1/5 report

Two months. Two months ago I was buying shoes, practicing packing my bags, saying goodbye to all of my friends, and getting ready to get on a plane. Since then I've actually managed to see a significant portion of Scotland, and I haven't had any major breakdowns! Even though I've been comfortable here for a long time, I think it took my trip to Paris to really make it official. Somehow a vacation away from a place and then coming back to it and unpacking and settling back into familiar territory just makes it seem that much more like home. And that's what this is now, my home!

It was interesting seeing everyone's reactions after break. Last night we all had a dinner (paid for by Butler, woohoo!) and got to catch up and see each other again. For those people who are staying only one semester, the break marked the halfway point. I think Fredrick reacted the best; he's made plans for every weekend between now and December trying to cram in as much traveling and exploring as he can before exams. I hadn't really thought about the difference between a semester an a year before, but now I'm realizing that if I had to go home in 6 weeks (which is how long they have) I would be royally pissed off! Things are just getting started, I'm just settling into my room, getting close friends, got a job, getting to know Stirling, and yet there's still so much I want to see before I leave!

Speaking of things that I want to see, there are some exciting things coming up for me soon. First, Elyse is flying into Edinburgh (her first out of US experience) on Thursday morning so I'm going to go meet her at the airport and spend the weekend in Edinburgh wandering around. Then we're going to come back here and base out of my room and show her around campus and Stirling and hopefully get out the next weekend maybe up to St Andrews, or the highlands or even Isle of Skye if I can pull it off.


The next exciting piece of news is that I might be getting to spend Christmas in Greece with Alex, one of my friends from SUDS!! (Stirling University Drama Society, in case that slipped through the cracks). If everything works out, I'll get to stay with her family in Greece and then get her to show my around her island and the rest of Greece and maybe even get over to Italy. I'm super excited about that, especially since Greece and Italy where the two other countries I was seriously considering studying in, but the language barrier held me back. Now I'll have a native Greek to show me around and show me all the things that tourists never get to see! And she speaks Italian too (studied there for a little under a year) so that will be awesome too. I'll keep you informed about all of that though, and let you know if it works out or not.

I think that's about all of the excitement that's coming up soon, so now I'm going to continue my retrospective posting of things I've done in the past month. (I'll get to Paris eventually, I promise). Now, come back with me to Oct 5th, a gray Scottish friday.

Celeste's flatmate, Monika, (a foreign student from Slovakia) occasionally has access to her bosses car and this day they decided to go to Loch Lomond just for fun. I was invited and decided to tag along. I mean, free transportation to one of the reportedly most beautiful lochs in the trossochs? Yeah, count me in.




This is the three of us. You should recognize Celeste by now, and that's Monika on the left.






Here is a little panorama composite photo of the Loch showing that it is, indeed, beautiful.

This was from the other side of the loch after we drove around.

Unfortunately, whenever someone points a camera at me, I have a bad habit of acting like an idiot. Oh well, at least you all know I haven't changed much. . .






This was our second stop, a little castle on the side of the Loch. I think it had been renovated into an office building or something stupid like that. The girls used the bathroom and I used the vending machines inside.








Just a little ways down the way from the castle there was this little playground, so we all let our inner child out and played around on it for about half an hour.





There was this net meshy thing with tow layers and I of course sat on the bottom one and took some silly pictures.






These things just remind me of City Park when I was younger. Or last summer. Whatever. Shut up.

This thing though, was the best thing at the park. It was like a merry-go-round on crack, or maybe bred with a see-saw and a climbing rope. You'd sit in the curves of the huge rope and then you'd have to have someone else sit on the other side to keep your bum from hitting the ground, and then you get another friend to push you around in circles! It's craaazzy! The bearing was a little crappy though, so it didn't turn as well as I would have liked. Oh well.

After the playground, I was apparently in a playful mood, and I proceeded to climb a tree. Here's a picture once I'm in the tree, but we didn't get pictures of the really cool parts though. I basically had to climb up Monika to get to the first branch, so I was standing on her hand, and then her shoulder. And on the way down, I literally just wrapped my arms around one of the leafy bits and slid down. Kinda sway-y and scary, but awesome none-the-less.

Finally, on our way back, we watched this rainbow grow until it stretched all the way across the sky. It was amazing. I haven't seen a good rainbow in a long time. We followed it all the way home, and it's the same rainbow in my previous picture of Stirling Castle.

That's it for now! I love you guys, and can't wait to show some of you around!

Forests and Castles

Do you all remember that hill that I pointed out in the video of my flat? No? Well, it's there, whether you remember or not. I can see it from my window, and from just about anywhere on campus. It's just opposite the Wallace Monument and appearently it's called Dumiat hill/mountain. (Given that Ben Nevis is the tallest at only 4000 something feet, I guess this little guy counts for something.)

Regardless of it's classification, a couple weeks ago I decided to hike it. Here's a picture of it from the road I was on. I think I took the long way to get there, but I wasn't really going for a speed record anyway.


