Back from Scotland

So last night we got back from Scotland.  I would have posted last night, but internet was being worse than usual (blinking out after only a few seconds rather than a few minutes) and I was tired.  But I slept a lot last night and am now waiting for a text from some people I was planning on seeing Alice in Wonderland with later today, so now I attempt to chronicle my trip to Scotland.

Well, really the first thing to talk about is Tuesday night, because I saw Twelfth Night.  I'm not in the Shakespeare class, but I got an extra ticket, and I'm so glad I did, because it was an awesome performance.  Very funny; I definitely enjoyed it.  But we got out pretty late, so it was almost midnight when we got back home.  Considering we had to be at King's Cross at 7:45 the next day, meaning getting up no later than 6:15 thanks to the commute, it wasn't much fun, but I was fine.  Martin kept telling us to just sleep for a couple hours on the train, but once I'm awake, I'm awake, and I'm not going to be able to go back to sleep until the afternoon at the earliest.  Thankfully, though, less than six hours was still enough for me to stay awake the whole day.

I like trains so much better than flying.  So much.  I still didn't want to chance reading, but I had enough to occupy me, and I had so much more leg room, and it just felt smoother...I hate flying.  Thank God I got the Eurail pass so I can take trains across Europe and not fly.

The weather was miserable the entire time we were there.  It was snowing when we got out of the station, and that sucked, because we walked from the station to the hostel, and I'd lost one of my gloves and hadn't yet had the chance to replace them, so there I was, carrying an increasingly-heavy bag (or so it seemed) with freezing wet hands for twenty minutes in an unfamiliar city with my glasses getting wet and slush sliding around under my feet.

Edinburgh is a very hilly city.  Lots of inclines, not that much level ground.  I did not enjoy that, though there were only a couple times it was bad, when we had to climb things particularly steep.  The first of those horrible climbs was right after we dropped our stuff off at the hostel, because our first stop was the Castle of Edinburgh, which happens to be at the top of a tall hill.  There was a set of stairs that was particularly brutal, and that no one liked, so it wasn't just me.  But I managed them, and all the way up the rest of the hill to the castle.

I do want to say, though, that on the way we passed a street performer who was playing bagpipes and wearing a kilt.  Disappointly, I did not see many men wearing kilts, but one of the ones I did see was also playing bagpipes.  Hah!  That was awesome.

The castle was very cool.  It was still sorta snowy and very cloudy, so we didn't have the view we would have had on a clear day, but it was still a nice view.  We could see pretty much all of Edinburgh, which is an interesting combination of very old (like the castle, part of which dates back to the 1100s), to the old-but-not-as-much (like all the Victorian buildings), to the pretending-to-be-old (like all the buildings in the style of ancient Greece), to the startlingly-modern (like the Parliament building).  Very strange juxtaposition.  London also has that juxtaposition of very old and quite modern, but it tends to have the very old things clustered together, and likewise the very modern, whereas in Edinburgh it all seemed a mish-mash.

Anyway, the castle.  I wandered all over and saw St. Margaret's chapel, which is the oldest thing there (the one built around the 1100s), and the Great Hall, and the War Veterans' Memorial (for the Scots who died in the world wars), and the Scottish Crown Jewels, and the room where King James the VI and I was born.  We had audio tour guides, but I was so busy looking at things that I was only half paying attention to mine.

When we were done at the castle, we walked to the National Gallery.  It was cool, I suppose.  I never was much of one for art museums.  There were some pretty things, but I was not sad that we only had about an hour to look around until it closed.

We had a few hours of free time until dinner (which the hostel provided for us), but most of the people in the group wanted to take a nap.  I still felt awake, but I didn't want to go out by myself after dark in an unfamiliar city in the snow, so I just stayed in my room and read for awhile.  It was not a bad room, but it had bunkbeds and I was too slow, so I had to have top bunk.  It was also an extraordinarily creaky bunk, so I couldn't get into it, out of it, or move around in it without it creaking like hell.

After dinner we had the night to ourselves.  I just went out with a group of people to a pub, but I had a good time.  I did not drink that much, and we just spent the entire time talking and trading stories in a fairly quiet pub, which is what I like best in a bar experience.  Being there to socialize, not to get drunk.  I also discovered that one of the girls is a big fan of Doctor Who, and another thinks Final Fantasy VII is the greatest video game in the world, so I had plenty to talk about.

