She sounds like she's in the movie Brave!

The next morning after our delicious breakfast (and muffin stealing), we headed off to the Scottish National Gallery. We were supposed to go to the portrait gallery, but it turns out that this was way closer and had better reviews from people that had gone.

It was pretty cool and what you'd expect from an art gallery. Some of the paintings were so big you could seriously have slumber parties on them. We spent most of the morning here since it was pretty big:

We then had a tour scheduled for the Mary King's Close. The close being the tight alley-like streets, however, as Edinburgh was expanding and new buildings were being put up way long ago, many of the closes were build over and the buildings used as foundation for the newer ones. That then left many underground chambers and tunnels of sorts all throughout the city. This one, the Mary King's Close, being a more well preserved/well-known one had tours.

Our tour guide was cool and "in character" as Mary's daughter, since Mary King was a real person. I noticed that that style of tour-giving was quite popular in Edinburgh as a lot of tour guides at the castle had kilts on. Also, their accents are magnificent! I only really ran into one of two people I couldn't understand but I think the Scottish accent is very entertaining to listen to.

Anyway back to the tour, it was really cool since a lot of the houses and the street were still open and just as they were when they were covered. They had some pretty creepy mannequins to complete the picture, but we weren't allowed to take photos. Honestly, it's probably for the better you're not seeing pictures of some them. Especially the ones that were supposed to have the plague.

After that tour we were turned loose on the city. There are lots of street performers about, one of which was a bagpiper complete with kilt!

It really completed the vision of Scotland to be walking down the street as "Scotland the Brave" was blaring. Probably the one song the piper hates the most.

We were allowed to wander about as we wanted, but none of us had really looked up stuff to do in advance. Deborah said that she was headed to the Optical Illusion Museum so we decided to tag along. She said one of her friends recommended it and turns out it was a total blast.

The museum is definitely geared towards kids which is PERFECT because I basically act like a three year old all the time anyway. It was 5 glorious floors of hands on optical illusion stuff. The first up was a hall of mirrors and I was totally doing well to start. Then I decided to go ahead of the group and on my way back to find them, I walked smack right into the wall. Go figure it would be me to walk into the wall. It seems to run in my family (grandma and the screen door, dad and the sliding door) and I'm just continuing the family tradition.

And look at how cool I'm playing it off! This was taken literally seconds after. And you have to admit, they're pretty clear mirrors so it'd be easy to think they're the right path...

After that we walked through one of those vortex things that makes you think you're sideways when you're actually not, and I fared much better on that one than the hall of mirrors. Christine not so much, as she was almost horizontally leaning on the railing.

The rest of the floors were fun things like hologram pictures, electricity tube/sphere things,

magic tricks,

 and other science-y related things with optics.

One of my favorite being the headless platter:

The top floor is actually the rooftop where you can go outside. They have super powerful telescopes and binoculars there so you can hardcore creep on people below. The actual building is near the castle so it's up high on the same hill and has a great view anyway. It was actually a bit weird at how powerful the telescopes were. I could read store signs that were probably a mile away and get reeeeal close to people walking below.

They also have something call a camera obscura which is like a big telescope. This one was fairly old but you view it in a dark room on a curved table and it actually looks like a movie playing on it the picture is so clear. It was kind of cloudy when we were in it but you could still see things really clearly. It has 360 view so the girl operating it gave a sort of "tour" of the big sites you could see in it.

Also, I just need to share with the world at how awesome their toilets were:

I actually want my toilet to be painted like this one day. They also had an apple one and I can't remember the what the third one was, but it was definitely painted another animal. The gift shop was cool and thank god I was pretty much out of cash at this point or else I would've spent a lot of my money there. I did almost cave and buy this book:

The whole store was a nerd's delight but this was pretty much the perfect example of the type of stuff they had. I feel like Tom and Maeve would appreciate this greatly. =)

We had seen signs the day before for a ghost tour of Edinburgh and bought tickets, so after the optical illusion museum, we didn't really know what to do in between then and the tour. We eventually met up with other people in our group and had tea time like true Brits would. How exciting.

We then just walked around a bit and looked for a place to eat. Along the way, we ran into more API people who were waiting for a tour themselves. API has programs all over Ireland in Cork, Galway, Limerick, and Dublin. Total we were probably 50 or 60 people so even though we didn't do much tour stuff together, it was bound to happen that we would run into each other. I was extremely jealous as they said they were going on a Harry Potter tour. My not-so-inner nerd got extremely excited and I even contemplated skipping dinner to go on the tour before the ghost tour we had later. Probably wisely, I decided to stick with dinner (I would've been cranky if I hadn't eaten) and we eventually found a pub with cheap enough food to not kill our wallets.

Afterwards, we had just enough time to walk the people who weren't taking the ghost tour that night back to the hotel...scaredy cats. The tour started kind of late at 9:45 since it was the "adult" version of the tour. I don't really see what was so different, but the tour was fantastic. Our tour guide was INCREDIBLE and got waaaay into the stories. She was a great story teller which, ya know, might come in handy on a tour where you are mostly just telling ghost stories. She also had the perfect balance of Scottish accent in that I could still understand what she said, but everything she said sounded extremely Scottish-y. She was honestly more excited about the tour than most people that had actually paid for it and dragged someone into playing parts in her stories every once in a while:

I think she was slicing Tommy's head off at this point in the story.

It was half above ground and half under ground in vaults of a covered up close:

If you weren't on edge before going down into the vaults, you definitely were by the time she was done and you were leaving.

When it finally ended we decided to go to a pub to hang out, but it turns out most of us couldn't get through more than one drink before nearly falling asleep at the table so we decided to finally head back to the hotel for the night.