Glorious and Gory History

First, the good news--after e-mailing the apartment owner about the incessant banging, he called the pub below and they discovered that the heavy barred door that leads to the bathroom was broken.  Or rather, that mechanism at the top that's supposed to ease it closed so it doesn't slam was broken.  So they jimmied some sort of fix and it was much quieter last night, and I found a note slipped through my mail box slot today from the manager of the pub offering me a free meal there.  Sweet!

 

Today was a beautiful, sunny day, which I enjoyed very much as I know that's a bit of a rarity here:

 

Now that I was aware of the whole ticketing thing for the walking tour, I got to the right spot, got my ticket, and spent the next 2 1/2 hours learning all kinds of interesting things about Edinburgh's history, much of which I've now forgotten, but I remember enough to hopefully pass on a few entertaining stories.  We started here at a market pillar just outside of St. Giles.  You can see a unicorn at the top, which is Scotland's national animal.  That's right, a unicorn.  Where there's now stone around the sides, there used to be wood, and those who were guilty of minor crimes (petty theft, for instance) would have an ear nailed to the wall, where they spent 24 hours at the mercy of any passersby who wanted to throw some rotten produce at them or spit on them.  After their time, the nail would be slowly and carefully removed.  If someone didn't want to wait that long, they could just rip most of their ear off, but that would mark them as a criminal for life, which led many of those who went the ripping route into just that direction.  The number one criminal activity for women? Not hard to guess--prostitution.  For men?  Becoming a pirate.  Both of those lives were brutal and short (average life span after beginning usually being a matter of months).  Thomas Hobbes' description "life was nasty, brutish, and short" seems to apply well to these folks.

 



 

Speaking of executions, we spent a little time in Grassmarket as well (right outside my apartment) and our guide explained that The Last Drop used to serve the final drink to the condemned just before he/she was hanged.  One such person was a woman named Maggie, who went to work at an inn after her husband abandoned her for another woman, and who ended up having an affair herself with the son of the innkeeper.  She got pregnant, delivered a baby that later died, and she buried him down at the banks of the river.  She did this in secret because of a strict law in those days called the Pregnancy Concealment Act in which is was unlawful for a woman to hide her pregnancy from the father (apparently this was aimed at trying to prevent infanticides that were occurring due to the extreme poverty in the city).  Even though Maggie's baby had died of natural causes, the fact that she had concealed it still made her guilty, and her actions were somehow uncovered and she was hanged at the square.  However, when they arrived at the cemetery with her in the coffin and were preparing to bury it, they heard a knocking.  She was still alive.  They got her out, brought her back to the square, and were preparing to hang her all over again when some kind solicitor in the crowd pointed out that since she had been declared dead, she had technically served her sentence and shouldn't be punished a second time.  Others agreed, but others still wanted to see her hanged (a two for one deal, as far as the ghoulish audience was concerned) and poor Maggie had to sit there with the noose around her neck for an hour while they debated it.  It was finally concluded that God had shown favor to Maggie by allowing her to retain her life, so she was let free and lived another 40 years in Edinburgh, known now as "half-hanged Maggie."  Apparently, her neck was bent for the rest of her life so she was pretty easy to identify.

 

The next few photos come from Greyfriar's church, which is where I attended service yesterday.  The cemetery surrounding the church isn't very large, but it houses over 7,000 corpses.  It was common practice for centuries to just push the decomposed remains/skeletons further down and bury the more newly dead on top (which makes me think of the grave digger's scene in Hamlet).  In the 1800s, some enterprising souls found they could make quite a lot of money by digging up fresh corpses and selling them to the medical school at the university, so those who were rich had iron grates over their graves for three weeks (after which the body was unusable) and family members without the means had to take turns keeping watch over the grave at night--hence the term "graveyard shift."

 

For Harry Potter fans, J.K. Rowling used to eat in the second story café of this building, which overlooked the cemetery and the George Heriot school beyond, both of which inspired her writing.

In the cemetery is a Moody, a McGonagall and...Tom Riddle:

Our guide said it's not uncommon to find angry threats and curses written out in notes and left on the grave for the poor man whom JK Rowling turned into young Voldemort.  This church is also famous for the Covenanters, a group of Scottish Presbyterians in the 1600s who protested against the changes Catholic Charles II was imposing on all the churches in the UK.  They were dealt with very harshly by George "Bloody" Mackenzie, who imprisoned about 600 of them here (also on the church grounds) and did quite horrible and cruel things to them like [stop reading if you are easily disturbed] making them lie face down in the mud as it rained and telling them that if they lifted their head to breathe, the two people on either side of them would get shot.  Many heroically did not lift their heads and drowned.  The prison is now a mausoleum and a popular spot for ghost tours.

