Turkey Time!

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody!

Obviously it's not something we're celebrating here, but I'll be throwing my own celebration with some friends on Saturday.  I certainly have a lot to be thankful for: an amazing opportunity to explore, a wonderful family who supports me, and amazing friends on both sides of the Atlantic.  Now it's time to cook!
Of course, I'm also missing everyone a lot right now.  Hope your Thanksgivings are fantastic.

Dancing and other Shenanigans

Last night I went to my very first (Scottish) ball, which had a very different dress code then nineteenth century balls at home.  I had a blast-learned some new dances, got to try dancing some of the ones I've been practicing in classes, and hung out with some wonderful and hilarious people.  Best of all, while there was a wide age range, in general the average age was early twenties.  There are very few dance events at home right now where this is the case-vintage dance isn't a part of the culture for uni kids the way it is here.  Also, I got to do Mairi's Wedding, which is at this point my favorite dance.
Here are some pictures from the EUNSCDS Beginners' Dance, plus a few other pictures from classes and general social time :)

At Chocolate Soup, which is a favorite for cold days

At Thursday classes.  We ran out of chairs...

In the process of acquiring the above picture, I gave the camera to Emma...

...who proceeded to play with it.

Obviously, we all dressed up a bit more for the ball.  Someone (I can't remember who) made the comment last week that "dance is a contact sport," and I really like that.  Which is why we're all shiny in these pictures. And why a few of them have kind of an ethereal glow.  While I would like to just say we're that angelic, it was actually so hot in the hall we fogged the lens!

Socializing during the raffle.  I just wanted to demonstrate the amount of tartan present.

some of my friends-I took a bunch during intermission so that I would have some pictures to post, since I was too busy dancing the rest of the night!

forming sets for a dance, with the band at the top

My dance card! Which was really more of a book: in addition to listing the order of dances, it also had four pages with all the dances written out so we could cram in between!

This is a little unrelated, but I'd been hearing about it from some of the experienced dancers.  A few years ago they did a performance piece to a Sound of Music medley...and I found it on youtube!  It's actually really neat:

The Elephant House

This was meant to be part of the last First Grade Friends entry, but then I realized first graders might be too young for Harry Potter.  Whoops.

Audrey and I took Tuesday afternoon to wander around the city centre in a way I haven't really done since I moved in.  I mean, I know the area well and am there all the time, but I rarely poke into shops or stop for tea.  So that's exactly what we did, and Audrey took a ton of pictures (she's a photographer and does really fun things with film-you can see for yourself at Visually Stunning, her photography blog), which someday I will steal from her.  After the Writers' Museum we went to The Elephant House, a cute little cafe on George IV Bridge.  We split a pot of vanilla tea and a slice of carrot cake.  The Elephant House, as you might guess, is full of statues and pictures of elephants.  It's super cozy and adorable.

In addition to just being a great place to sit and drink tea, The Elephant House is also the coffee shop in which J.K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

 Here's Audrey, photographing our carrot cake.

and this is Cu (which means dog in Gaelic), the stuffed sheep I bought at Bothwell.  He came with us so Audrey could use him as a model.

Also Harry Potter related: Did you know JR started and ended the series in Edinburgh?  She finished the last book at the Balmoral Hotel on Princes Street.  It's sort of the Edinburgh version of the Ritz Carlton.  I walk past it whenever I go shopping, but I've never been inside.
This is the facade, though:

I can't wait to see the new movie.  Eventually.

First Grade Friends 2

Dear First Graders,

I hope you are all having a great fall! Scotland gets very rainy and windy in the winter, but we don't have any snow yet!  What weather do you have in Lowell?
Last week my friend Audrey came to visit from Ireland.  Ireland is an island very close to Scotland.  We decided to go exploring, and we went to two special places related to some of my favorite fantasy books.  Fantasy is a type of story with magic, like the Gingerbread Man.  The first place we went was the Edinburgh Writers' Museum, which is in an old mansion.

