18 January 2011

First day in Edinburgh: Mary King's Close

Some highlights of the day:

Breakfast at the hostel includes haggis, and many of our group tasted it for the first time. Some of us have had haggis that's far less palatable, but it was clear that not everyone was going to continue including it on their breakfast buffet menu.

After some exploring of the vicinity, most of us struck off for Arthur's Seat for a climb to the top. It was very windy and our route (which, it turns out, was the long way) was wet and muddy. But we found that the ascent up one of the peaks is made of stone steps, and we started up.



Climbing Arthur's Seat, 14 January 2011. Click to enlarge.

Some students made it within sight of the summit, but we all had to turn back, not due to exhaustion or terror (the wind seemed strong enough to blow a person right off the mountain) but because we were running out of time. We enjoyed striking vistas of all of Edinburgh and generally had a very good time.





Views from Arthur's Seat, 14 January 2011. Click to enlarge.

We had a 4 p.m. appointment for a tour of The Real Mary King's Close, a historical tour of a close (a very narrow street lined with buildings) that dates to the 17th century and that was in use into the 1930's. The close and the associated buildings are now many meters below street level, so the tour is a subterranean adventure. Our guide was in character as Mary King's daughter, and she included references to some of the ghost stories associated with the close. One of her deliberate attempts to scare us (she struck the wood floor with a rod as we sat in the dark listening to a recorded story) elicited at least one delightfully loud scream from one of the group. More importantly, we learned a lot about the structure of crowded Edinburgh in the 17th and 18th centuries; the 14-story buildings that lined the close at the lake's edge are thought to be among the world's tallest at the time. We learned what it means when someone yells "Gardyloo!" Blecch. And we heard about how Edinburgh beat the Plague (on the 12th try or so). We weren't sure whether we should believe the claim that 2% of the coffins from that time really have scratches inside of them, despite the somewhat credible explanation: that the gents collecting corpses were paid in ale and thus so inebriated that they occasionally picked up people who were "taking a nap" by accident.

In the evening, we had our first communal meal, prepared by us in the hostel kitchen at a fraction of the cost of Pizza Hut.

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