 

 

Mackenzie's own mausoleum is here at Greyfriars, although somewhat neglected and overgrown, which is rather fitting.  It's reported to be haunted by his ghost who is said to attack visitors from time to time, scratching them, bruising them, and sometimes knocking them down.  So, essentially, he remains an asshole even dead.

 

On a brighter note, this little statue outside the church commemorates Greyfriars Bobby, a little terrier who belonged to a nightwatchman and, after that man died, sat faithfully at his owner's graveside (townspeople would bring him food) for the next fourteen years.

 

This little passage here is a great example of the many "closes" that populate this city.  Narrow (and often steep) passageways that open into rows or small squares of housing, which housed about a hundred times more people centuries ago than they do today (sometimes twenty to one dwelling).  Even though life was crowded, squalid, and miserable for a large majority of the population few of them ever left the city in their lifetimes because to enter the city, you had a pay a toll and the poor couldn't afford the toll.  So if they left, they could never return home again.  The dense population and the abundance of chimneys in the city has left a lasting mark--the smoke stained most of the older stone buildings a dark grey or even black sooty color.

This particular close contained the building (though since destroyed and rebuilt) that Robert Louis Stevenson lived in for a time.  As you can see, they go quite a few floors up, and in the old days, the richer people lived at the top and the poorer lived at the bottom.  This becomes especially significant when you remember (or learn) that the way people used to dispose of their household (and personal) waste was to dump it out the windows.  They were allowed to do this twice a day--once in the morning and once at night--and they were supposed to yell out a warning when they did it.  Those living at the bottom got to live right next to the whole building's filth.  Those at the top got to spare their aristocratic sensibilities.  The night drop was allowed at 10:00pm, the same time the pubs closed, so as many drunks walked home and heard a yelling above them and they were too inebriated to think clearly, they looked up and got, well, shit-faced.  Now you know where that comes from.

This same close also houses the Writer's Museum, which details and has artifacts from the lives of Stevenson (who, like Hans Christian Andersen, also loved to travel and wrote a book about it), Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Burns, all deeply venerated authors/poets here in Scotland.

Naturally, I paid it a visit after the walking tour ended.  I've just come back from a nearly 4-hour dinner with a friend of a friend who works for the publisher Canongate here in Edinburgh who also got her master's degree in English and loves to write.  Needless to say, we had a bit in common.  Now it's time for bed!

 

Transitions

One of the upsides of visiting so many locations is, obviously, that you get to experience lots of new things and have a kind of constant variety.  One of the downsides is that just as you start to get acclimated to a particular place, it's time to leave.  Case in point: yesterday I went out to breakfast, traveled a fairly long distance on the metro, browsed around a flea market, and managed to successfully conduct about 85% of all the conversations I had with people in French (the other 15% being the moment I accidentally blurted "bon dejeuner!" or "have a good lunch!" to the concierge at my hotel as I was leaving instead of "a bientot!" which is "bye bye!"  I was leaving about lunch time, though, so hopefully it wasn't completely bizarre).

It was raining in Paris when I left, and raining in Edinburgh when I arrived yesterday evening (hardly surprising), and I splurged on a taxi since it had been a very long day and I wasn't ready to get my suitcases on and off yet another bus.  Apparently, all taxi drivers worldwide take great delight in driving like maniacs and making their passengers clutch their seats in order not to be flung about (my suitcase was sliding all over the place).  I also found the journey a bit harrowing because of all the crazy roundabouts, confusing lane markings, and all the twisty-turny streets that don't have an inch to spare.  How on earth am I going to navigate all of that myself driving on the wrong side of the car on the wrong side of the street come Thursday?  My brain was confused enough just being a passenger.  I tried to calm myself with the advice the British man who cuts my hair gave me: "just keep your body in the center of the road." 
 
