Edinburgh (cont.)

My second full day in Edinburgh began with a visit to one of the prettiest (and most shockingly cheery-staffed!) Starbucks I had ever been to. Then Alyssa and I walked up the Royal Mile once again to Edinburgh Castle, which is on a cliff and has yet more incredible views of the city. Unfortunately, it’s one of those tourist sites where you’d have to pay extra to get the little guide book about it (and the entrance was pricey enough), so neither one of us bought it. Inside we saw Mary Queen of Scots living quarters and a family tree (or thistle, in this case) of Scottish royalty going back to the 1000s. “Oh, they don’t have Wallis Simpson!” I said. “She was never queen,” Alyssa pointed out. After seeing the crown jewels and a piece of rock on which Scottish kings used to be crowned, we sat out on a picnic table by the castle walls and pieced together our combined knowledge of Scottish history (mostly Alyssa’s).

After an Indian buffet lunch, which both of us Toronto kids were craving, we eventually found the Writers Museum, which is housed in a beautiful wood-paneled home with an amazing spiral staircase. It was again educational for me as I knew basically nothing about Walter Scott, Robbie Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson. It was around this point that it started to sink in just how ignorant I am about Scottish history. Having walked so much the day before, we both needed breaks in between sights and after viewing the art gallery (which included a Scottish collection and an absolutely hilarious art nouveau-style painting of a fey male angel) we ended up resting in the park for quite awhile. Well, it was mostly because a young man, dressed all in black, at the bottom of the valley starting singing Scottish ballads, which there don’t seem to be that many of, so it was a lot of ‘I’ll take the high rrrrrroad if you’ll take the low rrrrrroad...!’ He was holding something in his ear, which we assumed to be a headset playing his accompaniment. He was totally nonplussed at people waking by staring at him, and when this group of teenage boys starting taunting “Who’s a pouf!?” and even sat around watching him for awhile, he just kept on going. His girlfriend joined him (sometimes singing herself), and then two other friends and we gathered that they had just gotten engaged. He sat and listened to him for longer than I like to admit. I love how when travelling you can plan and plan and do all the stuff you’re supposed to do, but often the most memorable things turn out to be incredible stuff that just happens.

Still full from lunch, we ended up at a Turkish cafe at the bottom of the Royal Mile and I had my first Turkish coffee since I was in Istanbul last year. Then it was back up the Mile to do the St. Mary Close haunted tour of the underground rooms and alleyways buried beneath the Royal Mile. The Lonely Planet book said the tour was a bit cheesy and obsessed with the scatological, which it was. We learned a lot about how the old denizens of Edinburgh would throw their human waste out their windows and let it ooze down to the river. “I understand they didn’t have our technology,” I said to Alyssa. “But there HAD to be another way!” My favourite moment of the tour was when we walked into a room and our guide told us not to touch the walls. “Partly because it’s the original plaster,” he explained. “But mainly because the original plaster had ground up animal and human remains in it.” When you’re standing in the middle of that room looking at the walls, that gives you shivers up the spine.

After that, it was time to walk Alyssa to her train. I was sorry to see such a good, old friend go. She told me not to worry about my quarter-life crisis and enjoy my travels, and we’d see each other at Christmas time.