Day 9 : UK 2013 (Edinburgh)

Spent the entire morning at Edinburgh castle.  Not as impressive as others I have seen.  However there were some highlights.  The scots seem to have been very influential in all the wars they helped the British with.  There is a lot of information in the castle on Scotsman in the military. We also got to see the Crown Jewels which went thru some interesting tales of being locked away for 111 years at one point, basically forgotten.  They also had been buried during a number of wars, a lot of interesting tales on how they were protected over the years.  There was one prison area where American sailors from the revolution were held. There is a door preserving prisoner graffiti and one shows an American flag.  Kinda cool.

From here we went and checked out the Scottish gallery, it has a great cafe with a nice patio.  It also has many different paintings so we saw some Van Gogh, Monet, and others.  Took an accidental detour to the Scottish modern gallery, meant to go over to the Scottish museum.  Anyway that gallery was lame but the walk back was thru a more modern area of Edinburgh as well as thru a big park where there was a free concert and mini carnival.  Always fun to see how e locals enjoy a nice Sunday afternoon.

So we finished the day with some wonderful history.  Finally understand this cities strange streets.  So we look a tour called Mary Kings Close.

There was a government building built a long time back and when they did instead of tearing down houses they built on top of them.  But before I get to far ahead. Edingburgh castle is up on a hill.  From the castle to the palace there is a street called the royal mile.  It's runs down the hill along a ridge.  So since its a ridge each side of the royal mile drops dramatically. So they build purses along the royal mile and then down each hill they had steep houses seven stories or more high so they were close in elevation to the royal mile.  As I mentioned yesterday where the train is seemed like it should have been a river,  well I guess it was a loch at one point, but since there was no indoor plumbing and everything ran down hill you could image the conditions of this particular loch, so at some point it was drained.  So if you image in all these old style sky scrapers, imagine they fill in some areas and  build roads on top of the buildings.  Not sure I can explain it hope the pictures help.  I once took a tour of Seattle and its underground past,  it seems very much like that where the third floor of a building becomes e first floor when a road is put in across numerous third floors.

I'll get some pictures uploaded to help with the vision.