A post much overdue, but my brother has been less than forthcoming with the photos. So, another photo-less story.
Continuing on with the Edinburgh Ghost story, the group trouped up to Greyfriar's Cemetery - home to over 400, 000 plague victims. It is appropriately creepy, even in daylight, but that night there was only a sliver of moon and our guide's torchlight. We were off to visit Covenanter's Prison - home to the men and women who refused to accept the King as the head of the Church. They were arrested and kept in a portion of the cemetery - being considered dead in all but the literal sense - in something akin to a concentration camp. They were tortured by a Sir MacKenzie and few survived - those who did found themselves sold into slavery and all drowned in a shipwreck. Now it is closed to the public and supposedly houses the "MacKenzie poltergeist" who does all the poltergeist-y things like stealing energy, scratching and pulling hair, and occasionally, tossing people about. Ooooh.
Naturally, everyone came out unscathed, although the mood was brilliant because our guide new her stories well. Occasionally she would bang on walls and doors to give everyone a good jump, but that was to be expected. There was a "jumper-ooter" near the end of the tour, who nobody was expecting, so everyone got a good fright. Thing was, I was at the front of the group when he jumped out and boy, did he have bad breath! It seemed to cheapen the whole experience too.
The second tour we went on was basically What Life was Like in Mary King's Close in the 1600s. It was not intentionally scary, but most informative and really put your imagination to work. We went under the city again too. It must have been hard living, packed in these houses - often a family of ten to a single room - of over tens stories. They were flimsy wooden things, but if you were lucky enough to have plaster walls, then the plaster was made from water, horse hair and the ground bones of plaue victims. Families threw their excrement into the street and passersby were most likely ankle deep in the stuff. The plague hit hard. Edinburgh lost 1/3 of its population. the tour was a very different style and mood to the other, but still very good.
The next day, we moseyed around town, through the castle and into the museum. We met more Australians and caught the train to Stranraer (Stran-rarr!) in order to catch the ferry to Belfast. Yonder! Onwards and upwards!
By the way - spelling errors in awful places: York Museum= carve, spelt calve. Edinburgh war memorial in the castle= bear, spelt "bare". Angels bare up the men? Grrrr.
The ferry was flash. Are they all like that? The ticket was pretty cheap and it took about 2 1/2 hours - though there was no connecting train so we had to take a very bumpy bus ride into Belfast. Which is a hole. Lots of red brick buildings with nothing particularly interesting to see and no character to speak of. Dublin has a good vibe, as did London, Berlin, Prague and Vienna...Belfast is dead inside.
Naturally, our hostel was filled with Australians. And Germans.
We moseyed out to see the murals depicting the religious conflict at Shankhill road at dusk, which quickly became night...in this dodgy little area. i'm sure that you can tell a lot about the socio-economic status of an area by the proliferation of KFCs.
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