Today was our big day in Edinburgh. We were going to be proper tourists, poking in all the shops and taking a couple of scheduled tours. The first thing was to arrange transportation. Mrs. Chung, our hostess, has been very kind. This morning, after breakfast with the couple from Zimbabwe, who gave us a couple of well-researched tips, she took us to the corner and pointed us in the direction of the streetcars. We bought m-tickets on our phones and were good for the day. We could come and go as often as we please for the same low price. It was a good feeling.
The castle loomed overhead, so that’s the direction we headed. First stop was the National Gallery of Scotland, art. Here they have paintings by Peter Paul Rubéns, Gainsborough, Botticelli, Zubaran, and more. There were lots of Scottish artists and subjects about Scotland. One room of triptychs seemed so much like the Norton Simon, I was almost seeing double. The museum was fabulous, but we finally moved on. After all, we had tickets.
A little more shopping on the Royal Mile, a stop at Starbucks to check in for our departure tomorrow, and we are ready for the Mary King’s Close Tour. Edinburgh is full of secrets beneath the streets. There are dungeon tours and haunted tours, and many others, because the present city was built upon a previous city. Below these streets are more streets. It’s rather spooky, actually. We chose the most historical tour, according to our Zimbabwean friend. This was a guided tour by a young man calling himself Dr. Pelicious, a plague doctor. He took us through rooms of the rich and the poor, all below street level. The poor lived 16 to a room. The richest of the rich had an indoor toilet, which was called “The Thunder Box.” Everyone else seemed to use a bucket, which they pitched out on the street with the warning call of, “Beware the guardy loo!” All in good fun, but it was certainly a different time.
My favorite part of the tour was the bits of real medicine. One doctor examined patients by testing their urine. He had his ways of detecting diabetes, in fact. Another doctor could truly treat the Bubonic plague with lancing and cauterizing. Still, another, dressed all in leather and. wearing a raven’s beak, treated plague victims without ever contracting it himself—because of his all-leather PPE!
Back in our room, we pushed and pushed to pack everything in our luggage, so thankful that we packed our golf bags last night. Tomorrow, we fly.
That tour done, we wandered the Mile to our next tour, the Whisky Experience. This was a tour that came highly rated, so even though we already knew a thing or two about whisky, we decided to take it. The most marvelous part of this tour was the 3,000 bottles of unopened whisky purchased from a private collector in Brazil. That was an amazing room. We were also given a scratch-and-sniff card so we could match the “nose” of our samples with the card. We might have been over-served by the end of the tour (ah-hem), but since we’d kept the second halves of our lunches, we were able to sit a while over sandwiches and Diet Coke, chatting with a couple of men from Indiana until it was time to go back to the room. The streetcar took us by the lovely view of the Edinburgh castle, high above the basalt cliff. One last look.
We started with a gorgeous breakfast and new guests in the dining room of The Grovsnor Gardens Hotel!