Gardyloo

I'm sitting in a hostel in Edinburgh right now, I couldn't get a private room (it's the end of festival season and things are really booked up here) so had to settle for a four-bed dorm. Having lived by myself for about five years now, I don't really relish the idea of sharing a room, but maybe it will be good for me -- force me to socialise a bit or at least learn people's names. Generally I'm happy to just come and go, merely waving at fellow hostellers, but that's not obviously the best if you want to meet people. But truthfully, I'm pretty happy just doing my own thing and I don't miss the social interaction too much. Hmm, what does this say about me? (rhetorical question, don't answer!) I guess I just prefer to be in control of my social interactions, I hate it when people try to engage me in conversation when I'm not interested. So hopefully the four-bed dorm thing works out. At worst, I'll be in earplug land for the next three nights.

There's a guy playing guitar right next to me as I'm on the computer, free music to type to! The hostel environment reminds me of summer camp, all free love and happy people and sleeping in bunk beds. I'm feeling a bit old for this kind of thing these days and from the looks of the crowd here, I actually am a bit old. Edinburgh is a funny place, a little more rough around the edges than London (and that makes me wonder what the hell Glasgow must be like, Edinburgh's supposedly more earthy cousin) and lots of action on the streets of the rowdy variety. In the daytime, it's all kilts and bagpipes and shop after shop proffering wool scarves and tartan skirts to the middle-class tourists, each storefront hiding a huge shelf full of Scotch whiskey at the back. At night, it turns into a city of youngsters prowling the streets in their low-cut jeans and belly shirts, shouting from the top of a double-decker bus and scuffling on the sidewalks, cursing in that thick Scottish brogue. I have to laugh when I hear them; having been a teenager myself during the Mike Myers years on SNL, the Scottish accent is more quaint and funny to me than anything else. I suppose the day that a pack of these teenagers tries to swarm me for my moneybelt, I'll feel differently.

Otherwise, Edinburgh is a jumbled mess of modern and old and really old. Buildings have been built on top of other buildings, buried beneath or still part of the current-day structure, depending on what worked at the time. Tonight I did a tour of a 17th century "close", which were a series of narrow passageways perpendicular to the main street that held long 8-storey buildings where people lived (think of long farm buildings like greenhouses, lined up one next to the other, then translate that into tall buildings). The term "gardyloo" comes from the old days when people would throw the contents of their toilet bucket out the window to run down the street into the lake; as a look-out-below, they would yell that word (bastardised from the French "gardez l'eau"). Some of these closes still exist, albeit with modern plumbing, and it's fascinating to see how all these people could have lived in such narrowly spaced and tightly contained squalor. The plague of the mid-17th century originated in Edinburgh in these closes, and it's no wonder it wiped out such a huge part of the population. See the following link for more interesting stuff on closes: http://www.ebs.hw.ac.uk/MaryKing/welcome.html

Tomorrow, it's off to the famous castle on the hill here, followed by a visit to the Museum of Scotland. The weather has been holding out admirably, which meant I spent most of today outside enjoying the sunshine as I climbed up the bluffs at the eastern end of the city for a wonderful view. This can't last, being Scotland, and I'm taking advantage of it while I can!

Maryka