Museum and Vaults

Yesterday we had a pretty lazy morning. Joanne cooked us an brilliant cooked breakfast. Then we caught a bus into town. We did a fair bit of wandering down Princess st. We went to the museum of Scotland in the afternoon which was huge. I'm really not used to these massive museums (either that or maybe massive is the standard size and I just haven't been to many). It was a pretty interesting collection of stuff. They even had an iMac, a super nintendo and an old phoney gray station signed by Rubens Barrichello for some reason. We spent a lot of time in the history of Scotland part which was cool and found a map with Sinclair on it up by Wick:

Apparently the Scots invented a whole lot of stuff. I can't remember any of it now. There was also a big normal museum part with lots of stuffed animals and shit:

We then wandered home to watch some paraolympics and make a plan for dinner. We thought and Indian might be good to eat so we went hunting for one. Very good food but unfortunately there was far too much of it. As always, I felt pressured by my mother to eat everything on my plate. Everyone else only got through about half of theirs. I felt like Mr Creosote.

We then went to the royal mile again to go on a walking tour of the underground vaults. It was pretty damn cool. The tour guide told us a couple of awful stories about some punishments that were carried out on people. One dude that killed a king was tortured for 3 days. Day 1 they dragged him across the cobble stones to the Mercat cross. Then they hoisted him up by the feet to about 8m or so and dropped him on his head. They did that a couple of times and then put him back in his cell for the night. The next day they thought the regular ground was a bit soft for him so they dropped him on to hot coals, then they crowned him with a white hot crown that kinda seered into his head. When they pulled the crown off it apparently took quite a lot of scalp with it. On the last day they cut him open and did the whole "lets pull this out and see what happens" trick, finishing with his heart. Then they quartered him and sent him all over the country. 10 points if you can come up with who thought up all the torture: The kings widow. After a couple of "true stories" we went down into the vaults. It was only lit by candle light and as we wandered around our guide told us a bunch of ghost stories about encounters with ghosts that the tour company had had while it had been operating. It was really good, the only thing that let it down was that there was other tours operating in the vaults at the same time, so you would occasionally hear a scream or laughter from another group. It would have been much better if it was dead quiet. Here are a few photos, I think I have photographic evidence of ghosts on a couple of them.

I think on the last one the ghosts were responsible for making my camera take a photo without focusing properly. Pesky ghosts.