Edinburgh: He Who Must Not Be Named

---

Last full day in Scotland. I woke up early and checked out of the BlueSky Hostel. I don't have the highest opinion of this place but it was clean and reasonably quiet. Train left Glasgow Central station for Waverly Station in Edinburgh at 6AM. Train system in the UK is very efficient and a lot of people use train to get around. Exiting the station at 7AM I wandered around the Royal Mile until I found my hostel the Royal Mile Backpacker. It's a small hostel but had good reviews on Hostelbooker. I couldn't check in until 2PM so I went and grab breakfast. This proved more difficult than I thought because most places were not serving breakfast until around 9AM. I finally found this small café where I bought a Bacon bap, which is essentially a bacon sandwich.

After breakfast it was time for my walking tour of Edinburgh. I stored my luggage at hostel and went to the meeting spot. It was one of the free walking tours that are common through major cities in Europe. I have been on many of them and they are usually interesting and entertaining.

Our tour guide Billy took us around famous spots in Edinburgh and kept us together to make sure we wouldn't get lost. Edinburgh has a large number of statues to poets and other literary figures. The most famous being Robert (Rabbie) Burns. Robert Burns has statues not just in Scotland but all over the world. Edinburgh is a city of hills and is full of alleyways here and there where you can take shortcuts between major streets. Billy spent a lot of time talking about Edinburgh castle which was built in the 19th century and was never tested it battle because when it was built fighting had already stopped in the UK. I was debating whether to take the tour of the castle but I ran out of time in the end so I had to content myself with pictures of it.

Billy had all sorts of little stories of Edinburgh one of my favourites was the punishment for thieves which was being nailed by your ear to a board and being left there for 1 day as a punishment. Most of the time the thieves could not stand more than an hour and ripped off their ear from the nail and therefore permanently marked as criminals. It was a reminder crime and punishment of a few centuries ago was brutal.

Another story was about a woman who had given birth to a stillborn baby and had buried it which was a capital crime. They took her to gallows and hanged her. A few hours later they heard knocking on her coffin and opened it to find her alive. They promptly took her back to be hanged again but before they carried out the sentence again a young lawyer in the crowd shouted out they could not do this because she had already fulfilled her sentenced. He argued that since she had been hanged once she could not be punished again for the same crime. The crowd agreed and she was released and I wondered if this is source of the legal principle of double jeopardy.

My favourite part of the tour had to be the Elephant House Café where a certain author named J K Rowling wrote most of Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone. We didn't actually go in but Billy did take us to a cemetery nearby where some of names of the Harry Potter characters are found. I am huge fan of Harry Potter but did not know this. I saw McGonagall, Moody and Tom Riddle all there in the cemetery. Strangely enough at Tom Riddle's grave no grass actually grows and fans of He Who Must Not Be Named leave tributes to him including flowers, messages and the like. Through a gate of the cemetery was a school which was the basis of Hogwarts including the towers that were famous in the story.

After that Billy told us some ghost stories found around Edinburgh and if we wanted the full effect we would have to go on the Edinburgh Ghost Story tour. The tour ended at this point and most people went to a nearby pub to have some local Scottish food. Some people were trying haggis for the first time but I skipped it because I already tried it earlier so I went with fish and chips with some local beer.

I went back to the hostel and checked into my hostel. This hostel was one of the ones that name the rooms and the beds. I was staying in the Gotham City room and I was in the Joker bed. I met my roommates for my one night in the hostel, Bernadette and Yasmine from Germany. They chose Scotland because it was what Ryanair was advertising at the time. My other roommate was Panina from Israel and she had such a great answer for choosing Scotland. "Because I have never been" I use that answer a lot when people ask why I am going here or there. I was exhausted at this point so I took a nap and woke up a few hours later. I made a quick trip to Tescoe to pick some flowers and a Whiskey shop to get some Jack Daniels, both gifts for my favourite singer Tracy. I spent the rest of the afternoon chatting in the common room with the rest of my fellow travelers.

It was an interesting mix of people and the most memorable guy I remember from that trip was a guy from eastern Europe whose name I cannot remember now. He needed to go to London to meetup with a friend and we were working various ways he could get down there. The train was too expensive, bus took too long and flying was too expensive. We were stuck at this point on how his trip would work but as it turned out his friend down in London was a lady and she paid for his flight ticket to London and after a few more minutes of discussion we found out that she had been buying him other gifts such as a Samsung Galaxy. People were commenting she was not only his girlfriend but likely his sugar mama as well. He took some good natured jokes from the guys and girls in the room and that point it was time for me to head to my concert.

The Edinburgh concert was a place called the Electric Circus and was a classier place because it actually had nice chairs and tables to sit on. I tried some of the local beer while I waited for the bands to come on the stage. The local band that opened for The Primitives was ok, a bit loud but still entertaining. I met a few more local fans as well including 2 ladies Marisa and Vikki who both danced pretty hard while the bands were playing.

The Primitives came on to loud applause and went through the entire Lovely album and it was a great show and they came on for an encore that stretched to at least half a dozen songs. After they were done Tracy was nice enough to accept my flowers and Jack Daniels. I hung around after that to get pictures of Tracy with myself and her various fans. I emailed some of the pictures of her and her fans to them because I was one of the few people who had a charged camera by that point.

Primitives concert are the primary reason I travel and their concerts are always the high point of my trips. My favourite moment is when the song CRASH comes on and I remember why I became their fan. That song always makes me feel better no matter how I am feeling at that time.

I went drinking with Vikki and Marisa and 2 of their friends. I tried Scottish whiskey which had a real kick to it and we were all fairly drunk by the end of the first round and the conversation went in strange directions. Thankfully they took a taxi home and I was not far from the hostel. Got back to my room and said goodnight to roommates with a headsup saying I would be waking up very early tomorrow morning.

So that ended my vacation and all I had left was the long journey home.

---