Semester Wrap Up

Phew! It has been a while. Semester is coming to a close :-/ I finished classes a couple weeks ago and just had my first exam yesterday. The exams here count for a lot more than I'm used to (I think the one I just took was 70% of my grade). Now I've just gotta finish up one more project and then take my Women & Scottish Society exam and I'm done!! Truly I am glad to be done with Scottish women for a while. (the dead ones) (that you learn about in women's studies classes).

Anyway, I guess because the exams count for so much they give you a lot of time to study for them (we had 2 weeks off) But, since my grades don't really matter here and I'm not sure I could study for 2 weeks straight even if they did, Eric and I decided to make a quick trip to Amsterdam.

After visiting with shanz a few years ago and hearing about all the tulips that come in the Spring I had really wanted to go tulip huntin. The trip ended up being perfect timing because the tulip display we were going to see, at Keukenhof, was only lasting one more week. Just found this out: Keukenhof is the world's largest flower garden and apparently plants about 7 million bulbs each year, covering 32 hectacres. Holy crap!! There were so many tulips. Spring on acid. Here are a few pictures, but they don't do it justice - I wish I could have gotten some 360 degree shot of what it was like to be surrounded by all the displays:




However, the one thing that may have surpassed the mass number of flowers was the amount of tourists. After a couple hours Eric and I were sort of ready to get out of there. We were hoping to find a bus that would take us back to our hostel by the beach but couldn't find any. Instead, we tried asking a bike rental place near the gardens. The rental was set up so that people could bike through the huge flower fields where farmers were growing tulips. Luckily, the renter was nice enough to let us take the bikes and return them to his home - which was near our hostel - instead of just taking them in a loop. It worked out perfectly. After the jam-packed flower display it was so nice to get out into the open and start exploring for ourselves. Plus I missed biking. Holy cow I had not been on a bike in so long! There are a lot of bikers in Holland and the trails were set up nicely so everything was really easy. And I think that I liked seeing the fields of flowers even more than the gardens. Biking and sunshine and tulip fields - a perfect day.




Anyway, sorry if you guys are feeling flower-nauseous, I don't blame you. That night we checked out the beach bars and had some Belgian beer which, for some reason, we both agreed was the best beer ever created (only to come back here and find it at Tesco and decide it wasn't that great). The next morning we went to the (very cold) beach for a little while and then headed into Amsterdam itself. We settled into the hostel there and then walked around the city and big park in the center of town for a few hours. Next day we got to do some more touristy stuff like drive our own paddleboats through the canals, etc. Then we came home on the ferry and stopped in Edinburgh to finally hike Arthur's Seat! Gorgeous. The whole weekend was really wonderful and made exam studying twice as hard when I got back. Luckily though I will be back again in a few weeks with Laurel!!! A few more pictures...


Swings on the beach - a great idea (though this was a failed self-timer shot)

view from the paddleboat in Amsterdam :D

top of Arthur's Seat in Edinburgh

Anyway, it was good to go away and it was good to come back. I am going to miss everyone in my flat so much. We are like a little family (sigh). I've gotten used to hearing Sadhbh whistling next door and seeing Mhairi in the kitchen cookin her toast and Fiona's cute Scottish accent and daily tea offerings, and the huge commotion from the down the hall which could only be Jamee running into something or falling off her chair. :( I'm not sure if it is possible to feel nostalgic about something that is still going on but that is definitely how I'm feeling about St. Andrews right now. Life is good.

However, I am also really excited to see my parents and Laurel! So soon!!! Meep. And to see Beans. And Elliot and Grace and Byron and Blacksburg and Charlottesville and mountains and 80 degree weather (what does that feel like??)

Oh yeah! Shout out to you shanny - forgot to mention I smuggled back some hagelslag from Amsterdam. That stuff is too delicious for its own good. I wish you were here to have some with me!! Also when we were there we found out that they tore down Club 11 right after we left - we lucked out! ;) Miss you

France

Bonjour!! Currently writing to you from our flat in Cannes, France. It is wonderful here! Cannes is in Southern France and is known for the film festival that happens here for two weeks in the summer. It is a big touristy area and that is fun because a) people speak english and b) there is a lot of stuff to do. We are lucky because our apartment is located in the old part of town, though, surrounded by charming restaurants and far away from the high rise hotels and beach bars.