The next day we went to the High Kirk of St. Giles, which is also known as St. Giles' Cathedral and has at a couple of points actually been a cathedral, but it isn't properly anymore, it's the high kirk.  We had a tour of that, and I found it quite impressive, but I usually do for really old churches.  The window above the entrance had only been replaced a couple decades ago (actually, the stained glass windows in the kirk were all Victorian; in the Middle Ages and Early Modern periods, the kirk had clear glass), but it's called the Robert Burns window because the scenes in it relate to Robert Burns, which I found very cool.

After St. Giles, we went to the Museum of Scotland.  On our way, we passed a place called The Elephant House, which had a big sign in the window advertising itself as the birthplace of Harry Potter -- the cafe where JK Rowling thought up Harry Potter.

The museum was interesting.  It was huge, and we didn't have a lot of time scheduled for it, so we couldn't see that much.  There were seven floors, from the basement and the pre-history of Scotland to modern Scotland on the sixth floor, and the rooftop terrace with yet another awesome view of Edinburgh.  So much to look at.

After the museum we ate lunch, and I have a new favorite sandwich with an actual story behind it.  See, the hostel packed lunches for us, which was very nice -- or would have been, had the sandwiches not been covered in butter.  Seriously.  I had two half sandwiches, one of ham and one of tuna, and I like both of those on their own, but both ham and tuna were thin layers of meat surrounded by think layers of butter.  There was maybe two or three times as much butter as meat.

I don't even like butter as a thin layer spread on bread.  I'm sure these sandwiches could have looked less appetizing, but I really don't want to imagine how.  We had free time that afternoon and Martin was organizing an optional trip to Linlithgow Palace that I wanted to go on, so I just ate my apple and chips and figured I'd picked up something else on the way to Linlithgow.

Linlithgow Palace, the birthplace of Mary Queen of Scots, is about a fifteen minute train ride away from Edinburgh, so we went back to the train station, and there I found My Sandwich.  Ham and mozzarella on a baguette, cold.  Normally I'm not much for cheese on my sandwiches, but that's cheddar and swiss and so on, and I do like mozzarella cheese on pizza, so I thought I'd try it.

Oh my God that was so good.  Ham and mozzarella on baguette.  I am so remembering this.  I bought another one for the train back to London yesterday, and it was still so good.

Anyway.  About half the group ended up going to Linlithgow, which was amazing.  It's partly in ruins -- there are no roofs, and some of the walls are crumbling, but it's still mostly intact.  It was raining the whole time, but I had such a great time exploring.  So many awesome pictures, especially one Martin took of a bunch of us in what had been the kitchen.  The fireplace there was so huge that seven of us could stand in there without touching each other, the sides, or the ceiling, so Martin took a picture of us in the fireplace.

We explored that for about an hour, including going up to the top of the tallest tower and seeing yet another great view, but the palace isn't really that big.  We went back to Edinburgh and still had a few hours to do our own thing before dinner.  I wanted new gloves, but in particular I wanted those kind of fingerless gloves with the flaps that fit over and turn them into mittens, but I couldn't find them.  I went to two different malls and walked down several shopping streets, and could not find the kind of gloves I wanted.  It's probably because winter fashion is out and spring fashion is in, sigh.

I went back to the hostel for dinner, and afterwards one of my roommates expressed interest in the bar across the street advertising pear cider.  I love pear cider, so I agreed to go with her.  It ended up being just us, because a bunch of people were either going out for serious drinking (it was one of the girls' twenty-first birthday) or were going on the Edinburgh Ghost Tour.  I thought about going on the Ghost Tour, but it looked like it was going to be cold and wet, so I decided not to.  (The next day I was glad, because the girls who went said that they'd never been so soaked.)

The pear cider was wonderful.  Definitely the best I've ever had.  The bartender noticed our accents and asked where we were from, so we chatted a bit about that.  It was really just a nice relaxing experience, where we just talked and had a couple drinks.  After two each, we went back to the hostel and went to bed, and it was pretty early, but I still slept well.

