This is my travel journal from my study abroad trip to the UK and France. The names of my teachers and classmates have been changed for privacy reasons.
I could've sworn I got up at 6:30-ish today, but 7:00 rolled around and I'd been up for an hour already. Maybe I got caught in a time loop or something. I managed to open my third floor window without falling out of it. (There aren't any screens on the windows.) It's still cold out, but it might warm up later. Well, relatively speaking. I'm used to temperatures in the triple digits, Fahrenheit. I don't know what the people here do in the winter. I suspect they hibernate.
I forgot that the sun rises earlier here. I woke up thinking it was close to 9:00.
9:11 am
Had breakfast with Rebecca and Liz. We showed up at eight, but they weren't quite open, so we wandered around campus a little. Found out the library's closed on weekends, so study on weekdays! Breakfast was interesting, though. We've got these little cards to show the checkout lady and we're allowed to get four items every day. I still need to ask somebody about the procedures for this. Do we have to start at a specific point, or can we jump in anywhere? Don't cut in line, obviously. But if you want juice, do you have to stand in line at the muffins or can you just skip ahead? 'Cause in the cafeteria back home, if you just want a burrito it's okay to just cut ahead if you ask first.
I had beans, a fried egg, sausage, and something called a potato scone that tasted sort of like a sopapilla. I think later tonight, a few of us might get together and watch the new Doctor Who.
11:35 pm
Wow. Stuff happened fast. Never got around to watching TV and here's why:
At about eleven, we all met up and took the bus to Princes Street. (We also learned how to pronounce 'Princes Street' without it sounding like 'Princess Street'.) We rode on the top! It was all fun and games until a bee wandered in. Then we became a bunch of people having sporadic convulsions as the bee buzzed merrily around the place. After a big discussion on how to get rid of it, the bee showed us its ticket and insisted that it had just as much right to be here as we did.
We had some time to kill, so we wandered around town a bit. I went to the mall with a few of the girls and we browsed until it was time to meet up again. Here, we got on another bus and went on the Tour of Edinburgh. It was another double-decker, and we sat on top! Open air, too! It was really cold, but worth it. The tour is hop on, hop off. That is, you can ride the green buses all day long and get on and off as many times as you like. There's a tour guide who talks the whole time, but I kept thinking of her as a narrator.
Also, some teenage boys in the next bus over mooned us. But they were cool and let us take pictures. Which reminds me- I should probably hide those pics from Mom.
The tour was great! We did a lap around town and came right back. A few of us wandered off and did other things, and Rebecca, Liz and I got back on the bus. Actually, first we went back to the mall. I drank a whole bottle of water before the tour and had to pee like a racehorse. There was only one restroom in the whole place, and you had to pay to get in. Now, that's kind of a nice idea. If you have to pay for it, you're probably more likely to not mess it up and it might also be good for keeping troublemakers out.
It's hard to appreciate that when you're bursting, the turnstile for the ladies ate your only 20p coin, the thing won't turn, and the change machine doesn't work. I was seriously considering limbo-ing under the gate when some foreign tourists kindly gave me the 20p so I could go through on the men's side.
So the three of us got back on the bus. This time our tour guide was a man with a good speaking voice. He was funny, too. He made an announcement asking all passengers to please keep their conversations to themselves so everyone can hear him. At least, I think that's what he said. I couldn't quite hear him over Mr. and Mrs. Can't-Shut-The-Hell-Up.
Seriously, we were riding with a group of yankees. Yeah, I said yankees! If they'd sounded southern, I'd have called them hicks. Because wherever they were from, they were obnoxious. The mom and dad kept talking at the top of their voices, their three-year-old was screaming the whole way, and someone else in their group sat on the opposite end of the bus so they had to talk over the rest of us. And at least the dad tried to calm the kid down. She was up and running around, but she started howling when he tried to make her sit. He tried to get her to be quiet by threatening to take her home. Unfortunately, that's exactly what she wanted to do. He gave up and we got to hear a high-pitched diatribe about why this city is stupid accompanied by mindless babble with the occasional interesting anecdote about Edinburgh filtering through.
That first stop couldn't come fast enough.
We browsed through a bunch of tourist shops, all selling the same things. We also visited the Writer's Museum, which was pretty fun. I like looking at handwritten pages from the past, especially if the person had messy handwriting. I think it's because it makes them feel more real, if that makes any sense. After more walking, we had wandered so far down High Street that we'd left the tour route and met up with it on the other side. It was getting close to six, so we went to the nearest stop to wait for the bus. It didn't stop. Perhaps it didn't like us.
It wasn't too hard to walk back to Princes Street. The tour gave us all little maps of the general area with the tour route marked out. From there it was simple enough to get on the bus and go back to campus. When we arrived we had a plan- eat something and then watch Doctor Who. The eating first part was important, because I don't think we'd really had lunch. But everything on campus was closed. Even the little shop.
So! After making sure that the number 25 ran all night, we got back on the bus and went foraging for food. Hopefully, something cheap. We got off randomly and started searching. Finally we found a place called Wannaburger. It was some sort of weird almost-parallel of Whataburger, and cost just about as much, so we ate there.
We decided to look around for a grocery store, so that we could keep a few things in our rooms in case of hunger, but we found a pub instead. A pub, a bar...they had drinks. It was downstairs and we were lured by the sounds of an excellent live singer. Two cute guys were at a table next to us. I said hello, we started talking, I found out they were Irish, they bought us drinks, and twenty minutes later the five of us had pushed two tables together.
It was awesome! Their names were Alan and Michael, and we hit it off really well. We swapped stories, told jokes, laughed...I found out that Michael had grown up on a farm, too, and we talked about livestock for a bit. (And I found someone who appreciated my partial-birth calf abortion story.) Later, we all wandered off to find another bar. The next one had books in it.
I like those guys. When we met them, they'd been drinking since two. I asked Michael if he had a good alcohol tolerance and he just said “I'm Irish!” Fun. We all kind of compared life experiences...things like how the sun sets, drinking on campus...things that are different in the UK and the US. They were floored when I told them that my hometown had no bars at all, but had a drive-through liquor store.
"How is that even legal?!"
We had to leave at about ten thirty, though. It was finally dark and the girls and I wanted to be able to find our way back to campus sober before we tried it drunk. Or tipsy. (Mom, I'm kidding.)
I'm finally getting this bus thing figured out. A woman explained how to read the schedule to me, so I'm feeling pretty good about this. Actually, I thought learning how to ride the bus was going to be complicated, seeing as the town I currently live in doesn't have any, but I'm catching on quicker than I expected.
It's the end of Day Two, but it feels like it's been a week already.
