Scottish not British

July 14th - 20th: Oxford Week 5

I’ve got to start writing more frequently here. Originally I thought that just doing weekly updates while in Oxford would be enough, but it has been such a crazy week that it is going to take me a really long time to write everything down. Oh well…

Week Four has been a blast. Classes are starting to wrap up now, and everyone is starting to think about heading back to Atlanta. It’s a strange feeling here. Many of us are trying to plan for Fall semester back at Tech, which is difficult to think about when you are in such a different environment over here. My housing boss, Christina, emailed us our resident roster for the upcoming school year, so I have been on email and facebook all week long getting to know all my girls and answering lots of panicked “should I bring a fridge” type questions. All this on top of planning our last weekend trip to Scotland and working out my schedule for the fall… its been pretty crazy to look at my To Do list everyday! I feel like I’m playing the role of about five different people in three different places.

We had a movie screening Monday night for my Jane Austen class. We met in the evening and watched the entire movie in our classroom, and afterwards our professor felt so bad about taking up our entire evening that she took us all out to the campus pub. We got to know her a lot better, and it was great to have that kind of experience with faculty. Bible Study Tuesday night went very well. We have worked out a great routine that consist of someone playing a few worship songs on the guitar, and then a great group discussion about a chapter of 1 John. We have consistently over 20 people coming. I hate that we only have two more weeks to meet!

Wednesday was the last day that we had to get ready before we left for Scotland, and we all had lots of assignments to finish before we left for the weekend. Since we were flying out of the same airport as last weekend, we knew ahead of time how annoying our pilgrimage to the airport was, and we figured it would be best to wrap things up Wednesday so Thursday we could go to bed right after dinner and get some sleep.

And right we were. I went to bed by nine Thursday night, only to wake up at 2am the following morning. I took what ended up being my only shower of the weekend (we stayed in a hostel…what can you expect) and met everyone outside the porter’s lodge at 2:45am. We were traveling in a group of eleven, and surprisingly only one person overslept. I ended up running to get him and then sprinting to the bus station in order to catch the 3:05am bus. We made it with plenty of time to spare, and all proceeded to fall asleep until our bus driver announced we were at the Victoria Station stop, where we were catching our second bus. We managed to meet up with Courtney, who had come into London the night before to spend some time with her brother, and all got to the airport right as the check-in opened for our flight.

We have learned that with Ryanair, the only thing you can count on is that they will be inconsistent. Last week it wasn’t an issue that we had US passports, but this week they had to reprint our boarding passes and made a huge deal out of the fact that they should have charged us a check-in fee. What can you expect? We all made it through the line with plenty of time to spare, and got on our flight right in time. We actually landed in Prestwick about 15 minutes ahead of schedule, which meant we got to celebrate with the cheesy “victory” music that Ryanair plays whenever one of their flights arrives on time.

We had to catch two trains in order to get to Edinburgh, and the train station next to the airport had no one in it to tell us how to get a ticket or even where to go. We saw signs that pointed to Glasgow, which we knew had a train that went to Edinburgh, so we just got on the next train. At this point, no form of transportation can intimidate us!

We sat on the train for about thirty minutes without seeing any kind of train staff that we could ask about buying tickets. We ended up getting off the train without paying, only to be chased down by a guy who Molly described as the “Wizard of the Train” and made us pay the 6 pound fare. It was a slightly intimidating welcome to Scotland. From there we had to walk through Glasgow to another train station to catch a train to Edinburgh…no wizards this time, though. We arrived in Edinburgh about 45 minutes later and went immediately to our hostel. Even though it was only 1pm, we had been up for eleven hours and were pretty much exhausted. The hostel was really cool, just like every other building in Edinburgh it was hundreds of years old and had lots of ornate decorations all along the wall and ceilings. We stayed in a mixed dorm…which wasn’t as bad as it might sound.

There was a “free” tour of the city a little later on in the afternoon, which we decided to take just to get more acquainted with everything. It lasted about three hours and took us through most of the highlights of the city. Our tour guide was actually from Chicago, which made it slightly less authentic, but what can you do? We toured around the castle, through cemeterys, the coffee shop where J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter, and several other famous sights. Afterwards we headed out to find some dinner, and ended up eating at a pub that was established in the 1600’s by a woman who had been hung for a hidden pregnancy but survived! The cool thing about Scotland is that everything has hundreds of years of history behind it.

After dinner we walked down the Royal Mile, which is the road coming out of Edinburgh Castle. We found the Queen’s Palace, the new Parliament Building (whatever you do, don’t ask a Scot what they think about the building. You are guaranteed to get an earful about how they spend way too much money on it and how it doesn’t fit in with the city…) and King Arthur’s Seat…which is a huge mountain right in the middle of city. Think Central Park with a mountain range and that’s about what it was. We climbed for a little while, but then it got dark so we decided to head back to the hostel. It was only 11pm or so, but we decided to call it a night.

