The new week in Aberdeen started with an excursion to Balmoral. Balmoral is an industrial company that manufactures cable covers for offshore industry. Balmoral has transferred knowledge from offshore oil drilling to offshore wind and is nowadays working with both industries. Unfortunately some of our group got sick and our live excursion got cancelled but we were still able to have an online presentation with Balmoral. The online presentation was really good even though, naturally, it would have been a lot more fun to visit their office.
After the excursion, we had some two hours of downtime. Some spend it in a restaurant and some resting at the hotel. The next plan for the day was an Aberdeen ”ghost tour” we had booked. We walked to the appointed meeting point in an old timey cemetery not really knowing what to expect. We were welcomed by a nice lady wearing a bright pink reflector vest. Not what we expected.
Our guide turned out to be really knowledgeable in the local history and the tour was mostly about the gruesome local history and murders, not ghost stories. We toured some locations where these events had actually happened while listening to the individual stories of the past. We heard a war story about a dog fight where the plane’s stray bullets killed innocent civilians in the cemetery. The bullet marks could still be seen on some of the gravestones. We also saw the apartment where the last man executed by hanging in Scotland did the murder he was convicted of. Couple of more locations and stories later we were at the end of our tour. The last story involved a pub right next to us where a murder had happened. It was only natural for us to go check the establishment right after. Sadly we didn’t see the alleged ghost cat roaming around the tables.
Our evening plan was to check out the Aberdeen university. On our way there, we grabbed some fish & chips from a cozy pub/restaurant. All the menus in Aberdeen show the calorie count of every food item and these fish & chips had 1500. At least we would have enough energy to walk around the city. After checking out the university’s castle-like grounds, we chose a different route back to see some new scenes. We saw two other universities, a shirtless guy running and dancing through a fountain, and a life-size cardboard cutout of the queen on someone’s window. What a night full of culture!
English