Anyway, early anticipatory driving panic aside, I managed to get settled in the apartment I'm renting until Thursday and start a load of laundry.  Little did I know that doing one load of laundry would take nearly 4 hours.  Part of it had to do with the fact that a wash cycle on the little machine in the kitchen takes nearly 2 hours for some odd reason.  Another issue was this:

 
I guess the U.S. travel packet of Tide was a bit much for this Scottish machine, so obviously I had to do an extra rinse, which added another 40 minutes to the process.  And that was just the washing part.  The drying (which should really be called "less dampening") took another hour.  So basically, in the time my one load of laundry was getting washed and somewhat dried, a glacier in some part of the world moved about five feet.  I didn't get to bed until after midnight, and then a new issue arose.
 
My apartment is located on this street

 

above this pub (it's the set of windows just above The Last Drop)
 

 
which is all very historical and charming.  This market square dates back to the middle ages, and there's a stone mound in the center commemorating all the folks who were hanged there that I can see from my window.  And my building dates back to the 1600s--my bedroom floor slopes down sharply in the middle attesting to this.  However, despite multiple TripAdvisor reviews saying otherwise, it's quite noisy.  Let's just say that the Scots who congregate here (and all the other pubs on the street) on a Saturday night really like to drink and really like to yell.  And say "fuck" in all its variations as often as possible.  All of that actually isn't so bad as the soundproofing from the windows is pretty good and the bedroom is in the back.  The real problem is that there's either a very heavy door somewhere below that's banging or they're dropping a really heavy load of something on the floor about twenty times an hour, and it's loud enough to set the oven racks rattling and shake my bed, and irregular enough that it startles me just about every time.  So every time I started falling asleep between 12 and 2 last night, one of those rattling thumps would wake me.  (It's actually happening right now and I'm trying not to let it drive me nuts.)
 
Needless to say, I didn't wake this morning in the best of moods and I had a raging headache, but after opening my curtains in the bedroom to see this out my window

 
and a full pot of strong black tea, I felt ready to go to church.  It helped that church started at 11:00.  Greyfriar's Kirk is located just one street over and dates back to 1620 (1620!!). 
 

 

 That gate above was locked, as you might be able to see, but a kind woman in a tweed blazer explained that I had to walk up the hill and around to enter (there are LOTS of hills in this city).
 
The service was really lovely and I managed to sight-sing my way through the hymns even though they were all unfamiliar to me (they were all Scottish).  The best part was sitting next to John and Grace Deas.  They live on the other side of Edinburgh and typically attend a different church, but they were on the bus today to visit some other location (I forget the name) and the bus broke down, so they decided to attend Greyfriar's instead, which is the church of John's childhood.  As Grace told me over coffee and cookies at the back of the church after the service, John's father--a strict Scottish Presbyterian of the Old School--got upset that they were going to carpet the pews years ago and stopped his family attending.  But John still has very fond memories of the church and likes to visit whenever possible. 
 
I should back up a bit, though, and record something else here.  I enjoyed The Xenophobe's Guide to the Danes so much that I read its equivalent for Scotland (not as good, but all right), and one of the things it mentioned is that Scottish people love to talk about the weather.  And sure enough, right after Grace sat next to me and I bid her good morning she said, "It's gotten a bit cooler, hasn't it?  But it's supposed to be a nice day."
 
She worked at the Bank of Scotland for years before retiring, and John was a fellow English teacher at a secondary school here in Edinburgh (also retired).  They just married twelve years ago after being neighbors for a while.  When Grace heard about the purpose of my visit here in Scotland, her eyes lit up and she told me I ought to talk to the minister and his wife as the wife is the granddaughter of a laird (Grace said the full name out three times to me in the course of five minutes with the same excitement and reverence that someone talks about a celebrity in California--the laird was a great hunter and used to bring her the odd pheasant when she worked in the bank) and they have property in Dunsinane.  So she hustled me over to the minister (his wife was talking to someone else) and introduced me, and he said that his grandfather-in-law had written a book about Macbeth and, since another service was starting and we had to vacate the premises, invited me to e-mail him. 
 
Grace, John, and I then went to lunch, which they generously treated me to.  Scottish thriftiness doesn't preclude kindness and hospitality with these lovely people.  I parted from them with a hug and a kiss, and for a moment it was like being with my grandparents again.  Considering how much we enjoyed our time together and how much joy they brought me, I can't help but believe our meeting was providential.  Especially as the sermon was on keeping your heart open to the still, small voice of God and the unexpected ways he might want to speak to us through the people we encounter.

