Around the flat

Usually on Wednesdays, Marjo and Aurore make a French/Swiss dinner for us to enjoy. But after hearing that they'd never had stir fry, I decided to show them the deliciousness of Asian cuisine!

Marjo and Aurore working hard in our kitchen/common room

Success!

Notice the lovely harvest tea towel, sent from home :)

Aurore made this crazy dessert where she set bananas and rum on fire.

Sliiiightly worried about the fire alarms going off, since the RA told us not even to use a hairdryer in the same room as one, but I suppose that just added to the excitement.

Playing a little classic American for the French girls (they love Jack Johnson)!

I just had to include this photo! I took it last Saturday as I was exploring the New Town/Old Town areas.
We're already into midterms, so I've had a ton of writing to do in the past few weeks. I'm not really sure how papers are graded here, so it will be interesting to get them back and see how I did.
This afternoon, I'm going shopping with a few friends to see if we can find some cheap Halloween costumes. It seems that dressing up here is a HUGE thing, so we thought we should participate. I'll take plenty of pictures!

Cityscapes

Cemetery overlooking New Town

Old North Bridge-- right next to the train station

Old North Bridge during the day...

And at night.

These next couple of photos were taken from Calton Hill, where many accused witches were burned at the stake. Anyone with red hair was questionable, and if they had a birth mark, they were almost certainly guilty of being a witch. Good thing I wasn't around back then...



David Hume's mausoleum

The only monument dedicated to the American Civil War outside of North America. It was surprising to see a statue of Honest Abe in Scotland!

This is my dead-end street, and the view I see every time I return to my flat.

Edinburgh is sometimes called the "Athens of the North," both for its intellectual history and for its architecture.

Here's another photo of the National Monument, taken during the day on Calton Hill.

More views from Calton Hill

Classes are really beginning to pick up, so I'm keeping quite busy reading and writing papers for my literature and history classes. I've had to change my working habits a bit because the university library closes at midnight (which seems quite early for a student library) and books can only be borrowed until 7:50 in the evening! After watching my international friends consistently complete their schoolwork days in advance, I'm starting to think that procrastination is a distinctively American characteristic.

A few days ago, Swahili Club had a movie night at a place a few blocks from campus called "The Brass Monkey." In the back of the pub, there is a room filled with pillows, with a two-foot thick mattress as a floor, that can be rented out by groups specifically for movie-viewing. Watching a movie in Swahili, in such a unique location, was definitely an interesting experience.

Earlier this week, I stood in line with Marjo and Aurore for almost two hours so that we could get tickets for a weekend trip to the Highlands in November. The visit is just for international students, but the bus seats were limited, so we were glad to get our hands on some tickets. It's difficult to get up to the Highlands without a car because trains don't really go through the rural areas that we want to see. The best part of the trip, I think, is that we're going to spend the night in a castle! We're REALLY excited about it.

It's called Carbisdale Castle. Not a bad place to say, huh?

Saturday in St. Andrews

On Saturday, I took a train to St. Andrews with my friend Tom. The ride was about an hour and the weather changed constantly throughout the journey-- bright sun, then pouring rain, then dark, then sunny again-- so we weren't quite sure what to expect when we finally reached our destination. But we enjoyed a mostly-sunny afternoon.
The photo above is of the St. Andrews cathedral ruins, which is right on the coastline.

Remaining structure of the cathedral

Coffins!


Really old graveyard near the cathedral ruins


Walking around St. Andrews, I really appreciated the crunchy autumn leaves on the ground and the smaller-town feel. There aren't really any trees within the city of Edinburgh, so the autumn smells are different from what I'm used to. Instead of the scents of burning leaves and apple cider, I smell sea air and car exhaust. Autumn in western New York is clearly the best!

Above, you can see the ruins of St. Andrews castle. We were able to walk near it, but it cost 8 pounds to go in and walk around (which is about $15) so, after deciding we'd rather spend the money on food and transportation, we opted to just take photos from the outside. But it was a breathtaking view, nonetheless.

We walked out on this pier-- it was low tide. (And really windy!)


The shore just below St. Andrews Castle

Tom's collection of seaglass

St. Andrews is "the home of golf," so there were several very posh hotels and clubs where people come from all over the world to play on the town's renowned golf courses. Palm trees in Scotland are always startling to me.

We walked around the St. Andrews University campus, which is another school I applied to. The campus is absolutely gorgeous; it's made up of stately, stone buildings, rolling green fields, and vast views of the ocean. It was strange, though-- we didn't see any students at all, anywhere. And on top of that, all of their grassy fields had signs like this one posted. Aren't green fields FOR ball games?

This is the stretch of coastline where that one scene from "Chariots of Fire" was filmed!

The sign in the window says, "Free Whisky with every haircut."

We were lucky to have such good weather for most of the day. Since that afternoon, there's been nothing but pouring rain in Edinburgh, and the 10-day forecast tells us not to expect anything different.

We headed home around dinnertime after a full day of walking around ancient ruins, eating local food, visiting tiny shops, and shaking the sand out of our shoes.

Weekend adventures

My French friends, Marjorie and Aurore, made dinner crepes and dessert crepes on Friday night. They were so good!

Here's a photo of them cutting up (really strong) onions for a Swiss dish they made together last week. They look pretty happy here, but they were actually crying for the next hour or so, haha.

Some cheese Marjo's parents brought her from Dijon, France. We had it melted over potatoes!

On Saturday, the Wilsons took me on a daytrip to the Birks of Aberfeldy, which is a circular hike that lies on the outskirts of the town of Aberfeldy. "Birks" means birch trees in old Scottish.

This area inspired the poet Robert Burns to write his famous "The Birks of Aberfeldy" in 1787.


"The braes ascend like lofty wa's,
The foaming stream deep-roarin' fa's
O'erhung wi' fragrant spreading shaws
The birks of Aberfeldy."

The Falls of Moness

Here are Ian and Jean Wilson! Their daughter is a friend of the family through church.

Overlooking the Scottish countryside


We visited Castle Menzies, and I took this photo through a lookout hole in the castle wall.

More beautiful countryside



This post was heavy on the pictures. I love you all!