Edinburgh
One thing I forgot to mention about my Aberdeen experience is that Mel taught me how to say a bunch of Scottish sayings, such as bawjaws, which basically is a friendly way of telling a friend, he’s being a pansy, ie, balls in his jaws. Such a colorful language.
We got up early on Monday and walked over to Asylum, a comic book store she goes to so I could peruse the Scottish selections; cross culturing is good. Then she walked me to the bus station and we waited eating granola bars and telling jokes until it was time to go. We said our goodbyes and I said that I could empaTHIGHS with her (only Mel will get that.)
Slept most of the way on the round about 3.5 hour bus ride, switching in Perth and finally arriving in Edinburgh, the capitol of Scotland. This is a beautiful city, the most beautiful I’ve seen in Scotland and there are a great many things to do there. It’s built on all these hills, not to mention the ruins of old Edinburgh which was built on the ruins of old Dun Edin. So it’s got many tiers to its streets. Everything is cobblestone of course as is the case with most old cities, and Edinburgh castle dominates the skyline in the center of the city.
I walked to the information center with my huge bag that’s only getting heavier and found a hostel. I accidentally walked up the wrong bridge and ended up on a street overlooking the street I should’ve been on, so I had to find some stairs to get down to it. So much fun, it’s like a 3d maze of a city, but still relatively easy to navigate because it’s much smaller then say Los Angeles. Only about 300,000 people live there but they’re all crammed into tenement housing and the like.
Upon entering my room at Belushi’s, which is the attached bar to the hostel, I saw Marti and Garri, the Finnish couple I had met in Inverness. Small Scotland. Oh, and upon arriving at the hostel, I learned of their buy one meal get another free deal until 5p, so I bought a vege lasagna and an Aussie burger with everything on it for £7! It was quite good, what a savings!
I walked the Royal Mile which is a group of streets that have a bunch of history sites and shops stretching from Edinburgh castle to the Queen’s Palace. Walking in the park which actually used to be a loch, I ran across some real Scottish dancers, basically old people hopping around to Scottish music. It was still fun to see.
After walking around, I headed back to the pub to do the pub quiz. I had met an Aussie named Josh earlier in the day and teamed up with him and two London girls for the quiz. Marti and Garri, which by the way Garri is the nickname I gave her because her full name had much to many syllable intonation changes, joined us later and even though there were six of us, we still managed to merely get second. The winning team were two Scottish guys in wheelchairs with whom we talked for a while afterwards, also while the Londoners, Tessa and Sarah showed us how to make paper origami lilies. The bar began to fill up as we discovered that a hockey game was going to be played between Edmonton (Oilers) and Carolina (Hurricanes). Apparently it was filled with Canadian fans so only Erica, the American bartender, and I were cheering for the US. Carolina ended up blowing them away of course. I’m sure Law was watching that game. It felt good to see the team that beat the Sharks lose.
The next day, I got up sort of late and had some free breakfast downstairs. Then I headed out to Edinburgh castle. Another American girl had told me the £10.30 admission fee was not worth seeing the inside of the castle. She must not’ve liked history cause I thought it was well worth it. It was huge. The castle itself is built upon a huge basalt mountain which shoots up from the center of the city; it’s basically an ancient extinct volcanoes, great place to build huh? This place is like a large village inside its walls, circling up to the Great Hall in the very center of the castle. There are living quarters, shops, chapels, chambers, vaults, all sorts of interesting things. It’s been all redone as a sort of history lesson that you can walk through.
You can also see the Scottish royal jewels and read about their history. By the time I made it to the war museum 3 hours later I was read out. You could spend a whole day there. In the War memorial, the architecture and statues were beautiful. If I ever make some sort of memorial, this is the one I will use as the model. And the crests are so intricately done. In the great hall, there was a man who was playing the part of a real Earl who actually existed during the time of Mary, Queen of Scotts, and was even married to her at one point, although I don’t remember his name. He was a great story teller, he really put you in the time period as though you were actually talking to this man.
I had lunch there and watched the 1 o’clock gun fire off as it does everyday but Sunday. They also told us of the many attacks against the castle, the longest of which lasted three years. It was a mighty stronghold, but had one weakness, water. It was built on dense, hard basalt rock, so there was no source of water except from the sky.
They had set up rain drains which would empty into a huge well that supplied all the water for castle. Since it rained quite often, this worked alright until one of the catapults of the enemy launched a rock into the north wall and broke of a piece of it which crumbled over the well, burying it. With no water supply, the people of the castle had no choice but to surrender.
Afterwards, stopped by Pasta Fresca to use the internet, then went back to the hostel for a bit. I met the London girls and Josh there who were about to have dinner. It was still buy one food, get one food free, so Josh and I split two meals. The girls had been trying to decide how they were going to pay for another night at the hostel and had spent the whole day making these paper lilies and selling them in the park. They actually made £16 off these stupid little things. I was quite impressed. That was enough to buy them food, drink and another night’s stay.
I left them to wander down to the palace just to see it. I had no intention of paying the huge admissions to get in there as well, I’ve seen palaces before. It was your typical palace looking thing, almost a run down version of Buckingham palace. I was more interested in the building next to it which I’m told is the Parliament building. It has some funky architecture, with bamboo rods and stones sticking out of it. I don’t think it really worked all that well to be honest.
Back at the hostel, I was looking forward to a nice shower since I hadn’t showered in 2 days. But only found cold water dripping from the heads, so no shower for me.
