In Your Shoes - Dark Dundee

'Office Day'

Monday mornings are usually ‘office’ mornings for us, where we make sure our tour documents are up to date, emails have been followed up, etc. Sounds a bit boring, but we’ve all got to do it to make sure we keep on top of things. We do our own web and graphic design as well as everything else, which makes being at a desk a little easier to deal with for long periods of time. After our documents are updated, we move on to finalising our trifold leaflets before sending them and another batch of tour booklets to print. The afternoon is spent planning out our offers to cruise ships whose passengers will sail into Dundee’s ports 14 times this year.  We expect to be fairly busy, so it pays for us to plan well in advance.

Exploring Perth

Today we set out for Perth for a morning of exploring the city, the museum and of course, the graveyard. We went to the graveyard first (obviously) to check out their collection of old tombstones.  It’s not as impressive as The Howff, in our opinion, but it’s still a beautiful place if you don’t mind the dead bodies. We took some pictures in the graveyard and in the museum, which was great and also bumped into a friend whilst we were scouting out the city, which was a lovely wee surprise.  We didn’t have much time to chat because we were on our way back to Dundee for a meeting regarding a super-secret collaboration later in the year and we didn’t want to be late. We’d tell you what it was about, but we’d have to kill you.

Tour Guide gets lost on walk...

Had a morning meeting and a blether over coffee with our friend Katrina, who just also happens to be our make-up artist for special horror events such as last year’s Halloween Takeover of Verdant Works. If you’ve not seen the pictures, check out our Facebook page. In the afternoon we went to a meeting at Camperdown House regarding a tour this summer on the Dundee Law. In typical tour guide style, we got lost trying to find the right way to the offices, so we’re sure we gave off the right impression!

In our defence, it was tough to find… and he didn’t see us wandering aimlessly around, so I we think we got away with it. After that meeting, we had to rush back into the city centre to take a family of bloggers on a wee tour. As it was their first time to Dundee, we gave them more of an overview of the city and everything it has to offer rather than our usual standard tour stories but we did make sure to leave in some of the most gruesome and disgusting ones. The kids absolutely loved it and were desperate for more, so we offloaded them at McManus, where they had a whale of a time.

Team building!

We held a scavenger hunt style teambuilding event this morning for 42 delegates from the Office of the Scottish Charities Regulator and their Chief Executive. Our job was to keep them all entertained for the morning and give them something interesting, fun and competitive. By combining stories with activities, and with a little helping hand from the sun, the morning was full of laughter and group engagement. It was great to see everyone enjoying themselves whilst learning a little more about some of the dark stories lurking in Dundee’s past.  If only all learning was as fun. We left them at Apex for lunch and an afternoon of theory-based stuff that they all looked desperate to get stuck into whilst we headed home and had a well-deserved cup of tea. Our afternoon was spent preparing our details for our new special tour ‘Deceased in the East’ which runs from 6^th to 11^th March.

Research & reading followed by some knowledge transfer

This morning was a research and reading morning as we waded through all of the information given to us earlier this week when we had our meeting about The Law with Colin. Next week we’re off to Morgan Academy to be interviewed by the students about The Law itself, so it’s always good to brush up on our knowledge and take the advice of folk who know a lot better than we do about specialist subjects. Not only did we learn something new, but we told Colin a few things that surprised him too. Every day is a school day. We have a fair bit of follow up to do this afternoon after all of our shenanigans this week, as well as write up our goals and tasks for next week, which is gearing up to be almost as busy as this one as we’ve got 2 tours of French visitors to plan for, a birthday party request and another corporate teambuilding event enquiry to follow up on too.  No rest for the wicked, so they say…

Deceased in the East!

Nipped into Lochee this morning to get a few pictures and to see how the new layout is coming along then had a quick test run of our new ‘Deceased in the East’ tour this afternoon with some family members and friends. We like to do one or two test runs of the tours before we go live with them, just to make sure we’ve ironed out any logistical issues and that the stories are told in a way that captivates our audience and paints a picture. Weeks of preparations, and in some cases, months of work go into our events, some of which only last a few days or a week, but it’s worth all of the work and effort when people really enjoy and appreciate what you do. We count our lucky stars every day, and try to leave nothing to chance. That being said, once the tour was done, we were right back home ordering Chinese and fully intending to put our feet up for the rest of the weekend!