Never Been This Sore Before!

Yesterday, I went on a tour of the university, climbed a mountain, and explored Edinburgh at night.

Today, I am tired.

Climbing is exciting!

View from the top

An overview of Edinburgh from the top of Arthur's Seat

Who's the better jumper?

Arthur's Seat is beautiful

J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter book in the restaurant upstairs!

See where she got the name? This is a block away!

Out and about

I look like a 1960s flight attendant...

Random facts:

• The newspapers here are two-thirds filled with football news.
• I haven’t seen many men wearing the modern-day kilts, and I haven’t quite decided yet if I like them or not.
• Produce here is so much worse than it is in So Cal! And they eat a lot of sausage here! And pies. They also seem to love baked potatoes and kebabs.
• The Scots haven’t been very hard to understand so far. I feel like my accent makes me stand out.
• So many amazing sites here are free for students- score! We’re going to Fife and St. Andrews this weekend.
• The school has been around forever, but not much has survived of the original structure. Some famous past students: J.K Rowling, Charles Darwin, Eric Liddell (Chariots of Fire), Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Adam Smith, and David Hume. The university is especially proud of Liddell- his statue and his name are everywhere!
• I’ve only seen two Starbucks and one McDonalds. Thank God. 

The map and I are getting to know each other well...

It’s 3 am and I’m wide awake. Jet lag is going to suck.

So, the verdict on dinner: Definitely not as good as Pomona’s dining halls or as good as cooking with the family, but just fine. I am glad that in about two weeks, I’ll get to cook on my own, though. Food-wise, the only thing I saw here that I wouldn’t see in the states was that yogurt-pudding stuff, similar to what we had in Israel. Their dairy products just come in more varieties than ours.

Alex's breakfast- Sausage, tatties, beans, eggs and toast

My breakfast- porridge, canned fruit, tomatoes, dried fruit medley with oats

Since last writing, I got to talk to most of the other people in the Pomona group. Everyone’s nice and seems excited, which is good. As a whole (at least for now), we’ve got a lot of energy and enthusiasm about being here, and I think that’ll make a huge difference as we explore for the next week and a half. For now, everyone kind of already has their set “people” to hang out with, me included. But I’m excited to meet lots of new people during Fresher’s Week (which will hopefully be as awesome as it sounds- a week of endless events just for us, basically), in our classes, and in our flats obviously.

We met our program director Tom at dinner. He’s here just for us, knows everything, and looks exactly like the old man who plays chess against himself in that Pixar animated short. And he bought us all a glass of wine or beer as we talked about our upcoming adventures around Edinburgh. I have a good feeling about this guy.

After being really, really confused about where I was during our group walk around the city last night, I spent some time studying the map. Two good things came from that. First, the city makes much more sense now. The layout is pretty straightforward. Still haven’t gone to Princes Street, though! And second, I found really great city and street names. Dumbledykes Road, Drumdryan, Cockburn, Abercromby, Kirkcudbright, Earl Grey. And, best of all, Claremont Street. Not too far away, after all. 

I Can Get as Hurt as I Want- Scottish National Insurance Will Cover Anything!

I knew I was going to like it here even before the plane touched down. Out the window, I took in the lush green countryside, the winding roads, the Lion King-esque colors of the rising sun—and it all looked like a new kind of home. The agony of those endless flights was quickly forgiven.

Tired after many, many flights...

I am finally here! After months of “Scotland is amazing!”s and “Did you remember to pack your…?”s, I am finally here. I am all the way across the Atlantic Ocean, in my temporary new residence of Edinburgh, Scotland to spend the first semester of my junior year as a student at the University of Edinburgh.

Being here is a big change for me. My sophomore year didn’t exactly go as smoothly as planned, and I felt I definitely needed a fresh start, a refreshing experience. Although I’m a bit sad about having to miss four months of festivities at Pomona, I’ve got 3 more semesters left there, and Facebook to catch me up in the meantime. And living in a foreign country also means not being able to talk my family as much, after a summer of almost constant interaction with them, which will be tough to get used to. But I’ll find a support system here. Being here is a once in a lifetime opportunity that I am so incredibly excited to make the most of. I am confident that I made the right decision—both by choosing to study abroad in the first place, and by choosing this university.

It’s beautiful here. And the people are so nice! Even though my ideal August day doesn’t include thunder, pouring rain, and gusty winds, I get to look out my window and see a golf course, a lake, and Arthur’s Thumb, an inactive volcano. My room has a sink in it… and it’s carpeted! I think I’m in heaven. The bathroom is the room with the bathtub, and the shower room has a shower! How novel.

And, best of all, my best friend Alex is down the hall! Seeing her again after so long was really great, like no time had gone by. We’re excellent travel companions, I must say. Whatever I’d forgotten, she’d remembered, and vice versa. Plus, she’s not bad company. (Just kidding; I really couldn’t ask for a better person to be here with.)

My impressions of Scottish and English accents are still embarrassingly awful, and I am trying to cut down on the amount of times I say “Dude” so that I don’t stick out too badly, but besides that, my trip has been problem-free so far. Let’s see if I take that back after trying the dining hall food tonight, though…

Today is just a day for moving in and getting oriented. We will spend the next few days doing walking tours of Edinburgh and getting to know the others in our group, and our Pomona course on Scotland starts on Monday. I’m very glad that we have a director to help us get our bearings, because otherwise I’d be completely overwhelmed right now at the idea of having to figure out this huge campus and this old city. So instead, right now, I’m mostly just feeling tired from all of the flying and time zone adjustments. But I’m also very, very… happy. Deeply content and excited, like I haven’t felt in a long time. I’m somewhere very, very new, but it still feels comfortable. It feels right.

So, as my new countrymen say, Cheers!