Day 3, Aug 12 (Sunday)

Breakfast was good. Walked in the rain to Old Town. We looked for the letterbox on Calton Hill, but no joy there. It was gone. It rained a lot with a pretty strong wind. This day we learned that our rain gear is not working. Decided to find an outdoors store to replace it. We made to Mary King’s Close for our tour.

Ranger Bob, show us the path!

Calton Hill is covered with monuments

The tour was great; definitely recommended for anyone planning to spend any time in Edinburgh’s Old Town area as it explains the history, and more importantly, why the city is the way it is. This included what a “close” is, why they are the way they are, how the vaults and bridges came to be, and why the city is laid out the way it is (Flodden wall, for defensive purposes). They also did a good job of explaining a non-sensationalized version of the Burke and Hare story. MKC is much more of a factual and historical attraction – they went to great lengths to dispel common misconceptions about life in the Old Town from 1600-150 or so, including how and why people lived the way they did. We bought the book. 

Did lunch at The Guilford, a local free house. Steak and ale pie, and haggis. Very yummy!

it's not stopping raining, what do you think of that?

this speaks for itself

Took in another show – a stand up at by a young woman. “Lightbulbs in Daylight” was her bitter and

awkward and depressing take on the misery of modern work and dating by a young woman living in the UK. It was terrible. This was more of what we would call “Cringe Fest” in she was just bad. There were a couple of funny lines and it was sad to see her fail like that. Especially after she made jokes like “I’m not stable enough to use alcohol or drugs to cope” which was funny, but all sad. Her best joke was about her ex-boyfriend and his line “show me the dick”. She was also working the streets pretty hard to drum up an audience. There were about 15-20 people in attendance. We ending up giving her a fiver when she passed the hat, mostly out of pity.

The very sketchy hallway leading to the black box theater for Lightbulbs in Daylight.  At this point I was wondering if we walked into a drug house.

The very, very low budget venue.  We had some feelings this would suck once we got here but decided to stay.  I read on the internet that we should see one terrible show.

We finished the day with City of the Dead’s Double Dead Tour. This was awesome! It was about 100

minutes long and included vaults underground, Greyfriar’s Kirkyard/Cemetery, and the McKenzie crypt and ghost tour. The tour guide, Ian, played sort of a crazy punk kind of guy. He did a great job with his own spin on sensationalizing the poor, depraved, and brutal nature of Edinburgh in the 1600’s, with some Burke and Hare in there for extra fun (including grave robbing, other resurrection men, etc.). Got some great pictures from this one.

Our guide, Ian.  He did a slightly crazy punk act.  We enjoyed his presentations.

Here are some shots from the vaults portion of the tour.  No idea on how old these things are, but I'm going with "very" in at least a few cases.

The tour started in vaults, and then led to Greyfriar's Kirkyard.  We ended up in the McKenzie crypt which was neat.

If this looks slightly familiar, it's because this is the building used in Harry Pothead as Hogwarts.

The infamous McKenzie crypt.

Little things like this are all over the graveyards in Scotland.