A Very Busy Week

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This week has been so exhausting! I finally get over being sick and then I'm sick again after about 4 days of feeling alright. I still blame it on the weather and the fact that since I live so close to people and I'm not outside as much as I would be at UConn that It's making me get sick more. Hopefully this is just a little cold and not a full out plague like last time.

Last weekend I had my first visitors! It was great to see people from home (my aunt and uncle from CT) and show them Edinburgh and Scotland. We got to see some great stuff which I wouldn't have seen normally either. We saw Britannia (the Queen's yacht, it was pretty fancy but straight out of 1970), Rosslyn Chapel (yes Dara, it was amazing), a distillery, the country side, and even drove through Glasgow! Unfortunately my aunt and uncle had to see Cowgate at night, I hope it didn't scare them. For all those at UConn - Image Carriage and Celeron put on a city street with clubs and bars that's where I live. And it's like Friday night every day of the week. But it was a really fun weekend except for the whole getting car sick thing. Never go to a whiskey distillery and then drive 3 hours on horrible Scottish roads. Your body will thank you if you don't. I got to see Loch Lomond as well which was great since I can't go on the "adventure" weekend when my program goes. But I have something WAY better for that weekend. Sean and Melissa are coming to Scotland! My aunt and uncle were just the first of my visitors that I'll have for pretty much the rest of school (which ends on March 23rd). Next week my mom comes and then Sean and Melissa (my roomie from this past semester). Mel's in Italy and I'm really really hoping to visit her during my spring break. There is a UConn study abroad program in Florence so a whole bunch of my friends are there. And Jenny and I are starting to make plans too! I need to fit Cribble in there somewhere but that shouldn't be a big problem since we're so close. I'm getting really excited to end school so I can do some serious traveling.

So yes, school. You get to that point every semester when it gets to be really annoying, usually around mid-terms. Well since I only have one "mid-term" like thing which is a group project I shouldn't really complain. But I have had constant work and some of it has turned out to be really really confusing and one of my classes I can't understand anything my TA says! I had my first lab on Tuesday and it was completely overwhelming. I signed up for geology not physics! First of all the lab was on excel and I don't know how to use it. I had to calculate this entire table using my calculator while everyone else just pressed some magical button and it worked. Now you might think to yourself, Melissa, why didn't you ask the TAs for help? Well I would have except their accents are so thick I can't understand them. I finally have Scottish teachers and I can't understand a word out of their mouths! My TA is the worst too. He kept trying to yell out hints and tips and stuff and I would understand maybe one word (usually a number or something). It's even worse when you talk to him face to face. And the class was giant and the kids around me weren't supposed to be there and were just looking at youtube and not even in the class so I couldn't ask them for help. At one point I thought I knew what I was doing while calculating this equation and thought I could finally do some of the lab. Until I realized that I forgot how to make fractions on my calculator! How embarrassing! My calculator could do my laundry if I programmed it right but I can't make a fraction?!?! I finally left the class and haven't looked at the lab since. It's not due til Monday so I have some time. I think I'll be fine once I calm down and have LOTS of time to work on it ei. tomorrow.

I also had my social history tutorial with my new professor. It was really bad because a quarter of the class didn't show up aka Jimmy was MIA and that left Gus, Rachel, and me to try to talk to our new extremely nervous and quirky professor. He really is awkward and it's obvious he doesn't know how to talk to people that aren't as intelligent as him. He's really nice though and he's one of those professor that will always try to find some sort of smart thing in what you say. We were used to the other professor always talking through tutorial so it was a little weird when we had to talk for ourselves. Luckily Gus saved us and made up some stuff about Italy which the guy loved. My other tutorial for Social and Cultural Geography didn't go much better. This is the TA that I can understand some of the time but it's at 9 am on a Friday so I usually really groggy and not happy to be there. At least I show up unlike most people. This week we had to bring in something "natural" and discuss whether it's more natural or more cultural. Well basically it was really horrible because my TA loves to play devil's advocate and at one point I was so visibly angry at her that she stopped the conversation. I was trying to agree with her and all she would say was that I was wrong! And everyone was just getting mad at each other because the thing they brought in wasn't natural enough for everyone else's standards. It was terrible and basically that class ruins Fridays for me.

Tuesday we had a program dinner so everyone could catch up and meet students that were there for the whole year. Good thing I didn't meet a single one. I think I saw two people I didn't recognize and they were across the restaurant and made no attempts to meet anyone. But I got a free dinner, tappas! They definitely weren't as good as they were in Spain even though I think the people who were working there were Spanish, at least one of them definitely. But they were kind of like... Scottish tappas. They had lots of fish and they were one big pieces of not toasted bread. They gave us LOTS of bread and nothing to drink. But we had meat balls and chicken too which were really good. But it was a strange meal.

