My Scotland

Hello to everyone (especially my mother who's been harassing me to update this!)

I had the most wonderful holiday in Edinburgh! But first I'm going to tell you about the group we had last week. My partner was Helen Doherty. I've met her several times before in the house. She lives in Lucan which is about an hour away. Helen is 30 years old and has a mild intellectual disability. She lives at home with her mother and sister. She is very mild tempered and agreeable, except for a few times a day when she would slip into her own world. I was able to detect when this was happening and left her to it. We had lots of fun together, with the exception of shopping which she had no interest in whatsoever. Helen was greatly disappointed that Gabriele has gone back to Italy, but she was satisfied with Jose and Lennart as substitutes. I must admit that while I truly enjoyed my time with Helen, I was even more excited to see Paul Lockery. He is my most favourite member and I'm sure I've written about him before. He is the one who loves to arm wrestle and the movie "To Sir, With Love." To my disappointment he didn't address me as "Claire, from the moment I met you I swear..." But that was ok because he made up for it by giving me the biggest compliment that he could give anyone. The entire weekend was spent with him challenging all of us to arm wrestling. He is very strong, and uses his left arm, so he wins 98% of the time. One of the nights I was giving him one last arm wrestle before bed and I won! I was so excited and he looked at me and said, "You're VERY strong!" That totally made my day! At the end of the weekend, Paul's driver was an hour late. Usually when this happens I am so tired and very impatient for all of the members to go home so that we can have our meeting and clean up. This was the first time that not only did I not mind, but I actually wanted him to stay longer! If Paul could live here I would absolutely love it!

After the group was over, we all hung out at the house and got ready for our mini-holidays. Kaitlyn, Lisa, and I went to Edinburgh, Erin went down to Cork, Lennart went home to Germany, Jose went home to Spain, and Kate went to Istanbul.

I woke up at half four on Saturday morning feeling very sleepy. (It's amazing to me that I used to get up even earlier than that for work every day...yikes.) Us girls and Jose called a taxi and headed out to the airport. (Jose's plane left about the same time as ours so it worked out well.) By the time we got to Edinburgh I was wide awake and ready to explore! The city was absolutely stunning. The architecture was beautiful and the history was very rich. One of the best things about Edinburgh is that it is small enough that you can walk everywhere easily. Our hostel was only a few blocks away from the bus stop. It was tucked behind a major street and covered in scaffolding, but we didn't have trouble locating it. The annoying thing about our hostel was that there were 89 steps to the top! I know this because as you start climbing the stairs there are little backpackers painted on the walls holding signs along the way counting down the steps left to the top. The walls inside the hostel had a very random selection of cartoon characters painted all around and it was very fun to see which ones I recognized. My favorites were B1 and B2 from Bananas in Pajamas! So good! We left almost right away and got breakfast before going to the Royal Mile. This is a major road in Edinburgh that is a mile long and runs from the castle to Queensbury, the home of the Queen when she visits (creative titles weren't important to the Scottish). We joined a group for a three hour free walking tour of the city. Our tour guide was Ruth from England. She is a drama student and has lived in Edinburgh for two years. I really liked her and she had a lot of really good information and stories for us about the city. The tour began along the Royal Mile itself. We walked past St. Giles Cathedral where I heard way too much information to remember much. I do remember that it is where Sean Connery was knighted by the Queen. It also holds the original document signed by the Covenanters. These were Presbyterians who refused to renounce their faith and join the protestants. (Can't say I blame them.) These men and women were tortured gruesomely and I will talk more about this later. The cathedral also stands next to the famous Mercat Cross which was used for proclamation or for punishment. When a person was caught stealing, they were nailed by the ear to the cross. They were to stay there for 24 hours and they had two choices. Stay for the 24 hours while people jeered at them and threw rotten food at them or they could rip their ear out of the nail and escape. If they did this, their ear would mark them as a criminal and they would be reduced to prostitution because no one would hire them.

Also along the Royal Mile were many closes. Closes are little walkways between the buildings. Many of them have been closed up or built over because the city used to be a few stories shorter than it is today. One of them in particular is a very famous one. But I will get to that later. We passed through one of them where Ruth told us a few good stories. One of them is about a very famous criminal named Deacon Brodie. This man was a very substantial and popular man of Edinburgh in the 17oos. He was a locksmith and he had a genius plan. He began to inspect his friends locks in their front doors and offered to fix them for free. When he changed their locks he made a spare key for himself. He then went in their homes as they slept and stole their valuables without ever making himself known. He did this for quite some time without getting caught. When it started becoming a big problem in the town, the councilmen got together and decided that one person should be appointed to figuring out who the culprit was. And who did they choose but Deacon Brodie himself! He knew he was in trouble so he decided to do one last job. He needed help for this job and hired several men. One of the men were caught and he told the police all of the names of the accomplices with the exception of Deacon Brodie. He was hoping that he could use this as blackmail in the future. However he didn't get the chance because as soon as he could, Brodie ran off to Amsterdam. Hours before he was to get on a ship headed for America, Brodie was found and taken back to be hung in Edinburgh for his crime. The ironic part is that he was hung by the very gallows that he himself built years earlier.

