Day Seven – Let’s Go Underneath Edinburgh
Day 7 and we had travelled around the top of Scotland to arrive at Edinburgh. Or at least we had arrived at the port that was a bus ride from Edinburgh. I had booked a tour in Edinburgh, but it was not my first choice. Most of the tour spaces had been gobbled up long before I did my pre-cruise planning. My tour was to be underneath the Golden Mile in what is called the Mary King’s Close.
The bus ride was comfortable, the scenery was green, and I learned a bit about Edinburgh, one of the few major cities in Europe that has not been damaged by modern war. Something about being so damned far north that nobody in their right mind would bother to conquer it, perhaps. The downtown core, known as the Golden Mile, was an impressive streetscape, and I saw the column with a statue of a unicorn on top. Apparently, the unicorn is Scotland’s national animal – I am tempted to wonder just how much whiskey they drink over there that they would make a mythical beast the official national animal.
Eventually, the bus stopped, the driver carefully explained where he would be and when to pick us up to go back to the ship, and then we were disgorged onto the sidewalk. Our tour was about to begin.
Downtown Edinburgh – wall to wall people all gawking, gazing, grazing and gallivanting.
Like many cities with a decent span of history, Edinburgh of today is built on top of past construction. They did not have the machinery to move old stuff out of the way and tended to tamp it down and build on top. This has been a boon for archeologists, who can excavate slowly, layer by layer, to discover a whole series of past times in the history of the place. No such luck for the future archeologists seeking to understand the history of modern North American, Asian, Australian or similar cities. Nope, we raze regularly and then dig foundations several floors deep in order to provide layers of parking under each building. Nothing of the past can endure. And as for a ruin like the Bishop’s Palace in the heart of Kirkwall… forget it. We’d have knocked it down and put a gas station or fast food joint on top ages ago.
It turns out that Edinburgh has a whole community underneath its Golden Mile, with rooms still standing. By going down through somebody’s basement you can walk into what was the ground-level community of the past. And my tour was going to take me there. The website looked impressive.
Well, I will grant the tour company credit for trying. Their guides were in costume and knew the story they were to tell from the 17th century when bubonic plague was rife. Our group entered through a door on the street wedged between two restaurants. Down the stairs we went, and then it got confusing. Sometimes we were ‘outside’ the wall of a building, sometimes ‘inside’, but all actually down below. The guides did their best, impersonating real people from that time, but the story was a pretty simple one about the ravages of bubonic plage and how the city dealt with the disease and deaths. I found I could ‘get’ the whole story with just a couple of paragraphs of script, because there was not much depth, and because each guide had to move us along – in order to accommodate the next group – there was little time for Q&A. Plus the rooms were dimly lit and dank, and a bit claustrophobic. I was quite happy to get back out into the fresh air.
Once outside, the deal was to ‘enjoy ourselves’ which really means ‘spend money’ until the bus comes back. The impressive streetscape was swarming with tourists. I know where one bus load came from but what about all the others. And the street of fine 18th century or so architecture was one long row of opportunities to shop on each side. Despite the vintage architecture, the shops were the same shops you’d find in an up-market mall anywhere in the world. Well, maybe not ‘anywhere’ – there are some up-market malls in the US which provide no inkling of a suggestion that there is any world outside the US border!
Still crowded after the ‘no photography allowed’ tour downstairs.
I did not want to shop. And I did not want to wade through interminable crowds. So, after a fruitless exploration of a side street which led nowhere, I found a coffee shop, drank the coffee slowly, made my way to the pick-up spot and was first in line to get on the bus when it eventually came back. The tedium of touring when it is not really a tour designed with your interests in mind.
We spent the night in Edinburgh, departing late the following day for Newcastle. On day 2, I stayed on board. One can get very lazy on a cruise ship.
Day Nine – Harry Potter Anyone?
Day 9 already and we are moored at Newcastle. Once again I had a tour booked, so at the appointed time I jumped on the tender to shore and after a short wait onto the bus. This was to be a tour of a castle. I had chosen it from a limited selection of tours with space available, and with the view that if I was touring the UK I really should visit a castle. I’d seen the relatively small ‘palaces’ in Kirkwall, but this was a chance to see a real castle. I gathered from the sparse description, that it was the second largest still functioning castle in Britain and had been continuously occupied by the family of the Duke of Northumberland for over 700 years.
The bus ride was decidedly uneventful. The driver gave sparse commentary. And eventually we were disgorged at the main gate to Alnwick Castle. I had admission to the castle grounds and a tour of the still lived-in portion. So, like the rest of the passengers, I wandered about haphazardly taking photos, admiring views, and having scant idea of what I was looking at.
Alnwick Castle: The main gate looking from the inside out.
