in the hazy light from the city. It was a great little hike, and a great place to hunker down out of the wind and talk religion and sip wine. I guess spending the night of your birthday hanging out at 1000-year-old ruins when you're a history buff isn't so bad, eh?