The Royal Mile is...just...wow.

Tuesday I got to finally meet my Edinburgh friend (whose name I won't mention to respect her privacy). She's nice, a likeable person. If she's reading this...hi!

We were going to meet in the morning, but she needed to reschedule so we met in the afternoon instead. I headed to the Royal Mile, which as I may have said before, is one long street that changes names, running from Edinburgh Castle in the west to the Palace of Holyrood House in the east. It was pretty easy to get to, the very long street my hotel is on runs perpendicular to it, so I just had to take the bus (several different buses follow this street) up to about North Bridge Street, get off, wander around until I find the Royal Mile, and there I am. I was early, fortunately, so I found a small sandwich shop and had a ham and cheese panini. About £3.25, best deal so far.

The Royal Mile is overall straight, but does weave a bit and has a few hills. A lot of the buildings are several stories tall, with shops all along on the ground floors. I think people must live above the shops, otherwise it would be a waste of space. I also saw a few "Hostel" signs over narrow doors between shops. There are a lot of historic buildings all along the way too. And SO many shops selling kilts and tartans and other Scottish clan-related paraphernalia.

I met my friend just outside the St. Columba Free Church, and we sat and chatted at a little cafe just across the street. Then, we decided to head up to the castle. They had just had (in August) the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, an annual show with music, pipers, and I don't know what all else, in the big area outside the castle entrance. They assemble these huge grandstands for people to sit on, and they're still disassembling them. They must be very sturdy, but I'd be afraid to sit on the back row of one side, as it's a sheer drop off over the edge. We didn't go into the castle, because they advised that it would take about three hours to see everything, and she couldn't stay quite that long. So instead, we had a "ramble". :)

I saw a lot of things. There was a guy dressed up as William Wallace in blue face from the movie Braveheart, collecting donations for the restoration of some building I didn't catch the name of. We also went into the Camera Obscura, which is Italian for "darkened room". The building has several exhibits about trick photography and optical illusions, and on the fifth level is the Camera Obscura itself. Only so many people are allowed in at once, in this round room with a big ceramic bowl on a table in the middle of the room. The building has an angled mirror on top, and can be moved 360 degrees with a pole inside, which the exhibitor does. He turns off the lights completely, and the reflection from the mirror on top of the building travels down to the bowl. I think it was about 1853 that it was invented, and the exhibitor said that people had never seen anything like it; people would get nauseous and even run screaming from the room. It was neat, just like closed circuit TV, in real time. Another interesting thing was a building nearby with very small windows, and two theories why. One, back in the 1800s the king would charge a "window tax" to bring in more money, which led people to brick up some of their windows (I also heard about this in London). The other theory is that since the house belonged to the inventor of the Camera Obscura, he knew anyone could use it to look inside...so he made the windows to small to see into. Probably the second explanation is the most likely.

From the roof of the Camera Obscura, you can see a lot of Edinburgh for miles. I took a lot of photos and drove my friend crazy trying to keep all the landmarks and monuments straight, haha. Oh, I almost forgot to mention...my friend has naturally curly hair. We encountered a woman from Denmark who made the biggest deal about her hair, and then started touching it! My friend was very good-natured about it, and joked that her hair is a tourist attraction and she should charge for it.

Our next stop was St. Giles Cathedral, which was bigger than I expected. It has a lot of stained glass windows, and I took tons of pictures. They make you pay a small (£2?) fee in order to take pictures, which I was ok with because it seems a lot of churches and museums don't allow photography at all. I also recorded a bit of the organist who was noodling around. I wondered if he was maybe a student just practicing. In addition to the stained glass windows (the only way the illiterate Medieval people would really learn Bible stories, especially when the Mass was still done in Latin but the common language was anything but), there were a number of sculptures and carvings. There is a chapel off to one side, the Thistle Chapel. If I have my photos straight, "This chapel was gifted by John David Earl of Leven & Melville & his brothers in fulfillment of the wishes of their father. St. Andrew's Day 1910". I think it was in this chapel that there were some much more recent, impressive, intricate carvings. Another thing of interest in the cathedral is a slightly larger than life statue of John Knox.

In the Royal Mile itself, there are a lot of named "Closes", which is a very narrow path between buildings, such as "Mary King's Close".

Anyway, we covered less than half of the Royal Mile, and took a detour. The Royal Mile itself separates Old Town from New Town. Apparently about 300 hundred years ago, Edinburgh was really crowded and crime was increasing, so they built New Town on the other side of the road, which explains why Old Town is so historic and New Town is much more modern-looking. I didn't get the full story.

I'm going to have to go back and pick out pictures and update all these posts, I just need to get the words down faster.