Friday night in Edinburgh: dinner and a ghost walk

You have seen this hotel twice already in the previous post, but its even more incredible at night. No, this was not the one that we stayed in...ours was really nice, but much more quaint. I took this picture as we made our way to the underground ghost walk, somewhere between 8 and 9 pm.


St. Giles Cathedral is considered the head church for the Church of Scotland, the equivalent of the role Westminster Abbey plays in the Anglican Church in England. While England and Scotland have separate state churches, the Queen is the head of both of them. The Anglican Church (of England) is known in America as the Episcopal Church, while the Church of Scotland is known as the Presbyterian Church. I will likely have pictures of the inside in an upcoming post, but I like this shot at night that I took while on the tour.


This is looking up the street that the entrance to the underground tunnels is off of. You enter through what looks like a regular store front and take stairs down to below street level.


At the bottom of the stairs you are in a long tunnel with many rooms and other passages off of it. In one of the first rooms there were displays of some of the artifacts that have been found here.


This is what most of the main tunnels looked like. There are storage rooms off to the side. Most of these rooms would have been used for storage and things of that nature.


The Discovery Channel has been here to do a segment for one of their shows about underground parts of cities. I think there may have been one of the ghost hunter shows here as well to see if it's haunted. We didn't find anything out of the ordinary, but it was still a great experience to explore old Edinburgh's past.


This is the Royal Mile at night, as we were looking for a place to eat after the tour. This area at night is full of young people out on the town looking for their next pub. The funniest thing we saw that night was a group of young women scantily dressed walking around with an inflatable sex doll and singing loudly. We assume (hope) it was a bachelorette party.


Jessica and I decided to grab dinner at the Pizza Express. It is kind of like a luxurious Pizza Hut that serves classy pasta dishes and nice wines with your meal. Interestingly, they do have Pizza Hut and a sister chain Pasta Hut over here as well, but they are much more upscale than in the US - only offering full sit down table service and more gourmet menus. Our waiter was very nice, and was interested to hear where what part of the States we are from (all Americans stick out like sore thumbs, even when we try to blend in) and what we are studying. It was a nice finish to an exhausting day, and from there we went back to the hotel and went to bed in preparation for the next day's trip to see castles and the countryside.