A quiet day in Edinburgh
Despite having fallen asleep relatively early, David did not have the smoothest night, waking up at 2 am and not able to fall asleep for a couple of hours. The guest house provided a hot breakfast (eggs, beans, mushrooms, tomatoes, sausage), which was a nice way to kick-start the day. We got our things packed up and brought them down to be stored for a few hours until we could check-in at our AirBnB before heading out. David needed to get some work done for ISI, so we decided to have a relaxing morning at Brew Lab, drinking some coffee (or hot chocolate for me) and using their wifi. Perked up by a delicious pour over and espresso, we made our way back to the guest house to fetch our things.
It was a relatively short walk over to our new accommodations, right off the Meadows (a large park in the middle of the city) and about 10 minutes away from the University. We were met by one of our hosts, Calen, who was an SFU student in Cognitive Science when we were at SFU (and who had come by for a BBQ at our place many moons ago in Vancouver). The apartment was lovely–high ceilings and well-appointed, and our room was cozy and comfortable. We chatted for a time about work and mutual friends before unpacking a bit and settling in. The nice thing about staying for longer than a day in one place is that you do have that opportunity to lay out your things and not feel like you need to rummage through your luggage to get out a hair brush or a pair of socks.
We went off in search of a light lunch before going to see my supervisor give a colloquium talk at the Linguistics department at University of Edinburgh. David suggested Coffee Angel, which turned out to have quite delicious sandwiches (mine was a tasty portobello mushroom, blue cheese and caramelized onion panini), and were a perfect way to tide us over until dinner. We wandered over to the University and found the seminar room to see Ann’s talk. It was nice to socialize after with several of the grad students and faculty in the Department before heading over to eat dinner at a nearby Malaysian restaurant, where we all ordered a dish and shared them amongst ourselves. From there, we went to have drinks at a nearby pub, Cloisters, with James Kirby, a faculty member who did his PhD at University of Chicago, funnily enough. There, we debated the merits of different Scotch whisky and other types of spirits and talked a little bit of shop (the job market mostly) before walking back and calling it a night.