The Writers' Museum has exhibits on three authors who were from Edinburgh, the city I live in.  Their names were Sir Walter Scott, Robert Burns, and Robert Louis Stevenson.  Have you heard of them?  Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a book that I really like, called Treasure Island.  Have you read the book or seen a movie of it?  When I was little, it scared me!
Treasure Island is about a boy named Jim Hawkins, who works at a tavern owned by his mom.  A tavern is a type of hotel and restaurant.  When he is working there he meets a man named Billy Bones, who used to be a pirate.  Billy Bones gets very sick, and Jim takes care of him.  One day while he is helping Billy, Jim finds a treasure map in Billy's room.  Jim ends up on an adventure on the Hispaniola, a pirate ship, to find the treasure!  Have you ever followed a map to get somewhere?

Robert Louis Stevenson grew up here in Edinburgh, and went to Edinburgh University-the same school I go to! Just like in Treasure Island, Robert Stevenson had his very own adventure in the 1880s, when he sailed to Hawaii.  Have you heard of Hawaii? Hawaii is made up of islands in the Pacific Ocean.  When Robert Stevenson went there, it was a country by itself, but now it is part of America, just like Massachusetts!

While he was in Hawaii, Robert Stevenson made friends with King Kalakaua, the King of Hawaii. (The two of them are sitting together in the picture.)  Robert Stevenson also made friends with Princess Victoria Kaʻiulani.  Princess Ka 'iulani's uncle was the King of Hawaii, and his sister was her mother.  Princess Ka 'iulani's father was from Edinburgh too!  Are you parents from different places? Where are they from?

There were lots of other authors who lived in Edinburgh, and they wrote all sorts of stories.  What types of books do you like to read, or have read to you?


I hope you are having a good week!  You can ask me any questions you want about Scotland, Edinburgh, or travelling.  I'll write back answers for you to read.

Bits and Pieces: Video Edition!

So the spanikopita is in the oven, and I've finally gotten my timing right to listen to WERS.  For those of you not in Boston, WERS is Emerson College's radio station.  Except for the few hours at night when the reggae show is on, WERS is by far my favorite radio station.  When I was little we used to listen to 'The Playground,' the kids' show on Friday and Saturday evenings, and Mom and Dad requested "I Won't Grow Up" from Peter Pan for me, then recorded it on cassette :)  When I'm within range, I listen to their Saturday and Sunday morning showtunes program, 'Standing Room Only' whenever I'm in the car or around the house.  Now, with the magic of the internet, I can listen to the live stream online from anywhere-even Scotland!  The problem us that it's on 5 hours later here...it's taken me a few weeks to figure out the timing on that.  Ok, I promise I'm done raving about the radio now, except that they're playing a song from Little Women which just seems kind of perfect.  Listen for yourself sometime: http://www.wers.org/

Anyways, while I'm waiting for the spanikopita to come out of the oven, I wanted to share a couple of videos.
This is from dancing at Bothwell Castle at Fresher's Weekend.  I'm dancing, so obviously I didn't take the video.  Also, we were dancing on partially-frozen mud, so that's why everyone looks a little stiff.  We were trying really hard not to fall.


And in my previous post I mentioned Samhainn, the pagan fire festival we went to on Halloween.  This is a clip of some of the performers doing fire work.  It was really cool, but unfortunately we were kind of far and it was dark...thus the bad quality.


And one last thing:
Here I am with some friends on our hike to the waterfall.