Today we spent the day hiking at Massif de l'Esterel, a forested area near Cannes. We took the train to a small town called Theoule sur Mer about 10 miles away and then headed out of the town and up into the mountains. The cliffs were bright red and looked beautiful against the turquoise water. We spent the day checking out the forest and cliffs and then walking down along the coast, and then came back and made a delicious dinner - pasta, (a wee bit expensive) olives and red sauce, spinach, sautéed green beans, red wine, bread, cheese. Yum! Just like they said it would be, wine here is cheaper than water and the bread and cheese are incredible, even on cheap sandwiches bought at the supermarket. Here are some pictures from the day. Note: No, our snail friend was not eaten even though we are in france:

Another piece of good news is that Jamee and Angie made it here safely! We spent last night gorging on Easter chocolate that Jamee managed to squeeze in her suitcase, reading magazines, talking, and (sadly) facebooking, probably much to Eric's dismay. It was the epitome of a girls night. Tomorrow I think that we are going to spend the whole day on the beach because the weather is supposed to be really nice (today was sort of cloudy and rained in the afternoon.)

Not sure what the best way is to recap the trip so far, but I'll start with the first day:

Tuesday we got into Marseille and spent the night in a cute hostel named "hotel relax." The owners definitely did not speak any english, nor did anyone at the restaurant we ate dinner at, but we managed to make it okay.

Everyone here has been so sweet and willing to help us, the (admittedly ignorant) Americans. For example, when we were searching for the start of the hike today a cute old lady walked right up to us on the street started speaking to us in french, probably since we looked completely lost. We pointed to the map and told her where we wanted to go, and she just kept on talking to us in french and pulled us off in the other direction. To be honest, I sort of thought that she had no idea where she was going and was a little hesitant to follow her. But she just kept walking along and making sure we were still following her, singing to herself the whole time. She took us straight to the beginning of the hike and without her help we definitely would not have found it - you had to turn down a poorly labeled path and then go into some tunnel under the train tracks to get there.

Anyway, on Wednesday morning we got to check out Marseille a little bit before taking a train to Cannes. We saw a fort (there has been a fort in every town we've been to so far!) and then looked around the harbor there for a little while. When we got to Cannes we found the apartment agency, went to the supermarket to stock up, settled in and looked around the city. Here is a pic of me & marseille from the fort:

Thursday we went to Antibes, a super cute town near Cannes. The old part of the town is one of those sickeningly adorable areas where there is just a huge maze of cobblestone paths, old apartment buildings with flowers cascading down from the windows, and little cafes with candles and plenty of outdoor seating. Antibes (pronounced an-teeb) is also known for the Picasso museum there. We saw a bunch of paintings around the town which were done by Picasso and inspired by the area, but decided to skip the museum. Instead, we took a hike up to a big hill/park nearby to get a view. We walked back down from the hill through a seriously expensive neighborhood and gawked at all the luxurious homes. (please note me and eric's model shot - so many emotions)

Friday was my favorite day so far. We went to Ventimiglia, a town in Italy that is an hour and a half away by train. Every friday they have a huge outdoor market there. The train ride itself was gorgeous - tree splotched cliffs juxtaposed with clear blue water, sun shining, snow-capped Alps in the background. The weather was incredible and we spent the whole day browsing the market. I got some cheap sunglasses and a new scarf, and even got to take a nap on the beach. Add in ice cream and a cheap bread/fruit lunch from the food market and you have a perfect day.

As Byron has already noted, this blog would not be complete without me tributing bunny rabbits in some way on each post. Small dogs are extremely popular here, and just about everyone is seen walking some little fuzz ball around. But at the market we saw a woman walking a bunny around on a leash. Proof: Here they are scoping out a pile of jeans..

Okay bed time here. Bonne nuit!!

SkyeWalker

Just saw a field of ducks and bunny rabbits hanging out together. This means two things: that bunnies are great and that it has been raining so much that ducks have flocked to the grassy hills of DRA.

But that's okay because I have been at the Isle of Skye all weekend! We left on Friday at 4 and drove straight to the hostel, only stopping for some fish & chips. The place we stayed at was awesome - very clean and quirky. It was called the "skyewalker" hostel and had a bunch of star wars things all over the walls. For example, here is a picture of Darth Vader which they have clad with some nice tartan pants [I say pants here in the british sense, meaning underwear. We learned this weekend that saying you've got "crappy pants" is a big mistake!!]

The hostel also had things like a human sized chess board, an igloo-like "sun dome" outside where there were benches and a zen garden, a picture of the mona lisa that turned into a terrifying skeleton when you moved away from it, etc.

On Saturday a group of us did a walk to Loch Coruisk. They said that it was a "low-medium" walk because it was pretty flat, but it went for a long time. By long time they meant 21 km, and it is fortunate that I decided not to do that conversion in my head because that is 13 miles and that is a lot of hiking. But! The hike was absolutely incredible. The weather was beautiful and honestly I have never seen so many rainbows before in my life. We also got to hang out with some sheep and some big stags, and I took too many pictures of them both in typical tourist fashion. Anyway, the route was flat for about 5 miles, and then the last mile or so went up to get a great view of the loch. Then we walked around the top of it for a while and headed back the way we came, getting in after a 7 hour day. Here are some pictures from the hike:

That night we were served a delicious curry by gracious members of breakaway. We also had some sweet dessert that was basically cake with sugar goo on it now and i forget what they called it, probably some sort of "pudding." I have to say though that I am sort of confused what puddings are because I asked someone about "black pudding" at a fish & chips shop and that is apparently some sort of sausagey blood goop that has congealed. That is not exactly the definition he gave me but it sounded sort of like that. It is confusing to me because it is not a dessert and also I can't see why anyone would eat it.

