Mel and I left the apartment around 9:15 this morning and headed towards the train station to meet Mel's friends Chris and Katie. We boarded the 10:30 train for Glasgow and arrived around 11:20! We walked through the center of the city and stopped by Primark (a ridiculously wonderful British department store) because Mel and Chris were on the hunt for some onesies (like the footie pajamas) to wear for some Halloween parties this coming week! They were successful and each picked out one -- a tiger for Mel and a monkey for Chris. Very amusing. I picked up two men's sweaters for myself....one with a more generic snowflake dsign and the other with reindeer for the upcoming holiday season....
After that, we continued on to the main event of the day: The Great Western Chilli Cookoff! And yes, they spelled it "Chilli", and not "Chili". It was this great event set up by a small international food store (which imports Dinosaur BBQ sauce!) where they sold 500 tickets for 10 pounds each, and for the 10 pounds, you could go around to 10 different restaurants/pubs and each gave out a 50 gram sample of chilli to try and then score! We started at around 12:45, and we ended up taking the whole afternoon to finish it....
The chilli tour was really so much fun. It was incredible to see all the different types of chilli that the pubs made, and also just the Scottish bar scene in general! My favorite chilli actually turned out to be the only one was that vegetarian! Crazy how that worked out. I actually just looked up the results of the voting -- and my top choice got second! And my second choice got first! So at least I wasn't too far off. But anyways, this one restaurant that I loved had used coconut and had almost a sweet flavor -- it was the only one that still left a wonderful taste in my mouth 10 minutes later.
Along the way, we spent time enjoying some drinks while eating -- we happily completed the cookoff with a 2:1 chilli sample to drink ratio...whoops. We each bought around of drinks, and then Katie bought us all one more. I was shocked that despite the signs around the bars saying that I would have to show ID if I looked under 25, I didn't even get carded at all! It's still hard to get used to that.
We finished up the tour and dropped off the score cards, and then we walked back to the train station. We caught the 6:30 train back to Edinburgh and decided to have a nice night in. We picked up some supplies to make "cheese toasties" upon our return -- basically grilled cheese sandwiches and we also added ham! Yum. It was a lovely snack to finish up the long day, and we all watched "Gone in 60 Seconds" -- which I had never seen, and we all really enjoyed it.
Another wonderful day in Scotland! And unfortunately, my last. Headed back to Paris tomorrow -- still odd to think that going back to Paris is the same thing as going back to "real life"....anyways, a few simple pics from a really fun day!
A bientot!
No comments:
Post a Comment