About half way to the top, here's looking back onto my campus. Unfortunately, it started getting dark before I made it to the top, and I wanted to get back down while it was still light out. This means I still haven't made it to the top, but I'm sure I still will. I've got plenty of time, I just need to wait for the weather to agree.

On another adventure, I went to see the Stirling Castle. Now, this was the home of the royalty for a number of years and because of that, Stirling was considered the historic capital of Scotland. Because of it's size however, Edinburgh became the capital when it was time to make it official. But, back to the pretty pictures.


On my way to the castle, I passed through what used to be the front of a big mansion things. I think it was the external wall of the grounds, rather than an actual wall of the building itself. It had this awesome gate in front of it though, and behind the gate there is a quiet little graveyard. Very pretty, especially the way it is built in a very hilly, rocky area, so there is a craig jutting out in the middle of the graveyard with a couple of benches on top.

This was one of the statue memorials in the graveyard. I loved the way the vines are crawling up it though, and right next to it there was another memorial completely overtaken by the growth. Really cool.

I did finally make it to the Castle itself and was pretty impressed. As you can see, it's built right on the edge of a frickin cliff. Pretty strong natural defence I would say.

A lot of the castle was in pretty good shape, having been rebuilt and maintained a lot recently. In fact, the palace building (residence for the King and Queen as well as recieving chambers) was surrounded by scaffolding while I was there because they are taking billions of pictures and measurements so that they can monitor its decay from weather and such, and keep it in good shape for as long as possible.





I enjoyed the less rebuilt areas, like the underground storage areas. I was confused by the height of the doors though, becuase they only were about 5'-6" tall. Were people that much smaller back then? Or maybe they just didn't care about their comfort so much in a room like this.




Speaking of rebuilt though, they had the funniest setup in the kitchens! They created a little mock scene of what it might have looked like back in the day when it was used. It was kinda cool, but really more creepy than anything with all the statues stairing at you and falling apart themselves.


There was also a building further away from the castle but still inside the main wall where they had setup a tapestry room, and where there we're people actually weaving a duplicate of the tapestry "The Hunt of the Unicorn." It was really impressive. Huge too. And they had to weave it sideways, which seemed a lot hard to me.

There was a lot of other stuff too, but as always pictures just don't do it justice, so you'll just have to come visit and see for yourself!

I will leave you with this amazing picture of the castle in its entire glory with an amazing full rainbow over head. I got this picture on the way back from a day trip out to Loch Lomond, which you'll hear about in the next post! (Also coming up, Paris pics!)

Was it worth the wait?

This is going to be the first of a barrage of posts to get you all caught up on my life and trips. Remember a long time ago when I said I was going on my first excursion? Well, here are the pictures from that outing. Better late then never, right? I was contemplating posting all of my photos between then and now all in one ginormungous post, but that was too overwhelming for me, and I like getting comments so I figure if I spread it out over a couple days / week then I'll get more comments, and you'll have more time to enjoy it all! This way everybody wins!

Anyway, on to the pictures. The second weekend of my being in Scotland (two days after starting school for those of you keeping track) everyone studying at Stirling went to Penrith to do our family home-stays. Penrith is actually just across the border in England, in the Lake District and the houses that we were in were actually spread out in a number of tiny little towns around Penrith. We all took a charter bus there and got picked up by our host families in car park in town. Everyone except me that is. My "mother" wasn't showing up. I waited with the coordinating mom and Daniel, her IFSA student, and eventually just ended up going back to her house since we didn't want to wait anymore. That actually worked out nicely because I got to have some delicious soup and see their house a little. (It was very small, and obviously an old building that had just slowly been added to or changed slightly to keep up with the times. A little bit like G&G Schroeders house if it were compressed into 4 rooms with the same amount of furniture.) My "mom" came to pick me up shortly after the soup, and we discovered that she had had a conflict and had asked one of the other parents to get me to her house. Obviously some miscommunication going on.


All was forgiven, and we went back to the house to settle in. (The picture at left is a view out of the front door looking right. Attached to the same building was a second house that looked pretty much identical) That evening I met her daughters, Charlotte (15) and Sarah (12) as well as 2 of Charlotte's friends. I think it was around then that it really hit me that I was going to be in a house full of teenage girls for the entire weekend. Whoo-boy. And it was Sarah's birthday on Sat. Lots and lots and lots of teenage girls. I was a little skeptical to say the least.



After some crackers and cheese, I hit the hay. Sarah was nice enough (read: forced by her mother) to let me use her room, so this is were I slept. In fair compensation for the overuse of fabrics and other hanging paraphernalia, the comforter was electric! I slept quite cozily in that bed, if a little pressed for space.





Oh, I also forgot to mention that they had a black lab named Gia. (Ghea?) I'll just give you a second to soak in how adorable she is and how much she looks like Regan. That made me miss her a lot but it was also awesome to have some quality dog time.

