Day 7, Aug 16 (Thursday)

Slept in and deliberately missed breakfast at MacKenzie.  Had it a local café and it was really good.  Nice low-key atmosphere and relatively inexpensive.  Today we do the castle.

The castle is huge.  Really, really big.  So many buildings and levels to it.  We had lots of fun exploring and taking silly pictures of the signs and numbers by them.  Apparently there is an audio tour, but we don’t normally do these things.  First, they are slow and usually pretty lame; we prefer to do our homework and buy the book so we can read more about it.  Second, those headsets are gross like a TV remote or a phone in a sleazy hotel room is gross.

if you ask nicely, other tourists will take your picture

he looks so proud of those castle gates

pet cemetery (not creepy like a Stephen King one...)

Edinburgh Castle is very vertical.

Literally, the pet cemetery.

Mons Meg's balls are huge.

Mons Meg was a strategically important weapon.  They still have it.

While in the castle we was the Scottish War Memorial.  This is like their Arlington. We are getting a numb from all the war (especially Great War) memorials, but this one was worth it.  It was quite moving to see all the tributes to the various units, counties, and cities.  Scotland lost 148,000 men in the Great War, which seems like a small number, but it was highest proportion of soldiers to population of any country in the war (today the population of the county is only about 5.5 million to put it in perspective).

We bought the book, so we'd have a better understanding and better pictures....

Every castle needs a dungeon.

Dessert and mocha following the castle.  We are pretty happy with the dessert and coffee/tea thing in the mornings and/or afternoons.  Impulsed on a show and saw a 59 year old male accountant that also does a stand-up act.  Bald Man comedy act or something.  He did a part about growing up in Glasgow gangs and then some parady songs to Johnny Cash tunes that were very funny.  Really good show, probably the funniest so far.

The Royal Mile at dusk.  This is relatively quiet compared to the middle of the day.

I thought it rude to take a flash picture.

The resting place of John Knox.  For some reason, this amuses me greatly.

After the comic, we went to Edinburgh Underground Tour’s “Real Fear Tour” for an 8:45 start.  “Captain Porteous” was our guide for this one, an obvious late middle age stage actor.  His act was annoyed (which happened in real life – see appendix on city/country observations), haughty, and a little conceited.  Probably the best presenter and actor to date on tours (and likely shows).  Our tour was the guide, us, 2 Scots (whom we made friends), and 7 others from a mix of France and Spain.  The guide was clearly “done” with festival, but did a great job of telling stories and history, very well blended together.  Insights into Scottish politics from the guide and the others on the tour were very interesting.

Another dark corner in the Vaults.  This one was reputed to be haunted.  People that got close, often felt something.

This creepy little tableau was in another of the vaults.  It was said that a family that did not speak the local language was tortured to death in that vault during the last witch panic in Edinburgh.  The dolls are left for the ghost of a small child who was killed along with her family.  Sometimes people feel a hand in their hand, or a tug on their clothes.

Late dinner at Deacon Brodie’s Pub up on the The Mile.  The nice waitress was also pretty fed up with the festival as well.

 

They had a whole wall of Deacon Brodie/Jekyll and Hyde stuff.

The cider situation was bittersweet, not because of the taste, but because they are yummy, and we knew we couldn't get them in the states.