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vaults of Edinburgh
Saturday, August 11 2007
setting: Willy Wallace Backpackers' Hostel, Stirling, Scotland, UK
In the Willy Wallace dining room this morning I sipped instant coffee while making a paper sign reading simply "Edin-bg" to help with our hitchhike to the second-biggest city in Scotland. A light rain was falling as we walked out around the fields and "Kings' Knot" at the foot of the south cliffs beneath Stirling Castle on our way to the M9.
After a bit more standing in the rain than we would have preferred (my sign was totally soaked), we managed to catch a ride on an access ramp where there was no actual spot to pull over. Our driver was wearing a NY Yankees baseball cap and mostly wanted to talk about sports and we did our best to play along. He'd been to New York at least once and been disappointed by the food at Planet Hollywood. I didn't tell him that Planet Hollywood is about the most authentic American dining experience one can have in the Manzana Grande.
Unfortunately the driver let us off in the southern fringe of Edinburgh and we were forced to catch a bus to the city centre (no one was picking up hitchhikers attempting to hitchhike there). Again we found the bus driver gruff, as they evidently are throughout Scotland. It must be a job requirement.
A woman sitting next to us on the bus gave Gretchen all the information she needed to find the bed and breakfast where we had a reservation. The woman even called the B&B from her cellphone. I'm telling you, never underestimate the helpfulness and friendliness of a random Scottish stranger, just so long as they're not behind the wheel of a bus.
It always seems like a long walk when it's through a city in the rain when you're hungry and tired and there's a pack on your back. After we got into our room at Claymore Guesthouse (Edinburgh's one vegetarian bed and breakfast), we both took showers. We also took advantage of random free WiFi in the free global "Netgear" network (the "Linksys" is also good). This was our first free WiFi since leaving Glasgow.
We went to a vegetarian café nearer the city centre and a not-entirely-pleasant time due to bad service, although we were able to loot some good things off the table next to us after its customers got up to leave. Given the weakness of the dollar, we had no shame and didn't mind being mistaken for peasant rubes.
One of the great things about Edinburgh (pronounced "Edinboro" for some reason) besides all its lovely architecture is the number of free world-class art museums. We spent some time in The National Gallery of Scotland looking at a bewildering array of famous works and lesser works from extremely famous people. They even had a number of works by Seurat, hardly the most prolific Post Impressionist. I found the murky light of the gallery, particularly up in a room displaying the drawings by William Blake, to be the ideal place to explore the focusing behavior of my newly-myopic eyes. In full daylight the depth of field is big enough for me not to notice my myopia, indoors it's usually somewhat noticeable. I can always obtain a complete (but temporary) correction by tugging at the outside corners of my eyes, at least for now.
We just happened to be in Edinburgh for the annual Edinburgh Festival, featuring music, dance, and theatre performances at numerous venues around the city. These events are big and expensive and, over time, resulted in a parallel festival called the Fringe Festival, which hosts cheaper, smaller performances. But even the Fringe is too official for some people, and so now there's the Free Fringe, featuring mostly standup comics and whatever you can find being performed in the street. As we passed through the Royal Mile we encountered several street performances, which were usually hidden within thirty-meter-wide shells of people. These performances were typically a mix of comic performance and a skill such as juggling or acrobatics. Near the end we would be encouraged to put money in a hat, a responsibility we left to those facing a less onerous exchange rate.
We walked well south of the Royal Mile and managed to get a table at the Ann Purna Vegetarian Indian restaurant. We didn't have a reservation and there was about to be a rush of people who did, so we had to accept a table over the part of the floor that had been severely warped by water damage by the irresponsible youths renting the upstairs appartment. The food was, as promised, delicious.
After dinner we hurried back through the festival crowds to the Royal Mile, where we wanted to a join a tour of the "haunted vaults" beneath South Bridge, a bridge crossing a gorge from the Royal Mile to the next ridge south. These vaults are the arch-rooved voids beneath the bridge, which is a stone viaduct. In most viaducts the vaults are open on both ends, but here in Edinburgh buildings were constructed on either side of the bridge, enclosing the arches completely and rendering the bridge itself mostly invisible. A little water can drip in from the top, but there are no windows and thus no natural light whatsoever. Originally (in the late 18th Century) the vaults were used by the various local businesses, but when they proved problematic due to flooding they were abandoned and gradually taken over and used as living space by the very poor. People often lived ten-to-a-room and saved money by going about in complete darkness. It became an important center for such service industries as prostitution and the harvesting of live people for use as medical cadavers.
Our tour was given by a company called Auld Reekie Tours which sends plump young women dressed up in the gothy style to lead groups around to various nearby landmarks and then into the first a museum of torture implements and then into the vaults themselves. We got to learn about 16th and 17th Century sanitation (there was none), human rights (there were none, particularly if you were thought to be a witch), and plumbing systems (you basically drank from the same pool where your shit, garbage, and witches ended up).
I wouldn't say it was a wildly informative tour, and the emphasis on the paranormal in the vaults would be considered excessive by anyone with a rational mind. That said, something turned off the flash on my camera in the supposedly most haunted of the vaults, and that something wasn't me. Part of the goal was for us to be scared, and at some point one of the tour employees was sent to run down the dimly-lit vault hallway screaming like a banshee. What they should have done instead was have a small child walk down that hallway silently past the doorway to our vault as our guide was telling us of the many people who crammed into these rooms and died of things like the Black Plague. That would have scared the bejeezus out of me.
Instead I had to get my fright fix at the bar called Nichol Edwards, where we were given first a piss break and then later free drink coupons. Nichol Edwards proudly claims to be "Scotland's most haunted pub," but the truly scary things in there were its bathrooms. I'd been impressed by the immaculate condition of WCs throughout Scotland, but here at Nichol Edwards the toilets were filled to brimming with a lumpy grey substance similar to pea soup.
Our final destination of the evening was a comedy club called Linsay's Basement Bar nearer to our bed and breakfast (in the northeast part of the city off Leith Walk). Keith and Caroline had recommended the stand-up act of their friend (and fellow vegan, naturally) Eddy Brimson, who would be performing there tonight. We'd been told that a big part of Brimson's act was his happiness from not having had kids.
Linsay's was a fun pub, with a good selection of reasonably-priced drinks. I'd forgotten about Old Speckled Hen, but I'd remembered liking it so that was what I was drinking. The show was done down in the basement in a poorly-ventilated room that had all of the heat and humidity that Scotland is otherwise spared in August. Brimson's act was hilarious, pushing the limits on political correctness in all the best possible ways. He was also heckled by a couple drunken audience members, which he managed to use to fairly good extemporaneous effect. Some of the humor was a little too British for Gretchen and me to get, but we chuckled along anyway because there was always the physical humor to keep us laughing.
Before his performance, Gretchen had explained to Brimson how we'd heard about him, and so after the show she offered to buy him a beer. He came and sat with us upstairs to drink it, but he was drinking quickly and seemed distracted, like he didn't expect to like us very much. (I mean, really, why should he? He's a star and we're acting like starfuckers or something.) But through the sheer force of her personality Gretchen can make anyone like her. Brimson kept saying he had to go to this next thing, whatever it was, but he kept standing there talking to us anyway. And when finally he was done with us he went and sat at another table. The liar! The whore!
Stirling Castle this morning.
People impersonating chickens (sort of) in their act on High Street (the Royal Mile) in Edinburgh.
See more photographs from the Scotland trip.
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