On Saturday everyone doing the homestays (well, not everyone. It was optional, but nearly everyone) went on a hike to a place called Aria Force where there was this awesome waterfall.

The trail went over a bridge at the top of the falls, and then wound back down and went over another bridge lower down. You can see the upper bridge in this photo.

And here we have pretty much the same shot, but with people in it, because that makes it more exciting. From left to right we have Marguerite, Mary, and Tara.

During this hike, I got so excited about the waterfall that I kinda ran on ahead of everyone else and went off the trail a bit to see it. Because the trail split and was somewhat loop-like (which I didn't know until much later) I ended up losing everyone else in my group. However, I did manage to find something crazy that no one else did.

This, my friends, is a log. Now, look closely at this log. Go ahead, I'll wait.




Good. So, did you notice anything weird about it? Kinda looks like there is a bunch of fungi stuff growing on it, huh? Well, that's what it looked like to me at a distance anyways, but when I got up close I discovered that it was in fact covered in coins!!!

I don't know if people did this while it was still standing, or if they just amused themselves with it once it had fallen. Maybe that's what killed the tree. There was also a stump at the end of the log which also had coins pounded into it. I have no idea if this was similar to throwing coins into a fountain, or more like carving your name in a tree, but it was really interesting looking.

But, enough about a log.

After hiking we (everyone again) went to get lunch at this little lakeside place and then got out on the lake on some rowboats!

That's another group paddling fiercely to get away from our boat.

One of the many (okay, okay. 2) islands we docked at and explored. Of course, when I say "docked" I'm using the term loosely. The first island had a nice pebbly area where we could just steer the boat straight into it and not have to slow down or pay attention or anything. The second island just had rocks, so we cleverly thought that one of us would jump out of the boat and pull the boat in with the hand rope that was attached to the prow. Luckily, this person wasn't me, because he ended up first stepping into the water, then slowly sliding down the rock he had just managed to climb onto before falling completely into the lake. He - was - soaked! Also luckily, it was a very nice and warm day, so it was more fun and inconvenient than miserable.

Somewhere during all of these shenanigans, I lost my umbrella. Why did I have it if it was such a nice warm day you may ask? Because somehow I was under the impression that it rained a lot in Scotland, and I didn't know if it happened quickly like in FoCo, or slowly, like. . . . somewhere else. (As I've since found out, it's a mix. Some days it can look like rain for hours and not drip a drop. Other days it can be blue sky and rain anyways. It's dumb.)



Post the boat, wet clothes, and umbrella losing adventure, I went with another family (my mom had to go shopping to get stuff for the birthday barbecue) and we went to an open air market where I bought some tiny delicious doughnuts. I also had the option of buying a (no joke) 2 foot long adjustable wrench. Unfortunately, I left my stash of "money that I don't want" back in my dorm, so I was forced to pass up the amazing offer.



Next: the castle that no one else got to see. The family I was with was pretty awesome and decided to take us to this castle on the way home, which no one else did. The castle was falling apart quite a bit, but the main tower still had sound outer hallways on all the levels, and there was a semi-rebuilt spiral staircase that let you access all of them. Pretty cool. There was also a well with ferns growing all along the wall that was very pretty. There weren't any underground bits though, which I tend to like the most.


That night we had the barbeque, then all the girls (birthday party group and Charlotte'n'company group) took off to do their own thing. We adults stayed and grilled more stuff and ate some delicious food and drank some beer and wine and just hung out. I think this was the first night that I really started noticing that I was getting a cold (which I am still getting over as of writing this). This was also the first night that I got to try a WKD blue, also called Blue Wicked. I would not recommend this drink to anyone. Ever. Even if I hate them.


The next day, we strapped a canoe onto the roof of the car and took off for a little more boat action. Oh, and I forgot to mention this part. You know how the roads in the UK are tiny and really windy? And you know how they drive a lot closer to things, like walls (ahem, Dad!) and people than we do? Well, I thought that in and of itself was scary enough. But imagine doing it with a fricken canoe strapped to the car!!!! It - was -scary. Not life threateningly scary, but I certainly didn't want to be the one driving.

But, back to the fun part. We got in the canoe. Apparently the power for a canoe comes from the front, and you steer from the back. Something I did not know, but it is very true. I was in the front the whole time, and I couldn't affect which way we were going at all! Everyone else steered just fine though, and we made it to a little picnic spot and back without incident.

I've also realized that the above picture is the only one I have of my adopted family, and it's really crappy. That's the mom, Anne at the left, then Sarah, Sarah's friend, and Charlotte.

So, that's my home stay! It was pretty fun, and definitely entertaining to see the similarities in the highschoolers/teenagers. iPods, MSN instant messanger, gross alcohol drinks, too cool for siblings and familes, and all that jazz.

That's it for now, but stay tuned for more exciting adventures! Next up, my personal forest and Stirling Castle!

Oh, and for those of you who don't know, I'm going to PARIS this Sat and I'll be there till Wed. It should be awesome. That will be posted soon to.

I love you all!