Yesterday we climbed Carlton Hill, which was the second of the absolutely awful climbs.  Carlton Hill is where the Nelson Monument (for Admiral Nelson) is, and though a bunch of the group climbed to the top, I did not.  Carlton Hill is also where they built this thing they wanted to be a second Parthenon, because during the Enlightenment Edinburgh was called the Athens of the North, but they ran out of money partway through and so this second Parthenon is unfinished and looks sorta funny and is sometimes called the Shame of Scotland.

After Carlton Hill, we went to the Scottish Parliament.  It's an extremely modern-looking building (quite the contrast to Westminster Palace) right across from Holyrood Palace, which is where the Queen stays when she's in Scotland.  We went on a tour of the Parliament, which I thought was very cool for multiple reasons.  Scotland had had a parliament since at least 1235, but it was dissolved in 1707 when Scotland united with England to become Great Britain, and has since been governed from London.  But then in 1999 they got their own parliament back, and after learning more about Scottish history, I felt so happy for them.  They really are a people with their own distinctive history and society, and though I think the issue about them becoming a completely separate nation again is very complicated, if they do manage it I'll be very happy for them.  Scotland is now the only country in the United Kingdom to have its own parliament -- Northern Ireland, Wales, and London have assemblies, but they can't make laws and raise taxes, and parliaments can, so they've all just been governed out of Westminster.  But now Scotland has its own parliament, which is a step closer to being independent.

Our tour guide also said that the Scottish Parliament is a unicameral legislature where committees are used in effect as a second chamber, and I think I'm going to have to do some more research to figure out how that works.  I mean, Congress has committees that do what the Scottish ones seem to, from my understanding, but Congress is still bicameral.  Now I want to figure out unicameral vs bicameral and their respective advantages and disadvantages.  I also really want to see Westminster, but that's not scheduled for awhile yet.

That was pretty much it for Scotland.  Our train left at three, so we had to get back to the hostel and get our bags and get to the station.  The first part of the train ride was actually sorta funny though, because at the front of our car was a hen party, and they were very...exuberant.  They got off at Newcastle, though, so they weren't there for very long.  Otherwise the train ride was quiet.

Next week we'll be going to Birmingham for a day, and later I'm going to try and organize trips to Southampton, where I have a friend, and Cardiff, because the Doctor Who friend and I really want to see it.

So I didn't end up at the Tower today.  Evanie texted me to meet up at three, but when I got there, we realized it was closing soon.  Evanie's friend Katrina had thought it closed at 6:30, but then I looked at the board and it said 16:30 -- as in, 4:30.  Like my decision with Westminster Abbey yesterday, we decided we didn't want to shell out thirteen pounds for only an hour.

Instead, we went to the Tower Bridge.  I forgot my camera again, but Evanie got some pictures she said she'd send to me.  We climbed up the north tower, and it was a lot of stairs, but it was still better than the Horrible Greenwich Hill.  There were lots of Tower Bridge trivia placards along the upper walkway, along with things that the people there called "Victorian Games", like dominoes, and noughts and crosses (aka tic tac toe), and hopscotch, and something like horseshoes whose real name I can't remember.

At about 4:30 the bridge was scheduled to be raised so a boat could pass under it, so we went outside and watched that.  Heh.  We were standing there watching, and from behind us we hear some people exclaiming "Oh, the bridge is raised!  No wonder everyone's staring!"  As if the Tower Bridge weren't a tourist attraction and historical landmark and something people generally stare at every day.

We wandered around the south side of the river a bit.  London has the coolest City Hall building.  Seriously.  It's all glass and spiral-y.  But eventually we got cold and hungry, so we went to Soho and met up with some other people from the program and had Indian for dinner.  Mine was pretty good, but I still loved the naan best.  Mmmm, naan.

Soho is pretty cool at night.  Lots of people, lots of interesting things to see and do, lots of theatres.  I probably could have people-watched for awhile, but we were getting cold again and everyone else wanted ice cream, so we ended up at a McDonalds on Tottenham Court Road.  Wow, was that the trendiest McDonalds I've ever seen.  They had the coolest chairs, a downstairs sort of lounge/eating area, and played nice music.  Totally not what I was expecting from a McDonalds.  I still don't want to eat its food, but it was pretty cool.

