Spontaneousness Stirling-ing

Hello everyone! Today was a great day for me.  I had my final this morning.  I think it went really well.  I had the essay question in advance, so I knew what I was walking into.  I did learn something today though: There are a lot more people in my film class than I realized.  This was, at least to me, a pretty well attended class as far as I could tell.  Well let me tell you, the lecture theater was full today.  There were a lot of people that I didn't know existed in that class.  I was perplexed.

After my final, I just kind of relaxed for the rest of the day. My next final isn't until the 20th, so I figured I deserved a free afternoon to do nothing other than watch reruns of America's Next Top Model.  Then, I met my friends for dinner and we figured out our plans for tomorrow.  During our planning, my friend Katelin happened to type "fun things to do in Stirling" into Google.  The first thing she found was Stirling Ghost Walking Tours.  Upon further inspection we discovered that the next tour left in (and yes, this is how it was written out on the website) "0 days, 0 hours, 25 minutes".  This is how this all came about.  Grace was like "get your shoes on, we're going on a ghost tour."  We now know that you can get from campus (catching a bus right as you need to by luck) to the Old Jail in town (which is close to Stirling Castle) in approximately 27 minutes (yes, we were 2 minutes late to the tour).  This is especially amazing, when you consider that we walked up hill for most of the time and were dropped off at the bus station, which is farther away than the central stop.  But anyways, we made it and we went on our ghost tour.

We had a great time.  There were only 4 other people on the tour, so we had a nice little group. The tour guide was dressed as the old "executioner" of Stirling and was really good at story telling (we later found out that he has his Phd in English and writes his scripts himself).  He was dressed in costume and had just enough "creeper factor" to keep things interesting.  It was kind of like a historical tour of Stirling.  He told us some really good stories.  He took us around the jail house and up by one of the old churches into the graveyard by Stirling Castle. While there were many great moments on the tour (he had a good sense of humor) this one was my favorite. He was in the middle of telling us a story about a farmer and his wife.  This is how this went.  He said "he suspected his wife of cheating on him with soldier boys..."  This is funny for many reasons.  In case you were wondering, when soldier boys is said with a Scottish accent, it sounds like soulja boy. Soulja boy is a rapper. Grace, Katelin and I burst out laughing and we (being me and Katelin, Grace just kept shooting us looks) couldn't stop.  Nobody else seemed to think this was funny, but well we enjoyed it.

Here's soulja boy.  I really thought a visual was needed.

This was another one of my favorite stories.  Our guide told us that he was hired to do a tour for a group of businessmen back in 2004 or something.  They were eating in the Great Room at the Castle and he didn't get to leave until really late (2 am or something).  So, he decided to make his way back to the Old Jail through the graveyard.  Back in this time, the graveyard wasn't very well kept, so there were shrubs and bushes everywhere.  As he approached a really sketchy area, he saw a man standing in the shadows.  He thought this was weird, but as he passed he said "good evening to ya".  The man jumped and screamed and ran out of the graveyard.  As our tour guide contemplated this, he noticed that the man had dropped something as he ran away.  Upon further inspection he discovered that he dropped bags of "white powder" and pills.  So, he took these things to a police officer and went on his way.  A few years later, he ran into a police officer who was patrolling the graveyard and the officer told him "did you know, that this graveyard is the only place in Stirling that doesn't have cameras.  And drug dealers refuse to come in here to sell their drugs, because they all swear it's haunted."  See, when he was walking back that night, we was in full costume, so the drug dealer thought he was a ghost.  I found this story entertaining.

After our tour, we talked to our guide for a while.  He walked with us for a while and told us about historical stuff in Stirling and recommended places that we should visit in Scotland.  He was a really nice guy.  Evidently he works on doing something with old houses and castles in Scotland and doing ghost tours of course.  Then, we headed back to the bus stop, realized that McDonald's was still open, and got ice cream (this is something that we would do). Afterwards, we went back to researching places to go tomorrow and came across North Queensferry in Fife, which in addition to being a cute town, has Scotland's largest aquarium.  So, that is where I will be spending my day tomorrow.