Anyway, that night was full of games, guitar, and talking, as all the nights proved to be. Everyone was pretty laid back and it was fun to get to meet some new people. The next morning the clocks changed but we chose to ignore that, and just pretended that when we woke up at 8:30 it was still actually 7:30. I decided to do the hike that went by some old castle ruins and then up to something called the "Quiraing" which is a really interesting group of rock formations on the top of Trotternish Ridge. The hike to the castle was really just a pit stop and I had already seen it last week, but that was alright. The hike to the Quiraing was a little bit more difficult, mainly because the weather was pretty awful. It was raining and hailing on us for a good amount of the day and was very windy, which was not good because we had to scramble up a lot of slick rocks. But the hike definitely did not disappoint. Clara and I moved pretty slow on the rocks because we were a little nervous but the view from the top was incredible and the rock formations were all really impressive.

We had a little more time that night to enjoy ourselves, and after eating burritos we had a breakaway quiz night and dined on bananas foster. The next day we woke up pretty early to get all of our stuff together and clean up the hostel. In hopes to get back early, I decided to join a group doing a little hike in one of the small coastal towns on the mainland. The town was seriously too cute I could have barfed, and the weather was the best of the whole trip - sunshine and blue skies. I am getting lazy so I won't say any more and I'll just show ya some more pics

Eep! It was really an incredible weekend and I will remember it for a long time! Now I am off for France though (leaving approximately 30 minutes) Yikes. Almost April, can you believe it??

Au revoir!!! :)

Scottish Tour

Sheww! Ryan just left after a whirlwind tour of Scotland, and I am exhausted! Here is a very long post that does a poor job of summarizing the last week. I tried hard to include some pictures and links to make it a little more interesting but it may just be overwhelming:

Ryan came in last Wednesday and I met him in Edinburgh. He was supposed to have come into town a couple hours before I got there, and we were going to meet at Scott Monument. I walked over from the bus station, looked around, and saw him there - just getting off the bus! Crazy timing. Turns out that his plane had been delayed in Germany because of a "sticky substance."

That night we got to eat at a nice, but very expensive, indian/thai restaurant. The menu itself was like 8 pages and the front page had a description along the lines of: "Have you ever wanted Thai food, but had to settle for Indian? Not here!" Truly they had just about every dish you could imagine. Also we were served water in a wine bottle and it cost about 3 pounds. After that we went to a pub were there were a bunch of locals. We thought it might be a busy night because it was St. Patrick's day, but we were wrong. Just a lot of old men with very strong accents.

The next day I headed back here for class, and he spent the day looking around Edinburgh. He got to climb up Arthur's Seat which I was really jealous about. It is part of an old volcano and offers a cool view of the city. After looking around for a couple hours he met a nice old man in a graveyard, who drove him all around and gave him a tour of town. He also told Ryan a compact history of the world through the eyes of a Scotsman. I wish I could tell you some of the stories but I don't think that I could do them justice! Anyway, it sounded like he had a great day. When he came into town I made some curry and we got everything together for the weekend. Eric was nice enough to bring over a bottle of French wine, and we celebrated with Jamee because we just finalized booking our apartment in France for spring break!

On Friday I went to class and then Ryan and I picked up our car. I will not lie to you, the first 20 minutes were pretty terrifying. Ryan did a good job though!! We just went really slowly and I kept saying things like: "Now make a right hand turn into the left lane." After a little while he had mastered the round-a-bouts and turns and tiny roads. The hard thing for him was remembering to shift with this left hand, but eventually he got that down too. I was the trip navigator - we made a pretty good team. I think that one might draw parallels between the team and an efficiently run company, of which I was the head and Ryan was the labor force. Or perhaps Ryan was an old lady and I was a hearing aid. Ryan was a herd of sheep and I was a shepherd. Something like that.

