This week, with all of the terrorist threats, Butler sent us a ton of emails and urged us to register with the American Consulate. Normally, I tend not to take things too seriously, but I decided to register right away, because I plan on travelling as much as possible, even with these warnings. I'm pretty sure that most of the places I want to go are not really huge spots. Some of the other Butler kids and I have talked about whether we think there is really any sort of threat or not, and it seems like most people are kind of worried, but still proceeding with plans anyway (my friend Liz is going to Paris this weekend, and other people had already purchased tickets for upcoming weekends to various places). While I don't feel really personally threatened or anything, the volume of information we've been receiving about safety and travelling are really making me consider safety in my travel plans a lot more. Not only did we get emails from all of the Butler people here, we got one from the director of IFSA Butler. I feel like there's not so much we can do differently, and I'm not going to lie, I am very American. I open my mouth, and people know I am American as soon as I say one word. If I travel, I'll be travelling with a group of American students, and there's really very little I can do about that. I try not to draw attention to myself, but I feel like I'm very bad at sinking into a crowd, especially because of my tendency towards brightly colored hats. I don't know where this train of thought is headed... just thought I should probably remark on how seriously Butler is encouraging us to take these travel alerts. Okay, enough of that, and back to your regularly scheduled blog programming.
Since my return from England, and realizing that time moves very quickly here, I've been working on getting myself to do things more frequently. Tuesday was our Butler reunion dinner, which was fun (mmm free food!), but I've just decided that I'm not going to go absolutely day-by-day here because I have been spending a lot of time doing school work (that's a surprise!), so things have been pretty low-key. So, the highlights of the last week and a half:
Wednesday: Getting lost, chilling out, emerging victorious!
Wednesday provided me with much excitement. I had my first tutorial, for Scotland and Orality, and I was a little nervous because I wasn't sure if we were going to be quizzed on the reading or what, but it turned out to be a lot of fun. Our tutor is very warm, friendly, and laid-back, so I think it is going to be a good experience. Starting next week, I'm moved back to Thursday tutorials, because they ended up unable to cancel the date as there was one girl who couldn't make it on a Wednesday. This means that the tutorial will probably consist of me, two other students, and our tutor. After that, my friend and I decided that we should go to the travel "fayre" that Butler was having at their offices, which are located in the New Town (relatively new... it's Georgian. I will write an entry just talking about Edinburgh itself sometime in the very near future), which is a good distance from where our classes are. Having only a vague notion that Rutland Square was on the west side of New Town, we set off, and walked for a long time, eventually (after a call to my roommate for help, and randomly deciding to walk down an alley that fortuitously led into the square) made it to the Butler office. The travel fayre turned out not to be so helpful, as I am pretty savvy at researching destinations and travel options on the Internet, but there were sweets, and a guy to tell us about travel within Scotland, which was actually helpful. When we left, my friend realized that we could have come a much easier way, and went back that way, but I had to do some shopping on Prince's Street, so I went back the way we came. I was looking for a sweater or sweatshirt, which led me to H&M, where I came out with a belt and some hairclips. Oops.
I hustled back to Old Town, to leave my books and stuff in my flat before I went back to the campus area for the Classics Society Pub Crawl, starting at our patron pub, the Greenmantle, where we are always presented with very free food and very low-cost beverages. I started the night out classy with a glass of wine, fried food (it seems like everything is deep-fried here, which is why I tend to do my own cooking as much as possible!), and Haribo gummies (they are HUGE here. every store has a big display of Haribo, which is pretty funny to me). I spent a delightful hour or so with the few people who had shown up at the beginning (Who starts a pub crawl at 6 pm?!?), before I had to go to a different pub to meet up with my flatmates for the Hermit's Croft charity pub quiz. I got there before the rest of the team, so I tried to stake out an area, which was hard, since the pub was terrible and had no more than five tables. We ended up sitting on the floor, which was not particularly comfortable, but oh well. We were presented with a sheet of aluminum foil and the paper for our answers, and the pub quiz began. Our team consisted of me, flatmate Katherine, flatmate Caroline, her boyfriend Liam, and two other girls from HC, Jess and Becky. We stole a team name from a team that had won the FreshAir pub quiz during Freshers' Week: Quiz in my Pants. They told us to use the aluminum foil to make a sculpture incorporating sport and veg(etable), so Becky suggested we make a man benchpressing a carrot or courgette or cucumber. Somehow, I became in charge of making the guy, and we ended up with a lovely little sculpture.
The team was an excellent combination of talents, because we ended up coming in second (1st place in the sculpture category with 9.5/10!!!) and we won a box of variety chocolates. We went back to our flat to celebrate (by eating the chocolate, yum!)
, and ended up giving most of it away, which was probably a good thing. Friday: Harvest Festival and a Lovely Dinner
On Tuesday, Ying, Sarah, and I had decided that we would have dinner together at my place and class things up a little bit. I decided I would make a roast pork loin with rosemary, accompanied by a spinach salad and roast sweet potatoes with sage and rosemary. I'd already bought the pork when Ying decided she didn't want to go out since she'd be busy all weekend (sadness), so I invited my flatmates to join our dinner party. But, I have gotten ahead of myself. In the afternoon, I went to the Harvest Festival and learned about various environmental programmes in Scotland, as well as some of the different groups on campus. I wanted to go to a talk about sustainable food, but it didn't happen at the time it was supposed to happen, so I settled for my piece of free pie and then left to go shopping to buy some plates and a roasting pan. All of this was achieved at Poundland, and our plates, as you will see shortly, are quite fashionable. At Poundland, we had our first real unintelligible Scottish experience. A lady kept talking to us, and we were trying to hold up the conversation, but we really,really couldn't understand most of what she was saying. Something about being a bookbinder, but then they moved it to Harvard. I was trying to ask questions, but I'm not sure she understood me either. It's amazing how much difficulty there can be between people speaking the same language...
