Scotland Memoirs

Thursday, Sept. 13

John called me in the afternoon to tell me that that night's flight to Gatwick had about 50 seats free. All the other flights to the UK had been cancelled, and earlier we had thought that this one was overbooked by about 100 people. Of course I was so frantic that afternoon that I left some stuff at home, and I dropped all my fries from my dinner at McDonald's on the floorboard of the car, then I left my wallet in the car, and mom had to go back out to get it. When we got to the ticket agent, she said there were about 18 people overbooked, though we couldn't understand why this would clash so much with John's information from just a half hour before. After checking my two huge bags, we sat in the atruim for at least an hour, complete with grandma taking terrible pictures. When I left for the gate, they wouldn't even let John with his Delta pass through the metal detectors. Once through -- no alarms went off -- they had me stand at attention with my arms spread out and went over me with the wand. The security woman even felt my ankles to make sure nothing was stuckin my boots -- though what anyone could hide there without setting off the metal detector, I don't know. I was worried because no one would know if I got on the plane or not and I was afraid of being left at the airport, but I got on the plane fine. Being in the airport with so few people was very strange. The train was almost empty, and the concourse felt like a huge cavern. I think my plane was the only one going out of international concourse E at the time. I heard only one other international flight went out that night, and I don't know where that one went. I was lucky, and got the last seat in first class. I sat next to a nice somewhat older Irishman, who had gone through quite a hassle to get back to Dublin. He had to pay $4000 for his new tickets. I did not tell him I was flying for free. We had a big multi course dinner with wine and port, only a few hours before breakfast. Why they think they should serve a huge dinner at 11:00, I don't know.You're not finished until 12:30 or so; then they serve breakfast at 4:00 in the morning. There were a few good movies, though when they played the second round was a little unclear. I spent most of the time watching A Knight's Tale, once I realized it wasn't First Knight. What was up with that woman's hair? This is not a 20th century runway, and no one else was blatantly unhistorically dressed like that. The music was one thing, but the hair was wierd. Furthermore, some of those games on the planes are really lame -- hint: if you haven't heard of it, it's not worth playing. So, that's what I did almost all night, barely sleeping at all.

Friday, Sept. 14

I arrived at Gatwick Airport at about 10:45 GMT, which is 5:45 Eastern time. After about an hour, I finally got my bags and headed down to the slow Thameslink train into London, which I thought stopped at Kings Cross station, where I had to catch my train to Edinburgh. Of course, it was really the Thameslink station, about a block from the actual railway station, and completely lacking any escalators or "lifts". Thankfully, I met a nice woman, who helped me carry my bags up the three flights of stairs. I also got lost on the way to the train station, when the directing signs completely disappeared. After that, my train ride was fairly uneventful. I was informed in Edinburgh that Leuchars is pronounced more like "lookers" than "lou-chars", which is about as close as I can get th describing the pronounciation. I was a bit worried about missing my stop, but that turned out fine. Of course, when I arrived, I had no clue what to do.

The Overseas Weekend organizers had arranged for busses to take us into town, but I arrived long after the last bus. I could have gone into town, but I didn't know what building to goto or anything. The only place I was sure of was my hall of residence, St. Regulus Hall, but I was fairly certain that the Overseas Weekend people had us staying somewhere else, though I had no idea where that was. I asked a cabby if he had seen any busses from the university, and he just seemed confused. Two guys walked up and saw how pathetic I was. One lent me his cell phone, which I used to call the convenors of the Overseas Weekend. It took me a long time to figure out how much of the phone number I should call, and that I should add a zero at the beginning of the number, then I finally talked to someone, who told me she would send a car to the train station. 45 minutes later, I was still waiting. By this time, I had met a Dutch girl, who is a second or third year student at St.Andrews and who hoped she could get a ride with me. She told me the drive to St.Andrews only took about 15 minutes. Eventually, we just took the bus into town. She helped me figure out where I needed to go, Andrew Mellville Hall, and I took a taxi there (it wasn't far, but I didn't know where to go, and I had my bags). I didn't do much that night, just sort of settled into my temporary home at David Russel Hall, and talked to some upperclassmen volunteers for a little while -- I feel like such a freshman here.

Saturday, Sept. 15

This was my first taste of hall food. Breakfast is probably the best meal a day here -- though it is a bit strange at times, and the waffles are made out of potatoes. There are potatoes of some type at every meal, and always lots of fried things. The waffles were fried potatoes in the shape of waffles -- which didn't really go with the berry sauce I had poared on them.

