All of our tours have been with Sandemans Europe. The guides are all freelance and therefore unique. We do the free city tour first and then if it appeals, we will do one of the paid ones as well.
Today's free tour took us along the royal mile, past the castle, through the old town, cemeteries and talked about the cities gruesome past.
My favorite thing I learned?
Have you ever partied a little to hard and had someone call you "shit faced"?
Well, "shit faced" comes from the day of the chamber pot. People used to throw the contents of the pot out of the window of their homes, first yelling a warning. The warning apparently comes from a French term and so if you've had a few to many whiskey down at the pub and you are stumbling home in the dark you will most likely think that some crazy person is yelling at you in French. Of course, in this drunken state the obvious think to do is look up to the where the sound came from and tell back. And now, you have gone from drunk to quite literally shit faced.
After the tour we did lunch and tried haggis. It is not nearly as scary as everyone makes it out to be.
And yes, I do know what it is.
It is a bit of a strange consistency and quite spicy, other than that, not bad at all.
Like I said before, 2 tours today. The second started at 7pm and was a ghost tour. I expected to be scared, but I can happily say I wasn't.
We walked around 2 cemeteries (apparently the #1 place in Scotland for public sex), up to the site of pagan rituals and witch burnings, to the alleged gateway to the Scottish faerie realm and across a cursed bridge.
The stories were of murder, grave robbing, faerie's, coming back to life, bing burried alive and the end of the world.
I realize I just said end of the world, but no, the image in your head is not it. No fire balls, no zombies, no exploding earth. Or the people of old Edinburgh the end of the world was more of a place than a time. The city used to be inside walls and to go outside of them you had to pay. The poor people couldn't afford this so the started making stories about the horrible things that must be outside of the walls.
Another image you can get out of your head is Tinkerbell. I know that's pretty much where all of us go when we hear Faerie, but these are not that kind. These are evil faerie's that hate humans and would like to kill us all....
1 last bit of tour knowledge. Something else you may hear in your every day life. "Graveyard shift". Here in Edinburgh there was a huge grave robbing problem at one point because the bodies could be sold to the medical school for quite good money. Some families wanted to prevent this from happening to their loved ones and built mausoleum's. Others couldn't afford that and so they would actually sit in the cemetery all night and guard the grave. Hence "graveyard shift" is now referring to the undesirable over night work shifts.
Fun times!
See you tomorrow!
xoxo
Jan 15, 2013
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