THIS is a petting zoo??

So I'm still a little behind, but I'm gettin there! Day after the 50's party....

Saturday we woke up (after about 3 hours of sleep) and there was a Scottish breakfast waiting for us. By Scottish breakfast, I mean MEAT buffet. Sausage, bacon, blood pudding - all smothered in baked beans. I know for a lot of people that would be amazing, but as I've already mentioned I prefer to tickle my sweet tooth in the morning, so for me it was just kind of nauseating - especially coupled with my hangover. I ate a few pieces of bacon and sneakily raked the rest of my food onto Knoxie's plate, then cracked open a beer and called it a meal.

We all hung out for a few hours in the living room before getting dressed to go to a school fundraiser for Lee and Trish's kids. Everyone was still feeling kind of gross, as none of us had showered, and Andy and Knoxie still had on their party outfits from the night before! The first thing we stumbled upon as we entered the school grounds was a "petting zoo". Now, every petting zoo I'VE ever been to had cute furry little baby animals, like sheep, goats, ducks, etc. I'm not sure if it's the Americans or the Scottish who are confused, but this petting zoo had only owls. Big owls, little owls, white owls, black owls...all with beaks and talons. The thought occurred to me - "It might be kind of dangerous for 5 year olds to be petting things that could stab their eyes out with a quick head movement", but seeings how I'm 23 and not 5, and I thought it was pretty effing cool that there were all these birds of prey just WAITING for me to get close to them, I decided to go for it and hold one on my arm. There was a bunch of cute little owls, but I figured since I was already sticking my foot in dangerous waters, I might as well go ahead and just jump in. I picked the biggest owl out there and the owl-handler man tied him to a glove and slipped it on my arm.

I should have known right away that he was gangster, because as you can see in the picture to the left, immediately after the man put him on my arm, he spread out his wings as if to say "Watch it little white girl!".  He calmed down after a few seconds and I got to pet him (do you pet feathers? hmm...) and admire his huge eyes and sweet beak. I never let my head get too close to him for fear of getting pecked in the face, and after a few minutes I was over it and called the handler over to take him back. I started to take the glove off and during the transition between my hand and the man's hand, gangster owl decided he was DONE with it all and tried to fly away!! He got about two feet in the air and the handler jumped up just in time to grab the bottom of the glove and yanked the owl back down! I was SO glad that man caught him. I would've been mortified if the owl had escaped!

So after the near-owl-jailbreak-fiasco, the group decided to head on to the other "attractions". There was kids playing tug-of-war, two giant inflatable bouncy castles (that I was a little sad I was too old to get into) and some version of a three-legged race. There was also a guy with his head one of those wooden things from back in the day that they used to punish people with, I think it's called the stocks? Anyway, you could pay 1 pound to throw three wet sponges at his face. The group stopped and Lee, Knoxie, and I took turns aiming right for this guy's face with giant sopping wet sponges. Lee and Knoxie didn't even get CLOSE to this guy, so I stepped up and showed them how it's done, pelting the guy square in the head on the first throw. Next we walked inside to check out what was going on in the school gym. It was mostly stuff for the kids, like face painting and that game where you fish a duck out of the kiddie pool and win whatever is taped on the bottom. Trish was working the temporary tattoo table and only had 8 or so left to get rid of. Knoxie kindly volunteered to help and contributed his 50 pence before going on to pick one of the 8 designs left. He was going for a beetle, but I spotted an American flag/eagle tattoo sitting there. I doubted that anyone else here was gonna choose to brand themselves with another country's flag, and I needed to do my duty as an American and represent! By represent, I mean I pointed to it and told Trish to put that one on Knoxie.

He very politely obliged, which I thought was pretty nice considering the Scottish are a very proud group of people, and I guarantee you that no one else there would have been caught dead with an American flag on their arm! We all moseyed back outside and headed over to the owl zoo again, since it was the only remotely interesting thing going on. Liz spotted a cute wee one and decided that she was gonna brave the talons and hold him. So we called the owl-handler man back over and he tied the little guy to the glove and slipped it on Liz's hand.

I was petting it and decided that Penny was a good owl name, before we were informed that it was A) a boy owl, and B) from Africa, so clearly Penny was out. Liz instead named him Clik-Clik and had a good 10 minutes of bonding time with him before she gave it back to the handler. Soon after that the fair was over, so we walked back to Lee's house, packed up the car, and headed home to Dunblane. We had a tiny detour though. Keith had been talking about this mysterious pineapple thing for a few days now, and he was finally taking us to see it in all it's glory. About 20 minutes outside of Dunblane, we drove down this tiny dirt road and parked the car. We got out and walked up the prettiest path lined with trees and flowers, and then - there it was. A giant stone pineapple. On top of a massive house. I'm still not sure of the exact purpose of the thing, but it sure was interesting to look at!
Apparently, whoever's house it was back in the day wanted to show off how much money they had, and pineapples used to be a status symbol because they were a rare treat for people in Scotland.

 So, they had a huge one built right on top of their house. Anyway, we took a few pictures and we were on our way. We decided to stop at this cute little Italian restaurant called Corrieri's for supper since we were all too tired to be bothered with cooking. The food was fantastic, and I had the best ice cream sandwich EVER for dessert!

It was two scoops of vanilla ice cream sandwiched between two wafers, and on the bottom there was two more chocolate covered wafers with nougat in between!! Makes every other ice cream sandwich look like a joke now. Keith had something called a Knickerbocker Surprise, which came out in a tall sundae glass and had a cute little Scottish flag stuck in the top scoop of ice cream! After dinner we went home and pretty immediately crashed.