Bits and Pieces

It's funny how even though I've been in school for most of my life, I still manage to forget how crazy things get during the major grading periods.  There are usually two: one towards the middle of the semester and one at the end.  It's slightly different here, because I had one set of essays for each class and then nothing until exams in December...but the past few weeks have been insanely work-heavy.  Needless to say, I'm enjoying the lull between study periods!
As busy as I've been, though, I don't have a ton of exciting information to share (although stay tuned for my First Grade Friends post about the Writers Museum!).  Mostly I go to class, dance, eat, and hang out with my friends.  To give you an idea of what I mean, here's my typical weekly schedule:
Monday
History, 10-11am
Studying in the library, 11-12pm
Gaelic, 12-1pm
Lunch over a textbook, 1-2pm
Psychology, 2-4pm
watching BBC with Ailsa and dinner, 4-7pm
Cardio Hip-Hop, 7:15-8:15

Tuesday
Gaelic, 12-1
Lunch/study break, 1-3
History, 3-4
Reading and dinner, 4-6
Dance, 7-9:30

Wednesday
Gaelic, 12-1
Errands, language study session, lunch, etc., 1-5
Kickboxing, 5:30-6:30

Thursday
Gaelic, 10-11
Library, 11-1
Lunch/home studying, 1-3
History, 3-4
Baking and Dinner, 4-6
Dance, 6:30-10
Post-dance social, 10-1am

Friday
Gaelic, 12-1
Lunch/studying, 1-2
Psychology, 2-4

Obviously, things come up and fill in the gaps, but basically that's how my life looks right now.  I absolutely love dance.  In fact, tonight I'm going to my first 'real' dance of the season! There will be people from groups from all over Scotland, and it's semi-formal.  There are also dance cards (although they're called something different), just like balls at home.  The dance is also a pot luck, so as soon as I finish this I'm going to dash out to the store and pick up supplies to make spanikopita.
Since nothing particularly exciting has happened, I figured the best way to fill you in was with pictures.  I don't have a ton, but I'll post more as I steal them from facebook...(disclaimer: these are not in any particular order)

 New Lanark, the mid-nineteenth century mill town where my dance retreat was.  Outside the mill-buildings-turned-hostel was a nature walk through the waterfalls the mill was powered by.  It was beautiful but really cold!

 This is a terrible picture of me, but I just wanted to show how into Rocky Horror we got, even though we just watched it in the kitchen.  This is my flatmate Leah.

 For the Bongo Club halloween party, I went as a princess and both of my flatmates went as zombies O.o They looked very scary, though!

 On Saturday night, I went to a friend's Star Wars themed birthday party.  There are very few Star Wars costumes easy enough to throw together to work at the last minute!  My friend Emma and I went shopping for supplies that morning.  She went as Leia and I went as Padme (from the prequels).  Those pellet guns were so much fun!

 On Sunday we went to see the Samhainn festivities, the traditional pagan holiday Halloween comes from.  It was freezing, so I wore my winter coat.  A lot of my friends joke that I look like Samantha from the American Girls series, which is where this came from:

 Turns out Samhainn is full of fire :)

 At the beginning of October my flatmates and I went to a residence event at the Indian restaurant on the ground floor of our building.  They had a henna artist, and my flatmate Jessie gave it a try!  Here our Leah and my finished hands, and Jessie doing Leah's flower.  The food wasn't as good as Curry Spot, our take-out place at SLC, but it was still delicious.

 More dance retreat! The Saturday night dance was a 'fancy dress', or costume, dance.  I hadn't really been able to find anything to fit the mythology theme, so I went as a forest nymph and wore a dress with flowers (which, by the way, I made this summer!).  My friend Melissa had a similar problem, and decided face paint was the way to go.  I twisted plastic flowers into her hair for added effect.  We looked pretty spiffy!

OK, I'm on a time crunch and need to run to the store.  As soon as my videos upload I'll post them!

School-sick

I'm due for a real post (or several!), and they're coming as soon as I finish my essays.  I've been feeling a little bit homesick today, partially because usually my essay-writing process involves a lot of other people excitedly sharing research...and no one really does that here.  I'm watching Whip It with my flatmates tonight and making spinach cheese pie for dinner, though, so it'll be fine.  In the meantime, here's the best SLC internet thing EVER.

Sarah Lawrence Girls: a tumblr (a type of blog consisting of found pictures and excerpts) about SLC back in the day.  It's definitely a great reminder of why I have so much school pride.