(Just joking, Ryan.) He did a great job and got us all the way to Fort William safe and sound. Fort William is known as the "outdoor capital of the UK" and is located right at the foothills of Britain's tallest mountian, Ben Nevis. We spent the evening looking around town, exploring a local castle, and visiting "neptune's staircase," which is a series of locks. Here are some pictures from the evening [Ryan driving on the opposite side, me & some cows, some ships at neptune's staircase]:

That night we stayed at a b&b called TreeTops - it was awesome! It was nestled in a bunch of trees and had a beautiful view of the Nevis mountain range. That morning we woke up early and the owner made us an awesome breakfast: yogurt, fresh fruit, OJ, sausage, ham, eggs, toast. We got on the road at about 9 and headed towards the Isle of Skye! (Note: We were traveling from "Fife". Fort William was in the Highalnds) Everyone had been telling us to go there and so we were pretty pumped about it. The road to Skye itself was gorgeous, and we stopped a lot along the way. Here are a few pictures - Ryan infront of one of the many lochs; Eilean Donan castle; and a cool woodlands garden we stopped at (mom, you would have loved it!):

Right after passing into Skye we knew we had made it to a really special place! We headed up the coast, stopping at a bunch of awesome places. The weather turned out to be really nice as well. Big white clouds, blue skies, sun! It was perfect weather for getting out and exploring. These pictures don't do justice to how sweet it was.

1)The first is from the main road up the coast - we had to stop a lot because they were doing a ton of construction. The island was full of big dramatic mountains and cliffs along the coast.

2) Next pic is a herd of sheep friends that I made while Ryan was taking pics of a waterfall nearby. They pretty much roam everywhere and it was not uncommon to see a bunch walking across the road.

3) This was one of my favorite places that we stopped. There was a big waterfall, the cliff was full of sheep, the sun was shining and we just sat for a while taking in the blue water.

4) Kilt Rock - a big waterfall coming out of a cliff!

5) Funny sign warning about the cliffs.

6) Ryan and I exploring another (somewhat unsafe) castle.

7-8-9-10) One of the most incredible hikes I've ever been on - up to Old Man of Storr, an awesome rock formation. Check out the picture of Ryan doing tree pose!!

After a long day we went to an nice indian restaurant (just about the only thing open on the island). The hostel we stayed at was a little sketchy, but we had a nice shower and were exhausted so we didn't really care that much. On Sunday we decided to head back towards Fort William and check out the hiking there. Before leaving we looked at some ruins near our hostel. The weather was nice for us again, and we had a good time walking around. Here is a picture from the top of the ruins, looking back on the Skye bridge:

When we got back to town we got to meet some highland cows! Then we walked around Glen Nevis, the valley below the Nevis Mountain Range. The scenery was gorgeous again. That night we went to a sweet local restaurant in a barn. The walls were full of instruments, and they said anyone who was so inclined could play them! Ryan and I saw a banjo and both thought that it would have been nice if Claire was there to play us a little song!! (Miss you claire!) Here are some cow pictures and a picture from our hike...

On Monday we headed back to St. Andrews and spent the day exploring the town a little. We went up on the tower in the old Cathedral ruins and got to see a cool view of town. That night Eric, Ana, Clara, Ryan and I went to the pub quiz in town and made an embarrassment of ourselves. (Trivia is not our strong suit, particularly British trivia, or trivia that has to first be translated because the announcer has such a strong accent.) It was fun anyway, though!

Yesterday Ryan and I tried again on our eternal struggle to find seals by traveling to the nearby Tentsmuir forest, but to no avail. It was cool to see the forest anyway, though. We came back and ate a nice dinner and then Ryan packed up and headed back to Edinburgh to catch his flight :( It was a great week, though! I wish I could have a few days to recuperate because I feel a little exhausted, but I have tons of work to do after avoiding it for the past week.

Okay, this is a huge post! I am tired of writing and I'm sure you guys are getting tired of reading by this point. I can't help but feel guilty that I have been able to do so many amazing things. When I was in the grocery store today, agonizing over which brand of dark chocolate to get, I heard a little girl complaining to her mom about how hungry she was for dinner. I was thinking the same thing to myself. And then I heard her mom say: "Sophia - stop suffering. You live a good and satisfying life."

She is so right! Me and Sophia, we are seriously lucky. And the worst part is, I have Spring Break the next two weeks. This weekend I am going back to Skye with the breakaway (hiking) club, and then right when I get back I am heading to Southern France for 10 days with Jamee, her friend Angie, and Eric! Good lord!! Seriously I am so lucky that it makes me a little sick and it doesn't seem fair. But, now I am looking back on something I wrote to Eric earlier this semester..

"it is our duty as study abroad students, at this juncture in our lives, while we are here so close to europe, young and capable of seeing the world, even despite the fact that you are sickly, and knowledgeable of the fact that we have little money, to get out there and give continental europe a definitive american stomp."

I think that was some time when Eric had a cold. Anyway, even though I feel guilty I think it is important to make the best of every second I get over here (and just in life in general)! I hope that every thing is going well with everyone at home. I know that Virginia has been getting some beautiful weather, and I wish that I could be up in the Appalachians with you guys (and beans) soaking in the sun and going to the farmers market and riding my bike.

Happy Wednesday!!!