The boy who disrespected an American hero.

Before I get to the title, here are some tidbits from my life:

-The pink eye has cleared up!
-So has the rain! After three days of winds that were so strong that they kept blowing our windows wide open and prevented us from sleeping and made us very irritable, after getting completely drenched on my runs in the morning, after having to hold my umbrella horizontally like a shield... the sun has come out. I did enjoy getting to wear my rainboats around, though.

The rainy streets

-Scottish (or maybe all European) cars have turn signals on the sides as well as the front and back. Very helpful. The traffic system here is very weird, though. You literally just have to run across the street all the time because the crosswalk timers are set to about 10 seconds, and sometimes they just don't change to green. And sometimes cars in all four directions will have stops at the same time. And sometimes cars will just have to yield to a person or two before being allowed to speed up again. It's all very confusing. They also have roundabouts! Those are baffling. The Scots were amazed that we didn't have many in the States.

They don't say "Z" here; the letter is "Zed" apparently. And everything is reversed- the cars, the drivers, the escalators, and the toilet flushers!

They are very big on visibility, though. Along with the side turn signals, all emergency vehicles are bright neon colors. They make little kids wear neon vests for safety too, sometimes! I saw a father who had his son's gloves on a leash this morning on their way to school. It's very interesting- the most racially diverse groups I see around here are all the schoolkids.

My classes have been great so far. For Global Englishes, we had a really cool discussion about students who learned English in school as a second (or third) language and whether they tried to imitate the US or UK accent. I was talking to a girl from Lithuania about how her teachers tried to keep the class from using Americanisms, but how it was difficult because so much media is American.

Then I met a girl at the International Student Centre (during their free coffee and cookie afternoon!). She's from Germany, goes to University in France, is studying in Scotland for a year, and has a boyfriend who is studying in Burkina Faso in Africa. So much internationality... It makes for very interesting discussions.


My readings have been interesting, too. This is where I've been spending a lot of my time these days- the library.

Last night, my team got 4th out of 12th in a pub quiz. Not too bad. We got the question about which Hollywood celeb has webbed thumbs (Megan Fox), which celeb had a pet chimp named Bubbles (Michael Jackson), and the official name of the US national anthem (Americans are useful sometimes). But one of my teammates, getting finally to the title of the blog, told me a horrifying, and totally ridiculous, story. He was in California for some conference (he's Scottish) and he met Alex Trebek, the host of Jeopardy and one of my heroes, at a hotel. Apparently someone stole from Alex's hotel room, so Alex chased them down and broke their foot... and then the guy on my team went up to THE Alex Trebek and called him an innapproriate name.

I don't know if any of that story is true, but needless to say, I will not be friends with that guy. I would never go up to Queen Elizabeth and call her names!