Tuesday 2nd August 2022
Today I came over to Old Town Edinburgh and I very nearly died getting here.
I packed my mega backpack and loaded it on my recovering back and walked from the Waverley station, the only station in the world named after a novel by Sir Walter Scott. My previous trips to the Scottish capital always saw me turn the other direction outside the station. A short 14 minute walk would be lovely in the city that is preparing for the Festival which starts on Friday. Except there's moerse stairs... ie mega stairs. By the time I got to the top my newly healing lungs were screaming and my BP had stayed behind in the valley. I had to strip off my backpack and rest on traffic calming boulders while watching the stars in my dizzy head. I was grateful for my ID bracelet but even more grateful that nobody needed to use it.
I made my way slowly to my youth hostel where I'm booked into a 'pod' which are fairly private cubicles, which are less bouncy than bunk beds. I recovered on the comfy mattress so I could go on my booked underground tour late afternoon. The tours are everywhere and thousands of people are bustling in the cobblestone streets with a bagpipe wail around every corner. It's really cool being a Scottish tourist in Scotland.
My tour guide spoke double the speed that I do and a lot of her jokes weren't appreciated by the English-is-a-second-language tourists. But it was fascinating to watch what she did, with my own tour guide training behind me.
The buildings are just magnificent and the weather was fantastic so I am in my element ( now that my BP normalised) We went below the street level into old basements that were the street level in the 1600s before the population boomed. It was a walled city that had many high rise structures to keep the people in. But it was also badly affected by the Plague epidemic in 1645 where the population was halved. Mass graves, people in dungeons, and severe Plague laws couldn't do much to curb the death toll.
Today the city bulges with every hotel and bnb full of international tourists all wanting to experience Scotland. It's fabulous.
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