But luckily yesterday (Friday) I had some extra fun stuff planned! I went to the Brand New concert in Glasgow! It was amazing but my dreams of going to lots and lots of shows in Glasgow are forever gone. The concert was wonderful but the whole rest of the trip was horrible. I went with a girl from my program and one of her friends. We basically had no plans except that we figured the concert would get out too late to catch the last train home. Which ment that my stingy friends had agreed amongst themselves to stay the night in the train station. Now I'm sure at this point my family back home is having a heart attack at the thought of me spending the night in a train station in some foreign town. IT WAS NEVER MY IDEA AND I BROUGHT ENOUGH MONEY FOR A HOSTEL. But just so you know it didn't happen anyway. So let me start from the beginning. We aimed to leave on the 5:30 train (trains run from 6am-11:30pm every half hour from Edinburgh to Glasgow... all trains in the country unless they're sleepers end at 11:30). So I go to my friends apartment but it was the other direction from the train station. That was problem 1. Then she forgot her usb port at school and I got lost on the way to her place. Problem 2. I meet her at school and we go all the way back to her place to meet the other girl which is still away from the station. Problem 3. We forget out confirmation codes and have to stop at a internet cafe and miss the 5:30 train. Problem 4. We FINALLY get to Waverly station with 3 minutes to get on the 6pm train but we make it! So we get to Glasgow and it was fairly easy to find the venue. We followed all the weirdly dressed 12 year olds there. For some reason there were LOTS of little kids at this show. We had pretty bad seats but we actually had seats and the place was designed so you could see the stage no matter where you were in the whole place.

The concert was great and it got out at 10:50. So we figured we had TONS of time to get back to the station which was about 10 minutes away from the place. We even stopped and got shirts. We walked into the station at about 11:15 and looked at the sign for the next train for Glasgow and low and behold it had left at 11:06! We had a huge collective freak out in the middle of the station and asked the ticket guy why the train wasn't leaving at 11:30 like we knew it was. He said that it was... at the other train station... about 10 blocks away. We asked if we had time to get there in time and he assured we could definitely do it, it was only a left and a right outside of the station! How simple! Well the directions he gave us were terrible and we asked some guy on the street how to get there. Luckily there were signs for how to get there everywhere. We actually got there in 4 minutes and I don't think I've ever run faster in my life. So we're at the station and there wasn't a ticket person anymore, only machines where you get electric tickets and of course the lines were at least 10 people deep, most of them panicked kids or very frustrated looking business guys. We jump in line and at this point we're all practically dying with nervousness and then some girl can't work the machine. I was in the fastest line and it was obvious that I was never going to get a ticket in time to get on the train in 10 minutes. All of a sudden a guy appeared behind me and my friend and said quietly, "Are you going to Edinburgh?" It was as if a bomb went off in the station as all the kids around us started yelling "I'M GOING TO EDINBURGH" "WE'RE NEVER GOING TO MAKE IT IN TIME" "HELP US PLEASE!" The guy (he was wearing a railroad uniform so he wasn't just some random person) just looked around and said for anyone going to Edinburgh get on the train right now or you wont make it. A guy behind me (practically crying... literally) exclaimed that he didn't have a ticket yet and that that wasn't okay! The guy told us to all get on now and everyone started running to the train. It was probably a hundred people freaking out and yelling thank you to the train workers and they just let us on! Well then we realized that there weren't seats anyway. Luckily I got a seat but my friends had to share a luggage rack with two guys. Some kids got in a fight and another kid was walking around asking for money because he didn't have enough for the trip home. Everyone had come from the concert and we had shirts and posters and people were playing the music they recorded from the concert on their phones. I felt pretty bad for those few people that were actually doing something else besides coming from the concert. Eventually people got off and we all got real seats. And no one ever came by to get tickets from us, they probably felt bad that people didn't really have seat. So I got a free train ride and I wasn't homeless for the night! All in all it worked out in the end but I don't think I'll be going to another concert there any time soon.

Since I didn't get back to my flat until about 1:30am I decided to skip the trip to St. Andrews that my friends had planned for today and just slept for a long time. Good thing too because the weather was terrible and I wouldn't have wanted to climb around on castles when I had been out in the cold the night before. And I had a cold when I woke up. Tomorrow my flat mates and I are going to look for costumes for a costume party we're hosting next weekend and then I'll be spending the day in the library with my friends from class. We had to do a report on our trip to Haddington and I have to get started on my essays that are due in March because I don't want to work when my friends are here! I'll update as soon as I can but I'm finding I don't have a lot of time to do so, so please bear with me! I am going to school full time and now there are people visiting me so it's even harder. Plus during the week I do the same thing - sleep, class, make dinner, read things, and then sleep some more. It’s just like I do in the states really except sometimes I walk around town or go to the library more than at home. So I’ll write again when I can but if something really good happens I’ll update sooner, otherwise I’m probably not doing anything too interesting!

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Photos

Really Pretty Column
Apparently the apprentice mason was killed by his master because he made this without asking his master first. It's nice to live in the 21st century where that doesn't happen to often.