 
I headed to High Street from there to go on a walking tour, but after standing about with a crowd for 10 minutes, I discovered that in spite of it being a free tour and there being no signs (or instructions on their website) about this, you had to have a ticket to go on the tour.  By the time I and several other confused tourists made our way to the tiny, irritated woman who was the keeper of the tickets, the groups were all full.  So, change of plans.  I wandered around for a bit taking in cool scenes like this:

 

then headed up a very long and steep set of stairs (this is actually just the second batch) around the corner from my apartment to the Castle.

 

The food here is pretty heavy and rich, so I suppose it's a good thing there's all this climbing to do. 

 

 

The castle is situated on top of a volcano, the entire entity appropriately named "Castle Rock" as the castle truly does seem to 'grow' straight up out of the volcanic strata it rests upon as this section aptly demonstrates:

 

 

Entrance:

 

Scottish Hero Robert the Bruce:

 

 

Inside the walls:

 

 

 
Amazing views from the ramparts:
 

 

 

As with the churches in Paris, this castle and fortress has been destroyed and rebuilt many times since its first incarnation in the 1200s, and there are only a few remaining bits of that original structure.  Namely, Saint Margaret's Chapel:

 

And these garrison tunnels beneath the current ramparts:

 

 





 
Oh yes, and the outer wall to this dog's cemetery, which houses (among others) the military's mascots:

 
 Below is the Royal Residence, which royals would typically inhabit only if there was some kind of threat.  Perhaps one of its most famous residents was Mary Queen of Scots, who gave birth to her son James in the tiny wood-paneled "closet" below (the King James who would unite England and Scotland after Queen Elizabeth's death, and the King for whom Shakespeare wrote Macbeth).
 

 

 

 There was also an impressive display of the Scottish honors (a scepter, sword, and crown), which date back to the middle ages, as well as the Stone of Destiny, which was a block of stone used for centuries in the coronation of Scottish kings.  No photos were allowed, unfortunately, but each of those items has a very colorful history and capture the long history of conflict between Scotland and England as they wrestled for sovereignty. 

 

 On the way down the hill from the castle (a different route than the stairs), I saw a sign for The Whisky Experience.  From what I'd heard, I knew it involved going on a little barrel ride to learn how whisky is made, ending in a whisky tasting.  Sitting and whisky sounded good to me after all the castle walking/climbing.  The tour culminated in this impressive hall of whisky, which contains more than 3,000 bottles collected by some guy in South America (sorry, have already forgotten those details too) who then sold them to one of the largest distillery owners in Scotland.  It's a beautiful and impressive collection, but it also made me a little sad to think of all these amazing whiskies just sitting there on display, untasted by anyone. 

 Funny little fact: while the whisky is aging in the wood barrels, some of it always evaporates, and they call this bit the "angels' share."  Must be some happy angels in Scotland.

After my small slug of a Highlands single malt, I headed back to the center of town to St. Giles church, where they have a free music concert every Sunday at 6:00pm:

 

 

This evening, it was a pianist who played Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms--all in all, a lovely concert. They'd run out of programs, but thankfully I was able to recognize the composers/works.  I guess all those piano lessons still come in handy now and then, which is lucky, otherwise wondering about it would have driven me crazy for the rest of the night, which I can't handle on top of the random, loud thumps that are still happening (oh, my nerves!!).

 

In spite of the pub operating as a kind of instrument of torture last night and currently, I have to admit that their haggis with tatties (potatoes) and neeps (turnips) is pretty darn good:

 

 



Pretty Paris

 

Birthday #41 got off to a great start when I saw my glamorous nieces Gigi and Emmie waiting for me at the metro stop (I'd just seen them the night before, but I'm with them so seldom that every time feels special):

 

This meeting was made even better by the fact that Gigi had brought me a fresh pain au chocolat.  

 

A short while later, my brother Ben, fresh off the plane from the U.S. joined us, and we set out taking in some of the sights and starting our search for someplace to eat lunch.

 

We ended up at one of Gigi's favorite spots by the Centre Pompidou and ate in one of the cafes lining the square.

After lunch, we walked along the Seine (which this pretty building overlooks)

 

And stopped at one of my favorite places--Sainte Chapelle, which none of the others had ever been to.  Even though I knew what to expect, it still made me gasp when I walked in.  

   

Floor:

Ceiling:

 

The windows depict over 1,000 scenes from the Bible, so this beauty was not only created to glorify God but also teach and remind the illiterate attendees of the 1200s (and later) of the major figures and stories from scripture.

 

Everywhere you turn, there is something beautiful, like this clock on the side of the Justice Center on our way out.

