Edinburgh – Day 4

Very tired today. Slept until nearly 10am. Am having breakfast as I write this. I only have one definite plan today and that’s a tour of “Mary Kings’ Close.” I don’t recall the full history but it’s a section of the city that was walled off during one of the plagues. Most of the people in that section were not sick at all but everyone died of starvation. After the city cleaned it out, no one would live there. Went on for 40 years or so, and the city eventually knocked off the top floors of the city (Edinburgh, especially Old Edinburgh is very vertical – they did not have much space to spread).

A financial exchange was built using this section as the foundations to it. Now it’s Edinburgh’s City hall. The area underneath is basically a time capsule to the way people lived at the time. I went by yesterday to see if they were open today and they said you had to book tours, so I booked on a noon one. Glad I booked a later one, otherwise I’d have either missed it or be running there now.

The New Year’s celebration was quite beautiful. Live bands playing all over. There was a DJ playing pop music but something happened about 10:30pm and the music just stopped mid-song. By now it was so packed you could barely move. I made my way out to the Waverly bridge where a band was playing kind of Jazzy big band music. That’s where I rang in the New Year. I didn’t take any photos of the fireworks (except for a cell phone picture I sent a couple of you). That scene was over Edinburgh castle, but there were two more sets of fireworks going off around me. So, it was quite something to see. Definitely will not be easy to top this New Year. I only have crowd pictures of the celebration. At the end, I just wanted to be in the moment, not clicking my camera away.

Well, better run now – may need half an hour to get my tired body up to the Mary Kings’ Close tour. I’m going to find something to do today that involves sitting (I hope).