It is already day three four! Where to begin:
Saturday & Sunday
I left Seattle at 6:30pm Saturday and arrived in London at 12:00pm (local time) after the 9 hour flight. I slept for about 30 minutes on the plane. Had to run through immigration, customs, etc. in London and caught my connection flight to Edinburgh which left at 1:30pm and finally arrived in Edinburgh at 3:30pm Sunday. I found the school’s representitive at the baggage claim area and she organized a bus ride over to the Hostel. Luckily for us, Edinburgh Central Hostel is a 5-star hostel which is more like a hotel than a hostel, except for our room have four bunkbeds in it. Over the next few hours, our other temporary roommates showed up and we turned out the lights.
Monday
Woke up around 4:00am when it started hitting me that I am in Scotland… and will be for quite a while. We all got up for breakfast a few hours later where me met with the other newcomers (mostly from America) who were staying at the Hostel. We then caught a bus ride to Napier’s “Craighouse” campus for our introduction (induction?) session. Basically learned about house the school is run with “customised programmes” so you can study whatever you want to while you are visited… at least when you aren’t tied down to class requirements from home (as I am). After that we ate a cafetera in a building older than the United States! We then caught a bus ride back to our Hostel and spent the evening visiting and meeting all the new people. Everyone struggled to stay up past 6pm… damn jet lag.
Tuesday
Day two of our “Induction Session” was for all the new freshmen (foreign and not) but out of fourty or so people, only one attended. Everyone else was too jet lagged (and some were hungover) and we all decided to sleep in instead. But from what we heard from the one, we didn’t miss much. Instead we took the day to do whatever we wanted and to begin familiarizing ourselves with the city. Some went shopping, some went exploring, some went hiking. I was in the latter group. I walked up to the Edinburgh Castle gate’s (we are going on a formal tour later and so I didn’t pay admission to go in). Took a few pictures, and worked my way east down the Royal Mile. At the end I decided it might be fun to climb “Aurthor’s Seat”, 251 meters in elevation. It was a bit more extreme of a hike than I intended but I made it up to the summit where I was met with REALLY STRONG winds. And when there is nothing to prevent the wind from blowing you down a 251 meter rock cliff, I decided to stick pretty low to the ground and against the wall. Some other visitors were up there too and fell down quite a bit (quite amusing). Then I realized how exhausting the climb was and decided to head back to the hostel for a short nap, followed by going to see “Smokin’ Aces”. It is there where we realized how strange British commercials are… picture this.
Sad music plays. You see a little girl, dead. Blood dripping down her face. Suddenly time begins to go backwards, the blood goes back into her head, her bruses fade away, and she slides unassisted into the middle of the street. Then she wakes up. Cut to black. Then the message “You are 80% likely to die when hit at 40kph. You are 80% likely to survive at 30kph. There is a reason its 30kph.”
All that for a don’t speed compain… caught all of us a little off-guard since nobody would dare show a dead child on American TV.
Wednesday
Just got up so not much has happened yet. Today is the big “official become a student” and “get your flat” day… so it will be pretty busy I imagine.
Other Interesting Observations
Traffic: Cars always have the right of way. If you are waiting at a cross-walk, do not expect anyone to let you by. If you are in the road, do not expect anyone to stop from hitting you.
Coke: Made from cane sugar instead of corn syrup. Probably healthier, but doens’t taste quite right.
I will update this post with pictures as soon as I can get online with my laptop… still forced to use the hostel’s public computers. Sigh.
[Update] And as always… check out my Flickr page for the latest and greatest photos. I have been taking many. See the link at the top of the page creatively called “Flickr”.
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