Rememberance Day

Twenty years ago, I was spending a semester in London and my friends and I decided to take a weekend jaunt to Scotland. Edinburgh, to be precise.

We took an overnight bus and found a bed and breakfast (with plaid ceilings - I kid you not.) And then we toured the city and shopped.

It was foggy and misty the whole time we were there, which gave a sort of surreal feeling to the whole experience. We toured Edinburgh Castle and were told there was a wonderful view. I don't know. All we saw was a wall of fog.

As we walked around the city, trying to find something specific, but I don't recall what, we decided to take a short cut (yes I was touring with the same person I was touring London with, so be afraid) through a cemetery. It was an old walled cemetery with lots of huge monuments. Very impressive looking, and actually a bit creepy as the sun started to go down, as it is wont to do early in Scotland, in November (and it was already foggy and misty).

And as we wandered through the cemetery, looking for the other exit that would provide our shortcut, and it was getting darker and creepier, and we started thinking about all the unsavory types of people who might like to hang out in old cemetery's after dark, we slowly came to the conclusion that there was no other exit to this cemetery, so with our hearts beating faster we made our way back to where we had started. No harm done, just a bit freaked by the whole experience. Trust me, old walled cemeteries at dusk on foggy nights are creepy.

The other thing I remember about that trip was that it was Remembrance Day weekend (Veteran's day here in America). On Sunday there were a lot of ceremonies and parades. We didn't actually see any of them, but we kept hearing bagpipes. Around the corner, through the mist, there were always bagpipes playing. But we never did see them.

The cemetery was creepy, but the bagpipe music constantly floating on the mist was eerie in it's own way. I loved Edinburgh though and wished we had more than the weekend there.