Saturday: Part 2

The museum would have been enough for the day, but we were still had a whole bunch of places to go. We headed to Camera Obscura and the Whisky Heritage Experience after the museum, but we couldn't do both because it was so late in the day. We agonized over the decision for a few minutes before heading into Camera Obscura. This 4 story building has had a camera mounted on top of it for almost 50 years. There was a neat demo before we saw any exhibits, where we got to see the sights of the city through the camera image, which was projected on a huge table. The guide showed us how to "pick up" people from the table with index cards and let us all try it. As simple as it sounds, it was really neat to do.
After the demo, we worked our way down through the building. We saw 5 floors of optical illusions, holograms, and camera history. Definitely work the visit. We dropped by the whisky experience after we finished. We figured we could buy whisky in the gift shop even if we couldn't do the tour. Sure enough, we each picked out some whisky, with the help of the tasting notes posted by each variety. Is it wrong to hope my Dad and stepmother don't like the whisky so I can finish it? :-)
We caught a bus back to the hotel to drop of our purchases and take a breather. We had done so much that I think I could have gone to bed then, but it was only 5:30. We planned to have dinner at the Haymarket pub nearby, but it was way too crowded, so we crossed the street to look for another place. We saw another pub with an Italian restaurant above it. The menu posted by the door looked good, so we went up to eat. It was a very small restaurant, with only about small 10 tables. We decided to order 3 different meals and share them, which was great. We had garlic bread, a margherita pizza, and spaghetti napoli. Yum! Really excellent food, and a nice quiet meal.
We left the restaurant and caught a bus back to St. Giles Cathedral to take a ghost tour. The cathedral was beautiful, with the setting sun lighting up just the top of it. We met our tour guide and set off on the tour...starting with the back of the cathedral. The guide was very funny and interesting. She had people come up and act out parts as she told us stories about the city's history. One of the funniest portions of the tour was when she told us about waste disposal in the close behind the cathedral. We had already heard about how in the olden days people would toss their chamber pots out the window and into the street with a call of "Gardy-loo!" That made the streets really gross (and led to the invention of high heels, to get rich people up out of the sewage in the streets) and the loch it all ran into was the same loch that provided the town's drinking water. Ewww!
She really brought the situation home though. You could get someone to pause if you were on the street when a pot was being emptied from up above by yelling "hold your hand" and then scrambling out of the way. Her observation was this: what if you were from out of town, enjoying a nice moonlight stroll in Edinburgh, and you hear some gibberish from above you? "What would you do?" the guide asked us.
Look up? "That right," she said. "Eyes wide, mouth open. How's that for a first taste of Scotland?" Scots have quite the sense of humor. The tour continued to be hilarious, but also spooky. We walked through Cowgate, an area that used to be full of tenements and is now full of rowdy bars, to the Greyfriars cemetery. She stopped to show us the grave of John Gray. He is famous because his dog, Bobby, supposedly spent 14 years guarding the grave of his master, a constable from Edinburgh. Unfortunately, this is probably not true, but the story is popular both in Scotland and abroad. There is a statue of Bobby in the Edinburgh Museum and a nice new headstone on John Gray's grave, erected by the American Lovers of Bobby. The rest of the cemetery has old and worn grave markers, all the way back to the Flodden Wall (the best preserved section of this 14th century wall is in the cemetery).
The highlight of the tour is a visit to a locked section of the cemetery that is said to be haunted by a poltergeist. We had to go in through a locked gate and then stood in a crypt while our guide explained the history of the haunting and some common side-effects of hanging out with ghosts on the tour (unexplained cuts and bruises, interference with electronics). I thought it was actually a very peaceful cemetery, with neat looking crypts and little courtyards for family plots. We wrapped up at the grave of George MacKenzie, a relentless prosecutor in the 1600s. His grave is said to be haunted and has been featured on Fox's "Scariest Places on Earth."
That was it for us--the end of our long list of cool things to do. We headed back to the hotel for some much needed rest before our big trip to the Highlands.