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Close Quarters
Hey everybody! We just spent a few days in Edinburgh (pronounced Ed-in-burrow), Scotland. We walked the Royal Mile which consists of several streets that make up the road up to Edinburgh Castle. The castle sits WAY up on a hillside and it's built right into the cliffside. It is AMAZING!! We got to the castle and had to wait for almost an hour just to get tickets into the site. The history of Scotland is very interesting. It's funny to hear the Scots and English talk smack about each other!
Jude and I got to see the Crown Jewels of the Scottish royalty. Mary, Queen of Scots was coranated queen when she was an infant. But then, she had to abdicate the throne to her own infant son. Several hundred years later, the Scots had to give up their throne to England. The jewels were held in a chest for 111 years and in 1996, they were finally opened and now are displayed at Edinburgh Castle. All these castles and palaces that we go to have thousands of years of history and stories - it's hard to remember all of the details.
The first night that we were in Edinburgh, Suzie, Jude and I went on a tour of "Mary King's Close." A close is an old alleyway that used to be a main thoroughfare of the city but now is used as a walking path. This particular close was underground. We learned where and how the people of Scotland lived back in the 14th, 15th, and 18th centuries. One, ahem, interesting tidbit is that back before they had toilets, they had buckets where they put "waste" (and I mean ALL waste from human to dead pets to food scraps). Then twice per day, they would yell "mar-dee-luuu" (something like that-it's hard to understand the Scottish brogue sometimes!) and would dump their waste out the windows. Some of these houses were up to 12 stories high - so the "poo" would splatter 6 feet up the walls of the houses! YUCK!!!
After awhile, when enough people had had enough of getting a rude awakening, they passed, and I quote, a "nastiness" law, saying that all buckets of... well, you know, had to wait to be emptied until 10 pm. Perfectly enough, 10 pm just happened to be the time in which all the bars closed for the night. So, you've had a few, you're on your way home, stumbling through the close, and you hear a shout from above, warning you what's coming down. You think to yourself, hey, I know what to say to this... wait... what was it now... and then once your drunken mind can form the words "Hold your hand!" you look up, cupping your hand around your mouth and opening wide to shout when.... well, you can see where this is going.
After that tour, Jude and I went on a Ghost Story tour. We went down into the underground vaults where the Scottish people used to trade and sell their merchandise. One of the stories was about a 5 or 6 year old boy named Jack who was wearing a nice blue velvet suit. They found his ghost in one of the vaults, but a little kid in a nice suit doesn't fit the norm of the seedy blackmarket vaults. One of the theories is that Jack chased a ball down the steps into one of the vaults and he never came out again. Supposedly, there have been many sitings of Jack, but he is always friendly and wants to hold the hands of moms, especially those with blonde hair.
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