Another good story that Ruth told us was about the sewage system in the 1600s... The Royal Mile is on the top of a hill, and that hill runs down to what used to be the Nor Loch. The people who lived in the closes in "homes" as big as a living room would have buckets for toilets in the corner of their room. Twice a day they would dump their bucket on the floor of the close that they lived on and it would slide down to the river. This made their only water source impossible to drink from and so alcohol was drunk in it's place. In the evening, people were allowed to dump their buckets out from their windows to the ground of the close at 10pm. This was also the time when the pubs would close. So Ruth told us that when people would come out of the pubs stumbling around the closes they would hear the warning calls of people dumping their buckets and instead of having the quick response of moving out of the way, they would look up. Hence the term: Shit-faced. :)

The tour continued on with MANY stories and facts that I wish I could remember. She took us past the castle (18 pounds to get in and not worth it apparently) and told us a few stories about that. We went down to Victoria Street and Victoria Terrace where all of the dirty, secretive things happened in the city. This was the home of two very famous body snatchers named William Burke and William Hare. These two men decided to capitalize on the trend of body snatching. In the 1800s the medical school in Edinburgh was given one dead body from the gallows every year. This was obviously not nearly enough for the students to properly learn everything they needed to know. So the school began to accept dead bodies off the black market. There was a loophole in the system that when a person dies all of their possessions still belong to them, but their body no longer does. So people could walk into a graveyard, dig up a body, strip them of their possessions and walk out of the graveyard without being stopped by the guards. They were then given 5 pounds for the body by the school. Burke and Hare got tired of the business of waiting for people to die and digging them up. They began a plot to lure people to their homes and get them drunk enough to pass out. They would then suffocate them and take them directly to the school. They were very good at this until the day they took a famous prostitute to their home. She was not quite passed out when they killed her and screamed so loud that it alerted the neighbors. Hare confessed and gave up his friend. Burke was hung and Hare went to prison for only a few months. Guess which body was given to the medical school by the government that year? If you guessed Burke, you'd be right!

We moved on to the Grassmarket which is a strip of pubs and stores today. In the 1800s it was where all of the public hangings took place. There was a REALLY good story about a woman named Maggie Dickson who had an attempted hanging. I won't put the full story here because I'm worried that people are going to lose interest in all of these stories, but if you are even remotely interested I suggest you read about her. (Also, her more recent claim to fame is her inspiration for the character "Nearly Headless Nick" in the Harry Potter books.) http://www.the-grassmarket.com/history/maggie-dickson.html

After we spent time in the Grassmarket, we walked up to the Greyfriar's Kirkyard (graveyard) which holds quite a bit of significance, especially for Harry Potter fans. JK Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter novels, lived in Edinburgh after her messy divorce. While living there she began writing the famous books and used the beautiful city around her as inspiration. Inside Greyfriar's Kirkyard there are two headstones with names she used for characters in the books. We found them there: "McGonagall" and "Tom Riddell". Also, on the outside of the graveyard there is a school that was once donated by a very rich man who wanted to educate the young orphans of Edinburgh. It is now one of the most expensive private schools in the city and admits two orphans a year. (Sad.) JK Rowling used this school as inspiration for Hogwarts. Besides the Harry Potter connections, the graveyard had a few other interesting stories to be told. In 1858 a man named John Gray was the night watchman there. He had a little friend to help him keep watch: a skye terrier named Bobby. After four years of working together, John died and was buried in the kirkyard. Bobby was then handed over to the next watchman to be taken care of. Bobby would not leave his masters grave and continued this on for the next 14 years when he died. Because of his dedication to his master, Bobby became famous and now has his own gravestone which reads "Let his loyalty and devotion be a lesson to us all." He also has a pub named after him!

We continued the tour and ended up in Princes Street Gardens (the once famous Nor Loch which dried up and probably fertilized the now lush foliage there) where Ruth concluded our tour with one final story about "The Stone of Destiny." I won't put it on here for previously stated reasons, but it's worth a look if you're interested. It has to do with a very meaningful stone that was taken away from the British and was stolen by drunken Scottish university students in the early 1900s. Very entertaining, but too long to type out.

