12/02

Today we walked all around Edinburgh: The Castle, the Royal Mile, etc.  It's amazing to see buildings from the 1200's or previous.  I got to learn a lot of their history and visited all the exhibits at the castle from the crown jewels to the main room where Kings used to have their banquets.

(One of the views from the Castle)

At 1:00 pm they change guards and fire the cannons to the tune of the pippers.

Some stories:

Kristie, our city guide, told us some stories about it.  It seems R.L. Stevenson based his novel “The strange tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” in an actual Edinburgh person, Deacon Brodie.  He was a council man, this is to say powerful and well known, and also a cabinet maker.  He would go up to people’ houses to design pieces of furniture and at the same time look around to see what they had.  If he saw the family had something valuable, he would get ready to break in and steal it at night….. He even had a method by which he would get the key and make a model in wax to use it as a sample. After a number of robberies, he was caught of course, as an accomplice told on him, but it still remains a mystery; nobody understood why this good and helpful person by day, could have committed so many crimes by night. 

There is a monument here of a dog called Bobby.  Bobby was a friar’s dog at Greyfriars church.  When his owner died, Bobby would sleep on his grave at night.  Every night for 14 years…

Of course there is a tombstone for Bobby in the church’s graveyard, with a marble stone in honour of his loyalty and friendship.

The one I liked best was the story about the school of medicine in Edinburgh, well known in older days for its great academic discoveries.  It seems a group of doctors and students needed to experiment and analyze but did not have enough bodies to do it with, so the students and professors would go up to the graveyard as soon as someone had died and take the body up to the school.  This of course was illegal and, considering their religion, immoral.  But as they couldn’t be caught, the church decided to put bars on the graves.  Yes, yes, you read well: bars as in your windows for protection.  So, what could they do? Well, considering Scottish weather is so harsh and at the time many people would wander in the streets, they started considering killing some…. So they would get old or sick people to have dinner with them or simply have a drink as find out if they had relatives or family and if they didn’t, well, they were off for the final judgment.  When they thought they had enough men, they decided that perhaps a prostitute could be the solution to research the female body inside. But when they killed pretty Mary and took her body to the school, some of the doctors recognized her and wondered how she could be dead if they had seen her in such good health the night before …. and so the police decided to investigate why so many people were just dropping dead.