Over dinner and then lingering at the McDonalds, Evanie and some of the others were talking about the late night they'd had last night, drinking and dancing; I'd gathered they'd gotten home at something like three am.  I...found myself minorly repulsed; I have little interest in having a similar evening myself.  A couple drinks at a pub sounds nice, but I don't really want to stay out too late.  Some of the group was talking about the desire to experience clubbing in London, but I don't really see the attraction.  I'm not sure how to feel about this.  On the one hand, I do want to be social, and though I enjoyed wandering around by myself yesterday, I want to be doing things with people.  On the other hand, I don't want to do something that doesn't sound fun to me -- and it helps that I will save money by avoiding it, money which I can then use on things that do interest me.  I just...don't want to be doing those things alone all the time. *sigh*

People seem to have already fallen into groups.  I seem to be something of an anomaly in deciding to study abroad without a close friend in the same program, or at least the same city, and a lot of people are still spending most of their time with the people they already know.  I went with Evanie and her friend today because she'd been telling me after class on Thursday that they'd been intending to do the Tower today, and I was just like "Can I tag along?"  I enjoyed it, and I think they enjoyed having me there, but they were much closer friends and at times I did feel like a third wheel.

I'm...really not much good at joining established groups.  Well, I'll keep trying.  It's still early days.

I'm having issues with the pictures.  I did finally get some of them uploaded (God, the school computers were going so slow...), but when I looked at them today, they were too huge to even fit the screen, and I don't know how to make them smaller. *sigh*  So until that happens, probably no pictures.

I decided I'm not going to York this weekend.  I made tentative plans for Tower of London tomorrow with Evanie (she also goes to UPS, has been in a couple of my classes before), but I'm waiting for her to text me back.  I would like to see the Tower of London -- properly this time.  One of my clearest memories of England from the first time I was here was getting bored at the Tower and sitting on a bench to read early on while my family looked around.  This memory is probably so clear because when I remember it I think about what an idiot I was for wanting to read a book I could read at home rather than seeing something as interesting as the Tower of London.  Well, at least I'm not going to make that mistake again.

Last night I looked up the weather and saw today was supposed to be pretty clear, so I decided to go to St. James's Park, though unfortunately I forgot my camera.  I grabbed some lunch and ate it there, and I fed the ducks, and I walked around the whole park a couple of times.  I ended up walking out by the Horse Guards and wandered around the area a bit.  Which was awesome.

I saw 10 Downing Street!  Some cars were leaving just as I got there so the gate was open for a bit, but I couldn't really see much besides a street.  Still, it was 10 Downing Street!  I'd seen Buckingham Palace from St. James's Park, but I hadn't gotten that close.  I also saw the Houses of Parliament, since they were right there, and I got quite close to Big Ben, which was very cool.  It's very pretty when you're looking at it close up in the sun.

I wandered over to Westminster Abbey, but I didn't go inside because it was twelve pounds and I'd only gotten there about an hour before closing so I didn't think I'd get my money's worth if I went in then, especially without my camera.  I'll be going on an excursion there with one of my classes anyway later, so it's not like that was my only chance to see Westminster Abbey.  I did go into St. Margaret's Cathedral, though, which is apparently where Members of Parliament traditionally go to worship.  It had a lot of memorials on the walls, including apparently Sir Walter Raleigh, but I must have missed his because the only person I recognized was Olaudah Equiano.

From there I went back to St. James's Park, and on the way passed a statue of...Abraham Lincoln.  I was walking up to it and thinking "That guy looks familiar -- a lot like Lincoln, in fact," and then I looked at the inscription and it was.  It surprised me because I was not expecting a statue of an American president in the middle of London.  I think on Tuesday I'll ask my history teacher if Lincoln had any special significance to the British, because now I'm really curious why he was there.

A few days ago I told one of my online British friends how I was missing goldfish crackers, and she told me I should try an international food store.  I looked one up and decided to try it, but when I found it, it was very small and didn't have much of anything, very little seeming particularly international.  I was disappointed, but I suppose I can do without goldfish a while longer. :p  I did stop at Tescos, though, to get some things to make for lunch.  My first Tescos! XD

Today was a really nice day, if chilly, and Sunday is supposed to also be a nice day, so maybe I'll go to Hyde Park then, or some other park.  It's been very rainy recently.  People always warned me about how rainy Washington would be when I went to college, but when I got there I found the amount of rain was exaggerated.  Well, it doesn't seem to be exaggerated here, because it has been raining, a lot.  I do wish I'd gotten a jacket with a hood, but at least I have an umbrella!

