Demon on the Mountain

Thursday: We went to Edinburgh. I felt so... metropolitan? Does that make sense? (My living, breathing dictionary isn't here right now so I'm at a loss for words.) We rode the subway and train like it was no big deal. That is first time (I remember) I've ridden a train for the purpose of getting somewhere.

On the train

We went up to Edinburgh Castle and explored there. In the rain. I didn't know castles were pretty much a little town instead of one or a couple big buildings. Humans have lived at this site since the 9th century BC. Wow. The castle is built on top of a big volcanic rock called Castle Rock. The Honours of Scotland are kept there and we got to see them! There was the Crown of Scotland, a sword, and a sceptre all dating back to the 15 or 16th century. For more information, check out the Wikipedia page. It's pretty interesting. They have super thick doors, a guard in the room, and no photography is allowed in the room.

Awesome view of Edinburgh. Even more awesome when it's not foggy.

My new Scottish boyfriend. Please.

Jenna, Carolyn, Audrey, Me, and Emilia

After exploring the castle we walked down the Royal Mile. Along that road or close by are quite a few cool things: St. Giles Cathedral, lots of tartan and cashmere stores, the Scottish Whiskey Experience, where J.K. Rowling supposedly got the idea for Harry Potter, the Scottish Parliament, and Holyrood Palace where the Queen stays when she comes to Scotland.

I'm pretty sure this is St. Giles' Cathedral. If I go back, I definitely want to go inside.

Our whole group met up at the bottom of the Royal Mile to hike Arthur's Seat. So. Much. Walking. But it was totally worth it. It was a steep hike and I was lucky to have 3 or 4 people who also hate running up mountains and appreciate taking breaks and enjoy looking at the scenery. It was sooo beautiful the whole way up. In a book we read this week, a character hiked to the top and supposedly saw a demon. Or something. So we pulled out the book and Cat dramatically read that passage from the book at the top of Arthur's Seat. It was pretty poetic. Next, we took the steepest route possible down. I dunno why. It was pretty scary because it was windy and the stability of the ground was questionable. I almost sat down and scooted down on my butt. We saw some ruins of St. Anthony's Church on the way down. It was right on the edge of a cliff. That would have been an awesome picture way back in the day. We did some rock climbing to get down. But we pretty much walked around the whole mountain that day. So, understandably, everyone was pretty tired and things got a little frustrating for some people. We kept joking about the demon at the top of Arthur's Seat following us down.

View on the way up Arthur's Seat. This isn't even at the top!

FUNNIEST PICTURE OF MY LIFE.

Like a boss.

St. Anthony's Chapel

Friday: I met up with a friend I knew from Irish Dance like 7 years ago and her boyfriend! How cool is that? I haven't seen her in years but I saw her while in Scotland. It's funny to me. We went to a super yummy Italian place off Buchanan Street called Roma. It was my first experience at a sit-down restaurant. It was interesting to see the difference between Europe and the US. We sat around for an hour after lunch just talking. That's normal here. People usually order wine, coffee, or tea, but obviously I didn't.

Skylar and I 

After that Emilia and I wandered around stores on Buchanan Street. They have H&M there. I wanted to buy the whole store. There was also another really cute store with the funniest stuff.  There were backpacks, notebooks, pencil sharpeners, etc with cats or fruits and veggies on them. I also found a "So You Think You're a Hipster" book; it had all the different types of hipsters in it. On the way home, we stopped by a co-op called Iceland and I bought MORE chocolate... When I got home I took ANOTHER nap. I swear I've taken a nap pretty much everyday... Cat and some people in our group were going to go to the laser tag YSA activity but they missed the bus. Hopefully we can do other stuff with the YSA. They were so nice  had awesome accents. We talked in the hallway about going to St. Andrews, and I spotted an attractive boy living on our floor. Turns out Cat and I share a kitchen with him so I made friends with him. I was very proud of myself. He is British so he also has an awesome accent. He knows the word sieve and calls dorms accommodations... So I will definitely be keeping that friendship alive. Oh! I almost forgot! Cat and I found Ben & Jerry's for half off at Tesco. It was 2.24 pounds (about $3.41). Best day ever! While there we saw a guy who was, according to Cat, coming off a meth high. It was funny but really freaky at the same time. He was running around the store saying expletives under his breath. After that excitement, I tried to write my mini essays. I forgot how much I hated writing...