Day two was the bus tour that we scheduled. We all got up, at out free breakfast of toast and cereal, and then went off to the castle where are bus was suppose to pick us up. As we loaded the bus, we all got a free bottle of Scottish whiskey. Nothing like alcohol at 8 in the morning! From there we started driving out of the city and into the gorgeous countryside.

*** Warning: the next few paragraphs are sure to be full of many repetitive adjectives all ttempting to describe the countryside of Scotland. Let me say now that I know no word will to it justice, so I recommend just going to Scotland and seeing for yourself what I am talking about. ***

We drove through several small towns, and then Glencoe Valley, which was perhaps the most beautiful part of the drive. There is a strong history of clan fights in the region, and a nice Scottish song about the whole thing if you are interested. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-9141134108532362584&q=the+ballad+of+glencoe&ei=NZWHSL7JLYuOigLA5s3YCA&hl=en

Our driver, who was a character in and of himself, thought that it would be a great idea to play this for us as we drove through the valley. My seatmate and I both found this hilarious. She and I got along very well. I am horrible at getting people’s names, so I don’t know hers, but she was Lithuanian and had lived in Birmingham for the past three years getting her Master’s degree. (yay Luke!) She was incredibly interesting to talk to about the feelings between the Scots and the English, and believe me there are some tough feelings between the two groups. I had no idea how much they hate each other, but as soon as I set foot in Scotland it became very obvious. Even our bus driver had a strong dislike of the Brits; anytime he would mention a battle that was fought between the two countries he would add how well the Scotts fought the awful British and how horrible they were in general. It was almost amusing after awhile. According to my seatmate friend, that’s a common sentiment throughout Scotland. The English, on the other hand, find the Scottish to be rather whiny and lazy and difficult to work with. I tend to side with the English…

The highlight of the bus tour was arriving in Inverness and at Loch Ness. Yes, that’s the supposed location of Nessie the monster. No, we didn’t see her, but yes, we saw many many pictures, statues, postcards, flags, and other paraphernalia about her. We took a one hour boat cruise around the Loch which was absolutely gorgeous, and really really cold. It came complete with Scottish music, views of castle ruins, and a glimpse at a Scottish wedding (lots of tartan). The ride back to Edinburgh was pretty much a straight shot, but there were lots of castle ruins along the way. I spent a majority of the time talking to my seat mate about the healthcare system in Britain and comparing University systems. Its always so interesting to get a different perspective about the culture over here!

When we got back into Edinburgh we toured a little more of the city on foot, and Jessica, Sophia and I hiked up to some old monuments on a hill in the center of the city. We arrived at the top just as the sun was setting, which made the horizon look like it was on fire. It was incredible.

By the time the sunset it was almost 10:30p or 11, so we headed back to the hostel for the night. Even though all we had done was ride on a bus all day, we were exhausted and anxious to get to sleep.

Sunday proved to be absolutely incredible. We started off the morning early with breakfast and then headed straight to King Arthur’s seat…the mountain range that is in the dead center of the city. We took the very steep, blocked off way up, which ended up not being the fastest way, but was very intense and got us all in the mood for serious hiking. The whole way up we were right along the base of 10-15 ft jagged cliffs—it was absolutely incredible. After turning the bend on the first mountain there was some space for actually climbing on the rock face, which made for some great photo ops even if we weren’t able to get up very high. The weather was fabulous all day long. It was pretty chilly and windy, but with all our hiking we were warm the whole time. There were very few clouds in the sky, and you could see forever! Eventually we found a way to climb over the rock faces, which lead us to the prettiest field that I’ve ever seen. We laid in the grass for a while just trying to soak in how incredible everything was.

The hike down the mountain was quite the experience. We decided to take the “road less traveled,” which seemed like a good idea at the time, but let me just say that its very difficult to judge the steepness of a hill when you are standing at the top of it. What we thought was a moderate climb down the side of the mountain turned out to be an intense, forty five degree angle decent that most of us ended doing on our hands and feet. There was actually a portion of the hill that I slid down on one foot. Once I was down the mountain I was able to admit that it was a lot of fun…at the time, though, I thought was going to die.

Once we were back on solid ground, we went to an awesome baked potato shop for lunch and hiked to the hill in the center of the city to eat. It was absolutely lovely to sit and soak in the views of the city while eating the best potato that I’ve ever had! The rest of our time we spent shopping and walking around. I tried haggis…which I wasn’t too crazy about. We left for the train station around 4pm, and had a pretty uneventful ride back to campus. We got back to Oxford around 2am, and all slept WONDERUFLLY back in our own beds. Definitely one of the best weekends so far!