I went on a tour of town in the morning, which wasn't very organized, and was extremely confusing, but ended up being helpful. Just before lunch, I went to an internet cafe and sent the all important "I'm here and ok" message. I had called the night before, but my change added up to precious little talk time and I couldn''t even get my phone number out -- they were charging about 1p per second. In the afternoon, we had a whisky tasting session, which I went to. I found that to be interesting, since they told us how they make Scottish single malt whisky, and they tought us how best to drink it and what to look for. We had an example from all four categories -- lowland, Campbellton, highland, and isles. I personally like the Campbellton and highland types best -- I'm not sure which. The whisky from the isles tastes like smoked ham -- I kid you not. It was still imported during the Prohibition because they could label it as medicine. Yuck.

That night, we went to the Union -- the St.Andrews equivalent of the Campus Center, plus two big rooms for parties and three bars. That was probably the worst night out I've had yet, since I spent the entire evening in an argument over abortion. Not the way I wanted to spend my saturday night.

Sunday, Sept.16 & Monday, Sept.17

At this point, it starts to blur together, just more Overseas weekend stuff. We had a mock Highland games with things like toss the mop instead of the caper, and kinky boot throw instead of hammer throw. I participated in the 4 legged race -- 3 people tied together, and the tug of war, wich they wanted to make us do over the pond, but the rope wasn't long enough. We ended up winning the whole thing, and got teddy bears as a prize. I gave mine away to one of the volunteers I made friends with. One night we had a ceilidh -- traditional scottish dance, but somewhat different from Country Dance, and the other night was a Bop -- the weekly St.Andrews equivalent of a dance club. We also did a lot of orientation type stuff, like groups for questions and mini lectures from the president of the college, the student support services, the police, the student travel agency, etc.

Tuesday, Sept.18

On Tuesday, I moved in to St.Regulus, my permanent home for the semester. It was really nice to finally get settled in, especially since they kept most of my luggage and moved it to St.Regs, which meant I only had the stuff I had packed in my backpack and was already re-wearing my shirts. St.Regs is much nicer than DRH, where I had been staying, but there are endless stairs to go up because of the 10' and higher ceilings. I'm on C floor -- the third floor. My room is fairly large, but I do have a roommate. She's very cool, though. Her name's Darcy, and she's also American. She went to high school at andover, and is a freshman, which they call either "freshers" or "first-years" here. Sometimes it's difficult to say whether I'm a third-year or a first-year, and the administration certainly hasn't decided, but they're really confused anyway -- but those stories come later. My room is really cool. We have a wardrobe that is much prettier than the ones at Haverford. First of all, it's at least 2 1/2 times as big, and we have some huge drawers and cubbards and shelves as well, plus it's basically white painted wooden furniture from the 40's -- when the dorm was built, though it looks older. In one corner of our room is a turret beteen us and the girls next door (the dorms here are co-ed by floor, not room). I've made friends with most of the girls in this section of C floor, and some of the guys who live upstairs and are constantly hosting parties.

So, tueday night, our first night in we had a fire alarm. We had been out at Ogstons, a local pub highiy frequented by Regs residents where we had rented out the back room for a special Regs get together that night. I met quite a few people from my dorm that night. I had probably been asleep for an hour when the horrible, piercing alarm went off. Standing out in the street in my p.j.s, black suit coat and dress shoes was not the way I wanted to start my semester, or the ideal way to meet the hall-mates I met that night.

Wednesday, Sept. 19

I'm going to try to pick up the pace now, or I'll never send this e-mail. Wednes day, I was advised for my courses, which basically meant that I waited in liae for hours to speak to someone from each department I'm taking a course in, just so they could say ok, then I had to wait even longer to speak with a dean, who had to ok my scottish history course since it's intro level, told me all my courses were ok, but I had to take an extra course because my credits didn't quite add up. I signed up for a low credit low level philosophy course which I didn't really want to take. Then, the first day oc classes, I went to be readvised out of my intro philosophy class and into french, which meant a lot of waiting and ended up taking two days, after which I found out that all the liteqature in the course is in Old French. At that point, I obviously didn't want to readvise, plus my presence was required for the class to exist, which meant it needed at least 4 people, and there are 4 people in the course.The week before classes started was "freshers week", so it included all sorts of things to get us to know one another, like the hall trivia night and the three-legged pub crawl (where you are tied to someone of the opposite sex and race around St.Andrews to be the first couple to have a drink at each of 8 designated pubs) I didn't paricipate in this last event - I'm not one for racing with drinks. I went to a debate instead. I joined my friends who had participated later, when we went out on the beach in the middle of the night. The West Sands are always quite lovely.

My team won the trivia - though I haven't gotten a prize yet. Later that weekend, we had a bop - our cheezy weekly version of a night club, and a ceailidh - a traditional Scottish party.

The next week, classes started, and I'm just going to skip that since I have taken so long to write this in general. Probably, the next interesting thing I did was go to Aberdeen.

Under construction!

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