Day 5 : 2025 07 03 : Arthur's Seat, Mary's Close

All regions have their own snobbery. People from Eastern Canada could never admit it was ever cold when visiting Western Canada. It might be 15 below with polar bears dying on the streets and they'd mutter something about 'this isn't REAL cold' and insist on keeping their shorts and sandals on. I'm sure people from nearer the equator could be in a literal magma river but if it was in the temperate zone of the Earth they'd insist this is child's play, as the first layers of their protective volcanic gear melted in front of their eyes.

So with Pacific North Westers, and maybe Canadians in general, we generally have a snobbish attitude towards mountains. We have the Rockies! And, well, an appreciable landmass of British Columbia is just.. mountain. So when we agree to go walk up the world famous Arthur's Seat to get a lovely view of Edinburgh we somehow scoff at such low a mountain. This is doubly ridiculous because I am not a hiker and get winded getting up from my office chair. But somehow muster enough blindness to self reflection to scoff when looking at Arthur's seat, saying 'that's not a real mountain'. What I didn't finish with was "I've seen real mountains, from my car, while driving past them". 

This is a walk with the bride and groom and bridal party and whoever trekked across the globe to be in Scotland for the wedding. A bit of banter and getting to know really close friends to your really close friend. It's a bittersweet reality of weddings, where you get along, but know that these interactions will likely be all there will be. Habits, age groups, life patterns being what they are.

We meet near the Scottish Parliament. It's.. (again, my knowledge of archicture stops at 'flying buttresses', and only because it's both a hilarious term and just one of those snappy quotes I remember from Disney's Beauty and the Beast (yes, it's the line Cogsworth says)).. interesting? Modern. Ecletic? Beyond my understanding.  As a Canadian, that's as far as I can go. I ask one of the groom's friends, a straight talking nurse from northern England, 'what is the deal with the wooden sticks by the doors?'. He, of course, just says right out that the whole Parliament is just dog ugly. He may have used more colourful language. I'm all for talking in local customs and traditions but abandoning our painful deference and politeness with some common sense is a line I simply will not cross. Interesting, is what it remains.

As we are waiting, my wife goes about looking at shops and just exploring. Me and my son sit by a park, relaxing. He's a big boy now, taller than me, full of quiet, deep currents of thought and introspection. He might start blurting out some random meme that is only funny to people who think Iron Man is like, an old movie; he might suddenly ask me what is the nature of international trade and currency fluctuations. Both are equally impenetrable to me, but for one I can at least pretend to know what I'm talking about.  Which is all to say, he's growing up. So it's always lovely to see the boy he was just pop up out of nowhere. Here he is, suddenly possessed with a need to save all the ladybugs and put them back in the grass. It might be followed up with a question about Roundup and it's impact on North American pollinator populations and their declines knock-on effect on the greater ecosystem .It might be followed by him reminded me the grasshoppers in A Bugs Life sounded like they were motorcycles. Deep currents.

We meet up with the rag tag group of wedding goers. And begin our stroll up the Very High Hill. It's pretty and lush on the way up, and admittedly, the internet does say it's an easy hill walk. So none of the Canadians have an opportunity to point out this dormant volcano is hardly a mountain. Not that we would, not sober, at least.

At the top are more rocks and absolute wind tunnel level of wind. You could do some aerodynamic drag tests on the latest sub compacts out of Honda up here. The view was great, though. It's a long walk down back into town, then a very very long and subtle walk up another hill. This was the after walk walk that I simply was not ready for. By the time we got to the after walk restaurant, poised on top of another hill, I was in a muck sweat. Old middle age man sweat. I can only think this is karmic retribution for my PNW snobbery about mountains.

There is a story here about Edinburgh being called the Athens of Europe or  somesuch, but I honestly can't really remember it, so you just get these  enigmatic pictures of Greek columns

More columns

Then a short break, possibly a nap, and off we were again to do a tour of Mary King's Close. A set of alleyways well preserved, named after a prominent seamstress of the area. The close had examples of how people lived and died in the 17th Century, with a tour guide who cosplayed a maid of the era. Cosplay is probably a wildly inaccurate term, however, this is one of those tours that did not allow photographs. Likely due to some corporate copyright reasons which only serves to make the one picture they do take on their own camera's outrageously expensive as well as zero pictures of the exhibit to tempt friends and colleagues on social media. Which is to say I'm not looking up the proper term out of a mild sense of spite.

Of the many memorable facts is that, yes, in those days, early in the morning or late at night was when they were allowed to throw all their waste onto the street. And being as there was no indoor plumbing I'll leave what 'waste' means up to the reader's imagination. As they threw it out, they'd say Gardee LOO! Which means watch out. And my high school French is enough to tell me it was a slow bastardization of garde de l'eau, or 'watch the water' (watch the waste that is.. watery). This would in turn run down the streets and fill up a loch that was nearby. Edinburgh became a place you could smell a ways off and earned the nickname Auld Reekie (which they say is old Scots for old smoky, but come on.. a cess pool of a lack within a stone's throw?). It was colourful details like this that would actually put my son's appetite off. My son, the towering 16 year old of bottomless appetite, would actually start eating less after tours like this.

The great thing about this fact is that as the guide told us the fact, she mimicked the action with an empty bucket and through the open door. Oddly, there was a witty reply from the street. Did they just employ someone to sit their and reply every 20 minutes or so?

Now near the end of tour, we somehow wormed  our way back so that we were facing the same street, different house further down. And suddenly we hear 'Gardee LOO!' and our tour guide replies with the same witty retort. While yes, it outlined the fact we were on a repeatable and repeated tour that had gone on hundreds if not thousands of times before, it was still a hell of a neat trick.

Throughout the tour they had various rooms, one was for stables, another featured highly detailed mannequins suffering under the Bubonic plague, and another had a eerie ghost story about a child ghosts and toys left behind. All in all, sans the lack of pictures it was a vibrant and fascinating look at that time period.

We ended that tour, declined the overpriced set picture, and went for a walk around St. Giles Cathedral. Which was beautiful, with stained glass and plaques to famous writers and thinkers and the odd historical diorama featuring bloody rebellion and betrayals over key ecclesiastical points in how a religion about Loving Your Fellow Man should really ought to be taught and anyone who disagrees better be prepared to die.

Then it's a search to find some haggis .We eventually stop at a pub. Which to us, looks like a real locals pub. Not 10 minutes after sitting we hear the bartender murmuring the bar is really 'just packed with only tourists'. They do not have the haggis but have some very respectable meat pies under heat lamps which we eat.

Then it's back to our place. A well earned rest from all the walking and hiking even if it wasn't, strictly speaking, actually up a mountain.