After that, I went downstairs and made paper airplanes with the girls until we all went to Three Sisters, a pub, to watch the England/Sweden game. It was quite a good game and ended in a tie. England is moving forward. Tomorrow, our game against Ghana will be the deciding game.
I left there to go to the City of the Dead Tour. Apparently, Edinburgh is one of the most haunted cities in the world and is literally built on the bones of its dead inhabitants. The girl giving the tour was quite good at story telling and actually had me a bit nervous. We walked down to the tenements where she explained in the olden days, these buildings were packed with people and there was no sewage system, so everyday at the same time, they’d say “Look out” and toss all their trash and waste out of a bucket into the street, hopefully not on someone although that happened often, from where it would run down the street and be ankle deep in some places. It would eventually make its way down to the North Loch, now the Castle Gardens Park where I was earlier, which of course was the primary source of drinking water for the city. It’s no wonder people got sick all the time.
We went on to Friar Grey’s graveyard, the only graveyard in the whole city. For hundreds of years, people have been buried here and although you’ll only find about 600 headstones, there’s said to be more then 250,000 people buried in the grounds, piled one on top of the other.
There are many legends of the dead rising in this graveyard, largely due to the amount of rain they get. The soil would erode and bones would begin to appear from the ground as though they were working their way back to the land of the living. The tour guide told us many disturbing tales of grave robbing, being buried alive, and a dog named Bobby which guarded its owner’s grave for 14 years, although really we think it was to gnaw on the bones of the deceased.
The finale of the tour took us into Covenant’s prison which was a section of the graveyard that had supposedly been closed off for many years because it was deemed dangerous. Too many people had been attacked by poltergeists and ghosts there. And actually in the last 7 years, on the tours, they’ve had a total of 700 supernatural attacks, 193 of which ended up in people being knocked out by something they couldn’t see.
After telling us the tale of McKenzie, a cruel man who would torture people and kill them for fun and him being buried feet away from those that he tortured and that his soul could not rest after what he’d done, if you weren’t scared from the supernatural stories, she brought in the science. Scientists believe that ghosts and poltergeists are the result of condensed pheromones in the air which feed off of your pheromones, hence the more you fear, the stronger it becomes. She was excellent at making you feel afraid. In fact, there were too local girls who were so scared, they latched onto me the whole time for protection. I was quite amused.
After telling us all these wonderful things, we enter into the tiny Black Mausoleum where McKenzie is buried and where is ghost seems to have the most activity and power. She continued to tell us, while we were in almost complete dark about a homeless man who wondered in here and ended up in a pit of dead bodies. Oye, she was good at her job. After many more tales of the damned, in mid story, a masked man jumped out from the doorway to scare everyone.
Okay, haha, it’s all a joke, and then she got all serious and told us of an actual event which occurred just the week before of a guy having to go to the hospital because he was freaking out so badly. She said the masked man was there if nothing happened and to tell her it was time to go.
Leaving the covenant prison, it doesn’t end. She said that in all of the attacks that had happened, victims have immediately or later found scratches and burn marks on their body which were not there before. So when you go home tonight, you might want to check to see if you have any. So now we’re all going to be scared all night as well. It was fun though.
Afterwards, the two girls, Emma and Rachel, who had been clutching onto me and Emma almost broke my hand, and I went out to get a drink at a pub. Rachel’s bf who was Irish joined us and told me some things that I should do while in Ireland.
Whoo, this is a long email. Finally, up to today. Even though I only got 3 hours of sleep, I got up early and walked to the bus station to go to the Edinburgh airport. I had booked a flight from Mel’s, leaving Edinburgh and going straight to Belfast. It was only £40, prolly the same price is getting there by land, and would save me a whole day. I met an American girl on the bus who was looking to teach in Edinburgh but was a bartender instead. She was moving to Greece soon for a teaching job she had found. I was jealous. We sat and waited for our separate planes talking until hers finally left and I laid down to get some quick shut eye.
The flight was only an hour and I landed in Belfast at 8am. I picked up my luggage and then laid in the baggage claim on the seats for about an hour sleeping. I found an information center and got a bus, which was quite expensive, to the center of town and walked to the nearest hostel where I am now. All I wanted to do was go to sleep and take a shower which I hadn’t done in 3 days. But upon arrival, I found I couldn’t check in till one. So I dropped off my pack in the luggage room and walked around the city. Not much to it. I hadn’t heard any great things about Belfast, so I decided to use it as a recouping day, which worked out quite nicely.
I went to an internet cafe and burned a CD from a memory card so now I have plenty of pictures left. I talked to some girls waiting to check in until finally it was time. After dropping all of my stuff off, I checked out some pamphlets of things to do. I found some pretty cheap tours so instead of trying to do everything myself like I had in Scotland, I decided to go the tour route, especially since I’d heard the buses are not as good in Ireland, and they seem to be a bit more expensive. I booked a day trip up to Giant’s Causeway which has some interesting rock formations and then a 3 day trip to the western end of Ireland.
Oh, just so you know, I’m currently in Northern Ireland which is still a part of the UK, while Ireland is it’s own country and uses Euros, so I’ll have to switch again when I get down there.
So at last, I have taken a shower, gotten some much needed sleep, eaten dinner, and done some laundry. I resupplied with snacks and drinks and am ready for the last leg of my UK trip. I’ll end in Dublin on Monday, prolly go to the brewery and then back to Colwyn Bay to see Christie, pick up my stuff and fly home.