Along the way, it slowly dawned on me that our tour included two quite distinct groups of people. Some were here to see a building with a history. That group included me. The others were here to see the location of many of the scenes in the Harry Potter movies (and a bunch of others besides). It is a bit jarring to go into the gift shop and see a pile of overpriced books, ‘The History of Alnwick Castle,’ perched on a low table beside a tub of flying broomsticks. (I purchased neither.)
Alnwick’s history goes back to Norman times, and the present buildings go back to when Henry Percy purchased it in 1309. Henry undertook substantial renovations and repairs, adding towers along the outside walls, constructing a strong gatehouse at the main entrance, and two massive towers to strengthen the entrance to the Keep, the single large building within the grounds. The castle came with extensive lands outside, farms and villages. I get the impression the current owners still have extensive ownership in the surroundings as well as property elsewhere – indeed, the castle fell into a state of disrepair during the 17th century, at least partly because the family was living mainly in ‘the south’.
Anyway, the present owner is Hugh Percy, the 12th Duke of Northumberland. However, he is not a direct descendant of Henry Percy, because the direct line died out about 1670. A Sir Hugh Smithson married a Percy heiress, changed his name to Percy, and in 1766 was named the first Duke of Northumberland. (Except that is the first duke in a line of 12 to the present; there had been previous Dukes of Northumberland whose lines had died out – only someone born into the ways of the British peerage could keep track of such nonsense with a straight face. And only Wikipedia could exhibit it so seriously.) All of which comes down to the fact that the present Duke, who inherited from his brother the 11th Duke, is one of a line of 12, more or less, that goes back to 1766, but distant relatives carry the Percy name back to 1309. And while I am smiling about all this, I am also aware that that is a hell of a long time back. The present Duke gets to live in his castle in the winter when it is closed to tourists, and he vanishes to one or another of his other residences during the summer when the castle earns its keep.
The equally, or more imposing entrance to the Keep – the part that is still lived in.
The tour of the residence was a chance to peer at suitably opulent surroundings, including a table about 30 ft long set for breakfast with more cutlery per place setting than I knew existed. The tour was strange. We were allowed to wander through the rooms and gawk, but we were prevented from taking photos, even selfies. And the guide also, in an aside, admitted that where the large breakfast table was set up was normally where the pool table sat, so I don’t really have the foggiest notion of how those people lived.
I had a nice cup of tea at the canteen, wandered the battlements imagining myself as a fearless defender peering through slits to permit crossbow fire, but did not sign up for the jousting or the broomstick flying lessons. Then I got on the bus and went back to the ship. Last night on board, because we would be docking in Amsterdam tomorrow.
Reflections on Cruising and Watches
On a cruise ship, I fall into a lazy routine. I usually check out the gym, just to know it is there, but never ever go visit it. Nor the spa. Sometimes I get caught up in ‘educational’ ventures such as the cooking show – strangely absent on this ship – or the ‘how to do clever things on your computer’ events. Mostly during the day I walk the decks, visiting all the places where there are few other people. I spend hardly any time in my room, and seldom sit on my verandah – but I always want an unobstructed verandah when booking. On this trip life was no different. Breakfast, usually in the buffet – which I grow to detest by the end of a cruise – lunch there, or in the dining room, or in the smaller snack places, and dinner in the dining room or one of the specialty restaurants. The evenings usually end up at BB King’s where the music is usually damned good.
On this cruise I had a ridiculous conversation with one of the salespersons in the shopping venue on board. I had stopped and was gazing mindlessly at row on row of mens’ watches. I was not seriously thinking of buying, but none of the prices was visible. So I commented, ”You should show the prices so we know what class of watch we are looking at.” I thought it was a helpful comment. There is little point in looking at the $ xxK watches if you are in the market for a <$ 500 watch – not unless you have time to kill and enormous impulse control.
The salesperson (a man actually, judging by his garments, but we are not supposed to say ‘salesman’ because that would reflect badly on the fact we are not supposed to say ‘saleswomen’ which is somehow derogatory) sized up the situation pretty quickly – this guy is not going to buy a watch. He also seemed to take offense that I was not approving of the way he had hidden all the price tags. So I tried to help him. “Well, for example, how much are these watches in this row of this cabinet (that all look much like all the others)?” He did not say, “You cannot afford them” or “Get out of my face” but I could tell he was not having a good day and I left him in peace. But I still wonder. Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to let people know that the watches in this case will each cost several tens of hundreds of US dollars, while the ones in that case over there will only cost in the several hundreds, and no we don’t have any $50 Timex watches.
I did recently buy a new watch on Amazon. Under $100. First watch I’ve owned since I was a teenager that is analog. I can take it diving to 300ft, but this morning I had to advance the almost invisible little number that informs me of the date, because it thinks every month has 31 days. It looks sort of decorative on my wrist, and it will help me in future years when I have to get my drivers license renewed. I now have to prove I remember what a clock face looks like before they will let me on the road.