I started cooking and dinner was ready a little late, but it was okay, because it was DELICIOUS.
I am an amazing chef, and modest too. It was a very nice evening, and then Sarah and I decided we would go out to the Hive, which is a club on the Cowgate. However, we couldn't find it, and in the end, we decided that we're boring, so we went back to her room at Pollock Halls and watched Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It was an entirely worth while choice, and I was so tired by the end of the movie that I got home and fell asleep right away.Scottish Party Lifestyle
Saturday was a pretty laid-back day in the daytime. I got a little work done, tidied my room, hung out with my flatmates in the kitchen for a while. Katherine and I walked around looking for dinner for a while, but mostly just ended up exploring, because we didn't find anything that we deemed cheap and tasty enough. I stopped at the store to pick up some ciders to take to a friend's birthday party later that night. Sarah was going to come to the party but had work to do, so I went over to the party myself. I got there before my friend who knows the hosts much better than I do, so it was a little awkward, but I was talking to this guy, Yuri, whom I had met last time these people had a party. Fun fact: Yuri was on the Austrian National Basketball team, but now he is getting his PhD (I think) in mathematics. Later, Yuri's flatmate Anthony, who is getting his PhD in classics (but Greek stuff, not Latin) showed up, and we all talked for a while. I had promised Katherine that I would go up Arthur's Seat with her on Sunday morning, so I left fairly early and went home and slept.
Sunday: Muddy Sunday
I woke up later than I meant to, and woke Katherine up to go up Arthur's Seat. She had not realized that I actually wanted to do it. So, we got our act together and went outside. No sooner had we walked out the door than the sky opened and burst forth with torrential rain. No, I'm exaggerating. It was just a cold drizzle, so it was pretty unpleasant, but we were committed to doing some hill-walking. We couldn't figure out where the easy path was, so we started walking up some stairs on the side of the hill. These stairs just so happened to terminate at a random point, leaving no path to follow. However, there was a lovely view of the Salisbury Crags
and of the city as a whole.
So, naturally, we decided it would be a great idea to climb up the rock face and see if there was another path at the level ground that we could see probably 30 feet above us.
That is the view looking down from when we found the path at the top that actually did exist. So, we walked until we saw more people walking, and then followed them to what we thought was the top, but was not actually the top. There's a little grassy area between the three peaks, and so we had to walk across it to get to the highest peak on Arthur's Seat. While we were doing that, we saw all the messages that people had written with rocks they found, and we decided to add our own.
At this point, I realized that I was supposed to meet my friend LeeAnn at 1 to make a pilgrimage to Costco, and that we would never make it back down on time, and I didn't have my phone. Oops. So, we went up to the summit and had a grand old time looking all around the city and the surrounding areas, and trying to point out the buildings we knew. There's a map sort of thing that tells you what the big things in the distance are, and how far away they are. We were trying to figure out if we could actually see some of the things in the longer distances, but we still aren't sure.
Then I had a go at trying to pull the sword out of the stone...
On the way back down, we tried to go the "easy way" and failed miserably, facing the choice of sliding down a bunch of rocks or going back up and trying again. We ended up walking down the really steep stairs that go straight down the face of the mountain, and we were puzzled by the people who kept passing us at faster speeds, because we were afraid of falling and dying. It was SO slippery, because it was raining, and the steps are really uneven, and there's nothing to hold on to. It was pretty much my nightmare, but we made it down okay, and then we hustled home so I could get a hold of LeeAnn and tell her I'd be late.
I showered, then ran to the bus stop, where a nice man helped us figure out how to take a bus other than the one we'd planned to take that wouldn't be coming for a while. We were concerned that my card wouldn't work for European Costco, but oh, did it work. After shopping at Tesco Metro for the last month, Costco was heavenly. I ended up not really buying too much because I knew I couldn't carry a lot, but I was pretty proud of myself for purchasing liquor at Costco on my own. The checkout guy was really friendly, and amused that we were Americans at Costco in Edinburgh buying large quantities of liquor. Then, we had hotdogs. It was divine. Mmmmmm...
The Week
It's been a good week, but a busy week. I've been in the library getting things done quite a bit these last several days. You have to do a lot of reading here. A lot a lot. And you actually have to do it. It's been absolutely gorgeous, for the most part, all week, so I have been doing my reading outside and breaking it up with short strolls. Lovely. Tuesday was my first archaeology tutorial, and it turned out just fine. My tutor is nice, and I met an Aussie named Hannah who is quite lively, and I think we will get along very well. Wednesday I did more work, and then decided to go to the Edinburgh CouchSurfing meetup, which was a good plan. Something interesting was pointed out to me as we were all talking about having out of the ordinary names... my name is cool because I can just change the accent and pretend I come from pretty much anywhere in the world. I don't feel like too many names can go entirely unaltered in spelling and general pronunciation throughout so many languages. So, maybe I'll pretend to be German for a while. I was responsible and didn't go dancing afterward, but we were at the pub until they kicked us out just after 1. I forgot how many people you meet at once when you go to CS events! That brings us to today: I got SO much done today. I was proud of myself. After all my classes were done, I went to Spanish Society, because somehow, Ying, who does not speak Spanish, is the president of the society. There was free food. Mmmm. I met a girl from Italy, and a girl called Camille from New Zealand. We hung out for a while after the meeting, and then I went back to my flat to cook up some salmon with Katherine. We blasted Disney music and Motown while cooking, and it was a generally good time.
Now that you're all caught up, I am going to go to bed, because tomorrow I have to meet the bus at 7:30 to go to the Highlands!!! I'm going to go catch the Loch Ness Monster, you betcha.
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