I forgot to bring my flash drive today, so no pictures yet again! Wednesday is my busiest day with three classes, but those are spread out beginning at 9:30am and ending at 5:30pm. Time enough to go on the internet, but not to go home and get my flash drive.

On Sunday I actually got sick. Just a cold, which is really going around our group of students (it's easier to point out those who don't have it than those who do), but I didn't really want to do anything then either. It was a bit better on Monday and Tuesday, and I'm almost over it now, so hopefully this weekend I will be doing something. Apparently there's a Viking festival in York, so I might see about getting a student rail card (makes rail tickets a third cheaper!) and going to York. I heard some people talk about going on Saturday, so I might see about going with them.

Next week we'll be going to Scotland for three days -- Wednesday through Friday. I think we'll be the entire time in Edinburgh, and I'm warned that it's very cold, so I'm going to have to remember to bring my sweaters and dress very warmly. Here it's been alternately very cold and not as cold as I was expecting, but I'm not sure if that's the weather or just something weird my body is doing, because everyone else seems to think it's just plain cold.

Last night was our first theatre show, the play Enron, about the rise and fall of the company Enron. It was sort of strange, being there as an American -- it seemed like such an American show, but it was written by a Brit and is performed by Brits in Britain. My theatre teacher explained today that Britain's economy is so tied to America's that something like Enron would still have been very significant here, which makes sense, but it still feels a bit strange.

I did get dressed up. I knew I wouldn't have time to go back home and change between my last class and the show, so I wore tights under my jeans and brought a skirt and my nice shoes, and changed into them after class. No one else got dressed up. It was also raining, so though I did bring my umbrella, it was not so much fun wearing tights and open-toed shoes in the rain on uneven cobblestones while hurrying and often running to get to the theatre on time. Especially since I saw very few people dressed as nicely as I was. Liz explained later that people are going to theatre more casually now, especially in London, which I'm definitely going to remember because jeans would have been much more comfortable throughout the whole adventure.

I enjoyed Enron. The play actually explained financial matters so I understood them, which I felt was quite the feat. It was also something of a musical -- there were musical numbers and interludes, including songs both written by the playwright and inserted by her to appropriate places -- I especially enjoyed Guns N' Roses's Welcome to the Jungle as particularly apt for the corporation stage. There were a lot of pop culture references to things like Jurassic Park and Star Wars, which I also enjoyed.

Our next play is Dunsanine in about two weeks, which is apparently a sequel to Macbeth written last year or thereabouts. I think that'll be interesting. I'm looking forward to it!

Week's End

So, thus ends my first week in London.

And this is my first post, mostly because I've had a fuzzy internet connection. When I first open up my laptop, I get good reception, but after a few minutes it peters out and is gone until I close the laptop, wait a few minutes, and open it again. I don't know what's up with that, but I'm either going to have to live with spotty internet and get steady online time at the school computers, or pay 99 pounds to have the Apple people look at it and figure out what's wrong. I'm more inclined to the spotty internet -- for now, at least.

This post will have no pictures, since I haven't really had good internet long enough to upload them. Thankfully I brought my flash drive, so I can put the pictures on there and then upload them from a school computer, but I'm only at school Monday-Thursday. I did get some pretty nice pictures, too!

Anyway.

The flight from LA was...horrible. I hate flying at the best of times, but with this particular flight I only managed to get at most two hours of sleep, I was always uncomfortable, and it was bumpy all across the Atlantic. My stomach hated it, and all I wanted was to go to sleep and not feel it, but alas! no good. Then when we got to Heathrow, we had to stay in a holding pattern for at least fifteen minutes when all I wanted was to get off the damn plane, but then when we finally land, we had to wait another fifteen minutes for our gate to be free, and I just wanted OFF THE DAMN PLANE. All told there ended up being a delay of almost an hour. Gah. I hate flying.

I met my roommate Liz, who is nice, and we got to the house just fine. My host mum Suzy was in Australia until Wednesday, but her son Tarik was there with his fiancee Francesca and they were both nice and helpful so we were fine. I was so tired I took a nap for a few hours, but I still managed to get a good eight hours of sleep that night.

