A visit from Kate

Just spent a lovely week with my good friend Kate Murphy! She took a week off work to visit me, London, Edinburgh and Dublin, where she currently is. Richard and I showed her around Newcastle on Sunday and then went out for drinks with friends in the evening ... a bizarre evening that started at a local bar called The Cluny ... and ended drinking rum and coke whilst watching an old Kung Fu movie with no subtitles, after having practiced our robot dancing moves with a fellow North American. On Monday we went for fish and chips at Tynemouth and watched immense waves crash on the ocean front. On Tuesday Kate and I wandered up to Edinburgh for a visit. We saw lots of the city, sat in a few pubs, and went on two ghost walks! The first one was absolutely terrifying ... seriously almost peed myself. We were inside the 'underground city' which is effectively vaults built inside the bridges. Basically these bridges were constructed so the rich could bypass the valleys (slums) to reach the other side of town. There were lost of merchants on the bridges, so when they built the bridge, they also built vaults inside them so they could store their goods. The merchants quickly abandoned the vaults (which were built in only 1 year) because they were so damp and therefore, their merchandise was being ruined. It soon became a black market for prostitution, gambling and drinking. Burke and Hare, the infamous serial killers who sold corpses to medical schools, apparently found many of  their victims in the vaults. After an outbreak of the plague, the poor folk of Edinburgh started moving into the vaults, because it was thought that disease was spread by dirt. If you were found to be dirty, you were brought to the police, never to return. Eventually, people were scared and began moving into the vaults, where disease was rampant. The life expectancy was 3-12 months in the vaults and over 12 000 people died during this time. A horrific part of Edinburgh's city ... and a terrifying place to explore! Yesterday, we just spent the day relaxing, chatting, and watching movies. In the evening, we went to Khan's, an amazing Indian restaurant in our neighborhood. It was a lovely visit and it was so nice to see an old friend!