Saturday: Most of my group went to either St. Andrews or Loch Lomond (where Nessie is). I was silly and avoided writing my papers so I decided to take a day off, relax, and finish my papers. I will hopefully be going to a Ceilidh dance tonight! I'm excited for that!

Staring Contest

I rode the Subway here for the first time yesterday. It was pretty normal. It felt like an uncoordinated giant was trying to rock me to sleep. We got off the cute little subway car, walked up some stairs, and came out in the middle of a very crowded Buchanan Street in Glasgow's City Centre. We saw where Queens Street train station was and headed up to Glasgow Cathedral. Man, this building is cool and old. Saint Mungo is buried there and it was built sometime during the 13th to 15th centuries. It is beautiful!

Next we headed up to the Necropolis. Not really sure why... 50,000 individuals have been buried there. There was a lot of really cool headstones and monuments. It has a beautiful view up there and my camera ran out of batteries so it was nice to take some time to just enjoy the view and take it all in.

After that I tried a deep-fried sausage and Iron Bru. My friend, who is on her mission here, told me to try Iron Bru while I was here so I did. Not very good. Next I'm going to try Ginger Beer. After eating we headed home and I read James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner for the rest of the day for class. It is very confusing and interesting at the same time.

Today, Cat and I almost missed class. Neither of our alarms did their job; she may have turned hers off in the middle of the night and mine was silent or very quiet. Not entirely sure what happened there. Anyways, we got ready in 15 minutes and headed off to class where I got into a staring contest with our teacher Matt. Not on purpose. He asked for a volunteer and I figured I might as well look at him and not volunteer then awkwardly avoid looking at him. It didn't actually work. He ended up making me share a passage and my thoughts anyways to finish class. It's cool though. I'm fine sharing my thoughts but I'm too scared to actually raise my hand. And there's like 3 or 4 people that talk a lot and have very deep points. That intimidates me. Anyways, he said it was a very good closing point. SCORE. Ahhhh yeah. Take that smart people! After class, Kerry, Matt's wife, gave us lychee/litchi. They look like berries and taste a bit like grapefruit.

Next we headed over to Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum for an organ concert. The organ was huge! The whole museum was huge. I will definitely be heading back there to check it out some more.

This was hanging from the ceiling. My favorite is in the top right.

I explored and then heading back to my dorm and watched some Bachelorette with some gal pals (: Then I passed out and took a nap. Then we walked half and hour to church for institute. Best decision ever. All the young single adults there were SO nice and the guys were so cute. I'm in love. Whatever. They told us some good places to go and told me it's not worth it to go to Prestwick... I'm not completely convinced. On the way home we told our worst date stories. Good times!

Tomorrow we are heading to Edinburgh! Lots of walking...

We're So Scottish

So after a super long and boring trip over here, I have safely arrived and settled into my home for the next 5 weeks. We have a pretty awesome view from our window. It's nothing too special but it sure is pretty, and if you stick your head out you can see a church. And since we are in Scotland, the architecture is beautiful.

Anyways, we sat by a French man on the plane, got interrogated by the customs officer, laughed at a very badly parked car with angry notes on the windshield, went grocery shopping for the essentials, and realized just how jet lagged we were. For more information, check out Cat's super funny blog post about our trip over and our first few hours here.

The view from our window.

Sunday: Well, some background is required for this story first. Cat and I stayed up late watching You, Again because we weren't tired cause it is 5 hours ahead here. So we woke up at 11, with both of us needing to shower and be ready by 11:30 to walk over to church with the rest of our group. We were ready at 11:34 and ran down to the lobby. Nobody was there. Awkward. So Cat pulled up the address of the church on her phone (yay technology) and we asked a funny old guy for directions. Funny little fact: the guy we asked for directions was actually the guy that read the notes from the blueberry car the night before. OKAY, BACK TO THE STORY. So we asked this guy and his wife for directions. He said it was really far and told us we were crazy for wearing "such daft shoes" and not taking the bus. It couldn't be that far, right? Wrong. It took an hour. But we saw lots of Glasgow, witnessed a street race, asked some nice people for directions, and eventually made it to church. They had a YSA Sunday School and us BYU students definitely tripled or quadrupled it's size. The teacher is named Patsy; she's super funny and an excellent baker. So lots of us girls got nasty blisters because we had no idea how dang far it was.