We passed by Notre Dame (and the hordes of people waiting in line to enter)

 

and made our way to this famous bookstore on the Seine.

 

And look what I found...



The perfect birthday present pour moi!

 

 

Even the bag was perfect as it's a quote from Gwendolyn in The Importance of Being Earnest, which is another play I teach.



 

 Next stop was a café on the Ile St. Louis that serves Berthillon's ice-cream.  Photos and even video can't capture how amazing this ice-cream is (especially a scoop of chocolat noir with a scoop of wild strawberry sorbet and a glazed almond cookie wafer), although I think the video Gigi shot manages to convey at least a little of my bliss.

 

 

 

 

 

The capper was this guy just outside the café:

 

 

All in all, a pretty fantastic birthday, especially since I got to share it with family even though I am so far from home.  Sadly, Gigi and Emmie boarded the train early this morning to return to their friends in Germany, but Ben stopped by after he dropped them off and we had a nice, relaxed (we sat around for an hour and a half) late breakfast together.  Apparently, I don't know where to look when I take photos with my own phone.

 

Fueled by my omelet and greens, I bid goodbye to my brother (who is here for business and in meetings for the next few days) and set out for Musée national du Moyen Age, formerly known as the  Musée de Cluny.  "Moyen Age" means the Middle Ages, so perfect for this medieval/Renaissance history lover.

 

So many of the various churches and other sites in the city have been damaged/destroyed and rebuilt multiple times over the centuries, so this location houses and preserves a lot of medieval pieces that were either saved or discovered through the years and part of some earlier incarnation of said locations.  Inside was an impressive display of stained glass windows (some from the original Sainte Chapelle and other Paris churches):

 

 

 

 

It's amazing to me that people who didn't even have flush toilets knew how to create such gorgeous art that is as vivid today as it most likely was a few weeks after it was produced.

There were also lots of tapestries like this:

And of course the highlight is the famous Lady and the Unicorn tapestries, representing the five senses and a mysterious (different interpretations abound, but no one knows for sure) sixth sense, although sadly I've just realized my photo of it didn't turn out well.  There was a gaggle of French school children sitting on the floor that I was trying to work around, so I blame it on them.

Down these stairs and to the right is a doorway and a room full of statuary salvaged from Notre Dame.

 

The little explanation card explains that these statues were "damaged" during the Revolution, but I overheard an elderly British gentleman tell his wife that the mob chopped the heads off the statues, which happened to be kings.

 

Other medieval church stuff:

 

 

 

 

 

And this gorgeous little chapel commissioned by the man who first started collecting these items:

 

Back outside: 

 

I refueled and relaxed with some people watching at our café from yesterday, which has a nice view (in the distance) of Notre Dame.  Oh, and I may have also ordered some more ice cream after this salad.

 

 

I was enjoying myself so much that I kind of lost track of time, and realized I'd better hustle if I was going to make my final stop of the day before closing--Père Lachaise Cemetery.  I made the mistake of getting off the metro at the Père Lachaise stop (silly me) instead of going all the way to the Philippe Auguste stop, which is the one that actually puts you at the entrance.  So I'm walking along in a hurry trying to find the entrance and accidentally walked over a metro ventilation grille just as a strong gust of wind hit me, and my skirt flew up.  I don't know if all the tourists walking behind me have seen London, but they've definitely seen France and my underpants. 

 

With the sky filling with clouds, the wind blowing, and the crows cawing, there was definitely a haunting beauty to my surroundings.

 

Since closing time was rapidly approaching and I couldn't possibly get to all the graves I wanted to (this place is massive), I decided to take the quote on my bag as a sign and make a beeline for Oscar Wilde's tomb.  Which of course was on the opposite side of the cemetery.  I arrived huffing and puffing and with a new blister on my foot, but I had a full five minutes to spare.  I can't say I love the style of this tombstone, but I do love that in spite of the signs asking people to please not mark the stone, the tradition of leaving lipstick kisses continues, albeit above the glass.  

As I was leaving, I caught sight of this elderly woman with a scarf on her head and her hands full with a watering can, jug of water, and shopping bag, clearly heading somewhere to tend a grave, and it reminded me that it is still a working cemetery. It must be annoying to have to pass a bunch of gawping tourists to pay your loved ones tribute.

 If I can manage to get up at a decent hour (which is a wee bit questionable at this point), I hope to visit a flea market in the 4th arrondissement before I have to check out and head for the airport.  Next stop, Edinburgh!