Brass Monkey, Pleasance & Summerhall

As I ran down our 44 stair spiral staircase on my way to Summerhall for this morning I could see a white envelope sitting at the foot of the steps right under the mail slot. Gayle has received multiple postcards and packages  so I assumed it was for her...until I went to move it to the step so no one would step on it and realized it was addressed to me. We were running late for the Traverse talk, so I grabbed the envelope, stuck it in my bag and ran on to Summerhall excited to open it once we settled everything that needed to be done for the talk.

Avery loves meeee!

As we walked across the Meadows, we could see Andrew standing outside on the Summerhall steps. At first we got nervous that we were late or that something was wrong, but we were right on time according to Finnin's "if you're early you're on time, if you're on time you're late, if you're late you're fired" theory, so we realized something was wrong. Our speaker's train was delayed and with five minutes until the house opened, he still hadn't arrived. Thankfully he was able to make it and sneak in the back of the lecture hall to keep the audience from ever knowing there was a delay,

This morning's talk was with Stuart Hepburn. He was on the reading panel and a member of the Traverse board for 11 years. He spoke with such passion about the Traverse as the reason why he has a career in theatre.

After the talk I went for a walk around the area by our flat and down Nicholson by myself while others caught up on work or slept. About an hour later I met up with Katelin, Sam and Ali and we walked to Princes Street to go to Primark. The store is huge, fantastic and cheap considering the quality clothes you can get. I found a long enough pair of jeans for £10...which for those of you who aren't obnoxiously tall....that's impossible so when you find pants that are long enough you don't pass em up.

I'm getting somewhat more creative with my dinners...no epic fails to report.

At 10:30 we left for Citrus because it's free til 11. We hoped to get stamped, leave to meet up with Andrew and then go back on the stamp but it didn't really work that way. As we walked up the street the bouncer looked at us and laughed.  We were a bit confused as to why he was laughing at us, but as soon as we walked inside and NO ONE was there we realized--turned around and left.

It was one of our professor's last official night in Edinburgh. His flight is super early Saturday morning so we got him to go out with us for one last hurrah. He was working until around 11 and then went to his favorite bar, Brass Monkey. The place was really cool. The front looked like any other bar, but the back room had a bunch of cushions and tables.

Once we had enough of that we wanted to explore the Pleasance Venue courtyard.

It was very similar to the Assembly George Square but with cobblestone instead of grass. It was cold so we decided to sit inside for a little before heading over to Summerhall Loveboat.

Not only is it the last weekend of the festival, but Summerhall is shutting down on Sunday so everything--including Loveboat--is sold out. We walked up to the door and the bouncer turned us away because "all tickets had been sold" and we were trying to get in on our passes...but we weren't discouraged. One of the many up sides of working at Summerhall is knowing your way around the maze. Every room has at least 2 entrances so we just went downstairs outside and around the building and up another set of steps to the back door. We walked through a dressing room for the band and performers and ran into another bouncer at the back door who admired our determination to get in and let us through. Apparently Andrew took a ton of dance classes throughout high school and college so that was fun. We called a quits around 2:45 because of traverse in the morning.