We left the tour and began to search for food. We were starving! After "linner" we went back to the hostel to rest a little before our ghost tour that night. (By rest a little I mean sleep for three hours... in my defense we had been up since half four!) We got ready and headed back into the cold to meet up with our funny British tour guide for the ghost tour. This was less impressive than our free tour, but still worth it. It didn't help that we were all tired. Anyways, she took us around the town to a few different grave yards and told us true stories and some legends of Edinburgh in the past. Edinburgh is famous for its witch trials, which lasted for quite some time. Woman were accused of being witches for several fatal flaws: birthmarks, third nipples, red hair (one in five people in Edinburgh have red hair), or talking/moaning in one's sleep. If a woman was caught with any of these things, they were tortured until confessing. They would then be burned at the stake. Nice, huh? Up on Carlton Hill, Ruth told us about the fairies that were menaces to the good people of Edinburgh. There were two types of fairies: the sealy and the unsealy. The sealy would mind their own business and were not a worry to anyone. It was the unsealy that you had to watch out for. They came in three forms: the half man, the kelpies, and the redcaps. The half man was said to be just that...a half of a man split down the middle. (Ruth said that he was the least scary because you could just push him over and run away. I agree!) The kelpies lived in the water and when they came out they were the image of a white stallion. When locals saw them and decided to tame them to sell in the markets they would touch them and be instantly glued to their skin. They were then dragged into the water and consumed by the kelpie. The redcaps were little men with red caps. (Think garden gnome.) They are said to be very fast and very strong. The only thing that will scare them away is if you quote Bible verses to them. Ruth gave us a very simple one: Jesus wept. I think that would do the trick! But we didn't run into any red caps, so I didn't have to worry. (Catholics aren't known for their scripture knowledge, after all...)

After the tour we had a quick free pint in the pub as part of the tour and then headed back to the hostel to sleep. The next morning we got up early and headed back to the Royal Mile to meet up with our bus tour. We took a day trip up through the highlands and to Loch Ness. This was such an amazing day! Our tour guide was Andrew, a local Scotsman and really funny guy. He gave us lots of information and loads of good stories of the history of those that lived in the Highlands. A long time ago, there were little communities called clans that would live together as a big family. Each clan had a leader and the leaders would all get together occasionally to discuss any issues that arose. Conditions were very hard at that time and they were often driven to stealing cattle. One of the clans (I've forgotten the name) got so good at stealing that all of the other clans got together to discuss what to do. Rob Roy was the second in command to the thieving clan and came to that meeting. He then told the other clans that they would stop stealing from them if they all gave them money at the end of every month. They were to put boxes on their doorsteps and put money inside at that time. This gave birth to two saying. The first being "mailbox" because "mail" is the old Gaelic word for payment. The second being "blackmail" because at the time, the cattle were all black...before different breeds were brought up to that area.

Andrew also told us a very sad story about a clan named McDonald. 150 years ago, when King James I was ruling England and Scotland, he ordered that all of the clans sign a document proclaiming their conversion to protestantism. Because of procrastination and bad weather, the leader of the McDonald clan was late in signing the document. When King James saw how few clan leaders signed the document, he chose to make an example out of the McDonalds. He ordered the Campbell clan (very disliked by all the other clans) to go and kill ever member of the Campbell clan. They did this by abusing the code of hospitality between the clans. They were always to let other clans stay when them when asked. In the night the Campbells attacted the McDonalds and killed all but a handful of them. The descendants of the McDonalds own a hotel and to this day they do not let any Campbells stay in their hotel. (I don't blame them!)

The drive was breathtaking and I couldn't stop myself from being in awe of the beauty of Scotland. I can't wait to go back someday and spend more time there. The Highlands are sprinkled with hills, mountains, and lakes. Most of the lakes were completely still and looked like mirrors on the ground. I've never seen that before! The scenery was used for several famous movies including Braveheart and Harry Potter. I saw where they built (and took down) Hagrid's Hut! We also drove by Doune Castle which was used for four castle scenes in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The security guard has coconut shells behind his desk in case anyone wants to go clip clopping around the castle grounds! Apparently the cast spent the worst 6 weeks of their lives while shooting there because of the horrible weather and mean hotel owner.

We stopped to take pictures on top of a hill and as we pulled up we saw a man dressed up in traditional Scottish clothing playing the bagpipes. Andrew then said, "Jaysus we're gonna get piped off the bus! He's the worst bagpiper in Scotland. He's not even Scottish. He's Brittish!" haha He actually wasn't too bad. I give the guy credit for going out there in the middle of nowhere and making money off of standing and playing the instrument. If he wants to ask money for pictures with him, then more power to him!