Monday was our first day of orientation. The commute was about an hour and a half, with one bus ride, three different tube lines, and a ten minute walk on either end. I've since managed to condense that commute to about an hour, but that's with cooperative buses and tube lines.

There are twenty-nine people in my program, three of which are guys. We listened to some orientation stuff, and then Martin, the program director and one of our teachers, took us for a short walk around the neighborhood. Mom -- Dorothy L. Sayers lived just down the street from my school building! Literally down the street -- I walk for about a minute and get to a placard saying "Dorothy L. Sayers lived here".

Tuesday our teachers gave brief explanations of their classes. I'd been intending to take Britain Today (mandatory class), a history of the Empire class, a theater class, and a Shakespeare class, but now I've decided to take a 19th and 20th century novels class instead of the Shakespeare class. About half the reason I wanted Shakespeare was to see some of his plays, but I can see some of the plays without taking the class, and with the novels class we're supposed to go out and explore the London described in those novels, which sounded more interesting to me.

Tuesday afternoon was spent going to Greenwich. We took a boat ride down the Thames, and I got lots of pictures of things like the London Eye, the Tower Bridge, and so on. We had to climb up an awful hill to get to the Royal Observatory, which is where the meridian line is. It also had a pretty awesome view, so I took some pictures.

Wednesday was first day of actual classes, but it was mostly just introductory stuff. I was amused, however, when my history teacher started mocking the French. I'd thought it was just a stereotype that the British and the French like making fun of each other, but I guess not, if my history teacher does it at basically the first opportunity.

Also on Wednesday, Martin took us to the British Museum for about an hour. The British Museum is only about a ten-minute walk away from school, which is nice. Evanie and I went to see the Sutton Hoo helmet, which our History of the English Language professor last semester told us about and showed us pictures, so we got a couple pictures of us in front of it. When I can upload my pictures to the internet, I'm going to send those to him.

On Thursday I didn't have class until 4:30, so I wanted to take my computer to an Apple store to see if there was something they could do about the internet. I went to the one on Regent Street, so I could also explore Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus a bit. I'll definitely be going back there when I have more time. The Apple store, on the other hand, was not helpful except in telling me I'll need to pay 99 pounds for them to take my computer for a week or two and figure out what's wrong. I don't think I'm in such dire straits that I need that yet.

Friday was the first day of the weekend, since we always get three-day weekends. Liz and I and some of Liz's friends went to Highgate to have tea in a tea shop where Francesca works, and we felt very British about having tea in a tea shop. XD We were somewhat less British by taking loads of pictures to commemorate it. We then walked to the Highgate Cemetary because we wanted to see Karl Marx's grave, but you actually have to pay three pounds to get into the cemetary, so, after a few comments about how Karl Marx would be rolling in his grave at a cemetary practicing such capitalism, we left.

We spent a bit of time at the Sherlock Holmes museum on Baker Street -- or, more accurately, the gift shop. At some point I'll definitely go see the museum itself, but the gift shop was interesting enough, for awhile. Then we came back to Harrow (that's where the homestays are) and had our first meal in a pub. Liz and her friends are all 19/20, so they were very excited to be legally buying drinks. I was very amused. They all ordered different things and kept tasting each other's drinks to see what each was like, but I didn't bother because I've already tried all the things they'd had. I was somewhat disturbed to feel a bit old. XD

Now it's Saturday, and I've had a lazy day, only going to the Harrow Town Centre to get a quick lunch and buy some groceries. I feel a bit odd for just hanging around all day, like I should be going out and doing stuff, but I think that's mostly an external thing -- like other people would be telling me I need to go out and do stuff. Trust me, I am not intending to spend my days here like I do in America, staying home most of the time, but I do need some down time, some just-for-me time. It refreshes me. If I spend every day going out and doing touristy stuff, I'll get burned out on the touristy stuff and just want to sit down and read a book. So to avoid that, I'm going to try and take a day every week or so just for me to relax.

Fourteen weeks is both a long time, and no time at all. I do have plenty of time to be a tourist, but also to pace myself. It doesn't feel like it's all that long until I'm done with my program, but I'm sure I can fit in what I most want to do and still keep myself from getting burned out.