Cat, Carolyn, Emilia, and Rachel on the way home from church.

Sunday night consisted of walking around to see important places, writing lots of missionaries and Cat trying to see the Bavarian Tuba Players. Or something like that. We met a nice man from Singapore and talked to him for a while. Then we stayed up late watching When in Rome. Josh Duhamel. Yum.

Monday: What a day! We had our first class. It was a battle to stay awake. Like 3 of the students talked the whole time, which was totally fine with me. The best part of class was when he gave us 50 pounds each and subway passes. Love that. After class we got some lunch including chips/french fries with salt and vinegar. We're so Scottish. Then we went and explored the Botanic Gardens for a long time. I would not mind going back there at all! So many different different plants from all over the world! Here are a few of my favorite plants and people:

After thoroughly exploring the humid greenhouses we enjoyed the sun and cold wind for a while and then explored the park some more because we didn't want to walk all the way back to our dorms just to walk back over to our professor's flat for FHE. So we wondered on over to the super cute kid's garden. From what we gathered, kids volunteer to help maintain the garden. How cool is that?! After that we took a nap in the park. We probably looked homeless. 

Eventually we moved on from the park. We walked down a street to a used bookshop that seriously had thousands of books. Like floor to ceiling books with bookshelves in the middle and piles of books on top and on the floor and just everywhere. To make it even more impressive there was a basement, and possible an upper level, full of books too! We checked out a thrift store where almost everything is 10 pounds. No sweet finds there. We discovered a back way a back way to our professor's flat and were excited that we didn't have to go up a big hill from this direction. BUT we still had two or three hours until FHE. So we wandered in and out of shops (Papyrus was my favorite) for a while and ended up in the library. We settled down with some fun books and... I fell asleep. Two naps in public in one day! I'm not sure whether I should be proud of that or not. I kinda am. Anyways, after our naps, we decided to get a light dinner before heading over to FHE. We tried to go to Gregg's because our professor raved about their sausage pastry but it was closed so we went across the street to check out Iceland-- a cheap co-op store. We ended up getting sweets for the most part. I saw the wagon wheels and knew I had to get them because my family and I had just watched Wild Child and their deliciousness is mentioned in the movie. Emilia found some chocolate cookies that looked good but were called Digestives. Sketch name. She didn't get them. Cat found Happy Hippos, which are DELISH and I will most definitely be taking a bunch home with me if I don't eat them all before I get home... Aero and Flake bars too.

My excellent purchases.

After Iceland, we headed up to FHE. We ended up not taking our alternate route and did have to do up the hill after all. We got there 15 minutes early and decided to sit outside and wait for more of our peers to arrive. I felt like a hobo for at least the 3rd time that day. We were questioning if FHE was cancelled when the rest of our group showed up fashionably late. We climbed to the top and had fun re-introducing ourselves and chatting. I got to know some of the girls better and found out one of them has lived in the same apartment complex as me for a full year! On the way home we tried to take a short cut. Tried being the main word. The gate was locked. But as a result I got to see a fox and take this picture. So worth it.

 

Glasgow is great and I am never going home! Or I will just have to suddenly become a billionaire and bring my family back over here AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. I love it!

Bu-bye ATL. Helloooo Scotland.

To start, I'M TO SCOTLAND TODAY! Well, technically, I'm flying to London tonight and will arrive there tomorrow. It would be best to not ask me about the times because the whole time change thing confuses me andddddd I don't want to think about how much time will be spent on a plane in the next 24 hours. I have never been out of the country besides Canada when I was a baby so this will be my longest experience with planes. At least I'm just going across the pond! Optimism, right?? So our flight leaves at 9:25 PM tonight, so I will hopefully be sleeping for most of it. Hopefully. It doesn't help that I have a nasty cold and/or allergies. Hook me up with some antihistamines! Maybe some NyQuil to chug? I'm game for that.
Anyways, I'm heading over with my best gal pal Cat. We are going to take over Glasgow! And I'll hopefully get to see my friend Caryn who is on a mission in Scotland! And I'm going to go see some castles and where they filmed the train to Hogwarts! I'm just really excited. Whatever.

Be jealous.