When we got to Loch Ness, we were given two hours for a break. Lisa and Kaitlyn wanted to go on a boat tour, but I had little interest. I ended up sitting by the fire in a pub with some warm food and cold cider. Mmmm... But they tell me it was a good trip and they ended up talking to a man about the sea creatures that actually do live in the water. Their name is Macroplata. They are also found in Japan, Canada, and Lake Tahoe. Weird... When the break was over, we hopped back on the bus and made our way back south towards Edinburgh with a few more scenic stops along the way. We got home around half eight and went back to our hostel to eat dinner. We ended up staying in that night instead of venturing out to the pubs.

The next day we headed out to the Royal Mile yet again, but this time we went to shop! I didn't get much... just a present for my sister and a little stuffed Nessie for myself. :) We walked up the Mile to the Castle to see what was there. We didn't want to pay to go in, but the view was good. We went to the National Museum next, which was free! I wasn't that interested to be honest, because most of the things inside were old bones and artifacts from the vikings and that wasn't doing it for me. I did enjoy seeing the stuffed sheep Dolly. She was the first cloned sheep to survive the process. After the museum we went to have coffee at The Elephant House which has "The Birthplace of Harry Potter" as it's claim to fame. I can definitely see why JK Rowling liked to go there. It has cheap, good coffee and views of the castle and Greyfriar's Kirkyard. We traveled back to the Mile to the previously mentioned famous close. Mary King's Close to be exact. This is a very popular tourist site. It's only entrance is through the gift shop and you have to take the tour to see it. Best 10 pounds I've ever spent! The tour starts with a guide dressed as one of the maids that used to live in the close. She told us the basic lifestyle of those who lived in the closes and about Mary King. She was widow who moved into the close and worked very hard as a seamstress to the rich people of Edinburgh. This allowed her to be a middle class woman and raise her children singlehandedly. We walked through the dark rooms and were very freaked out! We fatefully ended up at the back of the group and as we walked out of the first dark, stone rooms we heard a step and a stomp directly behind us. Us three girl turned around and screamed because no one was there! We scurried out of the room and back to the group. I took it as either part of the tour or maybe someone above us...even though it sounded like it was only a few feet away that it happened. Later, we asked our tour guide about it and she kind of looked freaked out. She told us that wasn't supposed to happen and she told us that there is nothing above that room. She immediately went to another guide to ask if there had been anything weird in that room before and apparently they've heard stomping several times. I've never believed in ghosts before but that was REAL! (Laugh if you want...my parents already have!) Anyways, the rest of the tour was really cool! There were more stories and legends to be told. One of the rooms was especially scary. The walls were plaster made of horse hair, water, and human ash....yikes! We turned a corner and crowded into a small room. Inside the room was a large pile of little dolls. Our guide told us that in 1992 before the close was opened to tourists, a clairvoyant came through the rooms. She felt a lot of pain, especially in the room we were in. She turned to leave immediately when she felt a tug at her shoe. She turned to see a little girl in rags sitting in the corner. She said her name was Annie and she was left by her family. They assumed this was because in that time the Black Plague was a big problem and a lot of people would leave family members behind in order to save the rest of the family. She was sad because she was alone and couldn't find her doll. The clairvoyant came back later with a barbie doll for Annie. Now people all over the world come there just to bring Annie a doll. Maybe a little silly, but a good story nevertheless.

We left the close and decided to get some food from a grocery store to cook at the hostel. By the time we got back and ate it was kind of late and we decided yet again to ignore the pubs and stay home. I get enough pub life here in Dublin!

The next morning we packed up and checked out and were able to leave our bags there while we spent our last hours out and about. We went to the National Gallery which was one of my favorite parts of the trip! We got to see many beautiful paintings, including some from Rembrant, Raphael, Van Gogh, and Monet. We spent a few hours there, but I think I could have stayed longer! Now I am excited to go to the National Gallery here in Dublin... I think I'm going on Monday with Lennart. Anyways, after the gallery we walked around a bit more and saw a few last minute things we wanted to fit in. We then headed back to the hostel to pick up our bags and we made our way back to the airport to come home.

The last two days have been regular working days. Yesterday was Michaelena's birthday so we went to see her and the others at the Cara. Today was just shopping and cleaning. I made tacos for lunch. :) We have a group tomorrow that I'm honestly not looking forward to. It's an older group and we don't have much planned for them. But I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for the best!

I hope all is well with you...if any of you actually made it to the end of this crazy long post!
Love you,
Claire