belated post-mortem of my trip to edinburgh

[editor's note to the fans: i wrote this last night, then lost my internet connection and couldn't post it. so here it is, in all its glory:]

Well, I'm back from Edinburgh, and the haggis didn't kill me. I tried a bit of it (at a pub appropriately called 'The World's End', since it was built on the foundations of the wall that marked the boundary of Old Edinburgh, a boundary that most of the inhabitants would never pass), and it really wasn't too bad. However, it was also a bit too rich for the time of morning when I ate it; there's something about organ meat that makes it much less pleasant to eat in large quantities than, say, tenderloin. I don't mind organ meat, exactly (particularly fried chicken hearts), but I don't want a whole patty of chopped-up organ bits stuffed into a stomach. And, I must say that haggis was better than dim sum tripe, or the pigs' feet and petrified duck egg in black vinegar (which Tammy v. kindly reminded me of via email over the weekend--thanks!).

Anyway, I got into Edinburgh late on Friday. A hint to those of you who may arrive in Edinburgh late on Friday in the future--arrange a taxi in advance. I waited in the taxi queue for nearly an hour, which was especially unfortunate considering the accumulated hour and a half delay of my flight due to takeoff and landing issues, and so I didn't get to my hotel until almost one a.m. I rallied the next morning and wandered down the Royal Mile (the road that connects the Castle to the Palace), ate the aforementioned haggis at the World's End, saw a couple of cathedrals, and perused the main museum in great detail. Actually, I only perused the Scottish half of the museum; they also had a royal museum wing that, based solely on the description, seemed like a rip-off of the British Museum, and I've gotten tired of seeing Egyptian displays put together outside of Egypt by all the British noblemen who stole a bunch of artifacts from the East in the name of 'preservation'. The British Museum displays are amazing because they are so illicitly comprehensive, but I had no reason to expect that the Edinburgh collection would surpass what I'd already seen in London, so I skipped it. I also wandered through the Greyfriars Kirkyard; it's been used as a burial ground for centuries, so it has that sense of ancient peace that old cemetaries often have (as opposed to the too-well-ordered feel of cemetaries still in use, particularly cemetaries that contain people you actively love (or loved; verb tenses are so tricky with some members of the dearly departed)). Also, someone outside the walls and beyond my sight seemed to be preparing for a parade or something, because I distinctly heard the wailing, mournful sounds of bagpipes beyond the gate, and the music seemed to follow me as I made my way through the crumbling headstones. This aspect of the cemetary was much more pleasant and haunting than the statue of Greyfriars Bobby, which Walter had expressly forbidden me from photographing; Greyfriars Bobby was a dog who faithfully returned to his master's grave every night until his own death, and the dog has been immortalized with a statue near his master's grave. I would perhaps have been touched if I had not been so moved a decade ago by Jem and Walter's (not my friend Walter, but rather Anne of Green Gables' son Walter) dog, who stayed at the train station the entire time they were in the trenches of WWI, and howled the entire night that Walter was killed in battle, weeks before the family received official word. Katie's probably the only person who would understand exactly how moving that whole scene in 'Rilla of Ingleside' was, and why that gave me very little sympathy for Greyfriars Bobby.

I was supposed to do a ghost tour on Saturday night (billed as a tour of the most haunted place in Western Europe), but after a day full of history and several nights of very little sleep, I skipped it and slept for eleven hours instead. I don't find myself regretting it, other than in the vague 'I should have done more' way that I often have after a vacation; but I do regret that I seem to require so much sleep, since interesting people seem to sleep four hours a night, and I'm not happy unless I have at least nine. But, I did read a biography of Georgette Heyer which I had picked up at a bookstore, and it strengthened my resolve to become a romance novelist. She seems to have been so successful because she was writing out of necessity; I'm merely dabbling by comparison, particularly since I haven't written anything in a year and yet have still been able to eat and pay the rent.

Sunday, I had breakfast at my hotel, and would have visited the Palace, but was thwarted by the Lord High Commissioner, whose visit meant that the Palace was closed to visitors. Lame! So I walked all the way up to the Castle, only to discover that the line was a bajillion miles long. Seeing a sign for a priority queue for 'internet tickets', I went back down the hill to find an internet cafe, logged on to the Scottish Historical Society website, and discovered that tickets can indeed be purchased online, but only if you want to have them shipped to you in your home country, which can take up to a month. That seems to complete contradict the entire point of internet ticketing. Frustrated, I went instead to the 'Real Mary King's Close', and underground exhibit of Edinburgh's shadowy tenement past. Even as far back as the 1400's, Edinburgh's housing tenements were reaching as high as twelve stories, and the alleys (called closes) between the buildings might only be as wide as my wingspan. I don't have particularly long arms, so you can imagine how narrow that would be, particularly if very little light was making its way to the ground level and everyone from those twelve floors were throwing their waste into the close every night. A century or two ago, the Edinburgh city council decided to clean up Mary King's Close by leveling off all the tenements at the second or third story and building the council buildings on top of the former tenements, using the remnants of these houses as the foundations for the new development. Some enterprising historians/businessmen have since uncovered some of these rooms and opened them up as a tourist attraction, which I must admit felt much more real and accurate than the stupid Kerry Bog Village (and I can't believe I saw that only last weekend). The tour guide was really good, even though he was cheesily dressed up as some dude whose job it was to carry away and bury the victims of the plague. Also, no one was fooled by any of the attempts to make the tour scary, as evidenced by the ten-year-old kid who said to his equally-young sister 'don't ruin the illusion!' when she started to talk too much. Everyone humored the guide, he humored us, and we all got along swimmingly. He ended on an appropriately philosophical note, talking about how dead the underground city was, and to picture what it would look like if tour guides one day led tourists through our neighborhoods. I'd like to see a tour guide try to make Menlo Park interesting, but I'll leave that topic for another day.

After this, I went back to Edinburgh Castle, where the lines had dwindled, and I spent a very pleasant three hours there, leisurely reading every placard and listening avidly to my audioguide. I'm such a dork--my coworkers today asked me which bars I went to, whether I went out, etc., and I explained that I prefer to go to museums and sleep. Sigh. But the castle was amazing, and I could have spent more time there if I hadn't gotten extremely hungry. I especially liked the memorial to Scottish troops, particularly those who died in the Great War; as an American, it's easy to forget WWI since we entered the conflict relatively late, but Europe still remembers it. But, this post is dragging on, so I'm going to cut this short. During dinner, I ate a steak and plotted the end of my romance novel; I think it might be pretty good if I ever get around to writing the damn thing. Then, I went back to my hotel and caught a taxi to the airport, flew back to Dublin, waited forever to get a taxi, came home, and went to bed.

The only scary thing about my weekend was when my father told me last night that he had seen several girls over the weekend and realized that girls really do end up marrying men like their fathers. I refuse to acknowledge that this might happen; the fact that I only make friends with obnoxious people in no way implies that I will end up marrying one, right? But enough of that...it's time for bed!