"Life Moves Pretty Fast, if You Dont Stop And Look Around Once In A While You May Miss It"

So I've been in Edinburgh a little over a week now but it already feels like much longer.

On Wednesday we had class in the morning.  The class was Scottish Society and Culture and is taught by this fantastic man named Paddy who could easily pass for Santa Claus considering the size of his tummy and length of his beard.  After class everyone in the program went to the People's Museum of Scotland.  This may sound cool but if you are ever in Edinburgh I advise you to skip it.  The entire place is filled with creepy fake people who look like real ones out of the corner of your eye and freak you out when you turn around quickly.... Fortunately however we discovered the activities room that was fully equipped with enough coloring supplies to make me forget about the scary fake people around me.

Coloring in the Activities Room

Wednesday night was the USC pub crawl for all the students studying abroad in Edinburgh.  This event is possibly one of the best USC activities I have ever been to. Basically our adviser hired this Edinburgh writer to give us a "literary tour" of the city punctuated by brief stops in various pubs.  The tour was incredible and the guide knew so many great stories about some of Edinburgh's most famous writers.  I saw the building where Sir Walter Scott carved his initials, the place where Arthur Conan Doyle was inspired to create Sherlock Holmes and the building where J.M. Barry studied while living in Edinburgh.  I also got my first taste of what our tour guide called "The Scottish Drunk" when a random 70-year-old man came up to me and told me not to tell his daughter that he thought I was prettier than her......I clearly did not have a response and proceeded to run and hide behind Lindsey. 

After the tour we went to a really nice dinner where our adviser told us "Order whatever you want, appetizers, dessert, drinks, USC's paying for all of it."  Now obviously if you say something like this to a bunch of hungry college students you can't exactly expect self-control so needless to say 4 appetizers, 2 bottles of wine, 1 main dish and 6 desserts later I think we all felt like we got our money's worth or at least put our tuition to good use...

Molly and I taking advantage of USC's lovely generosity

On Thursday we toured the Scotland National Library with our program.  Obviously I love libraries so I was already excited about this activity but it turns out the Scotland National Library is much more spectacular than anything I could have imagined.  It's one of those really old fancy buildings that you just know has been there forever. I'm pretty sure that our tour guide was very worried that all the loud Americans were going to destroy priceless artifacts and thus removed us of all possible liquids and writing tools that we could use to ruin some piece of history. 

Thursday night we had our whiskey tasting which was quite the experience.  Martin, our activities leader takes his whiskey quite seriously which means that he was rather appalled that my whiskey knowledge was limited to Jack Daniels.  He set out to correct that immediately and thus somehow I ended up sipping a "whiskey neat" (a.k.a no ice) and swirling it around in my glass to test the quality.  It really stinks I don't like whiskey more cause I definitely feel that if I did I would be leaving Edinburgh as quite the expert.

I had big plans to tour the city this weekend and see all the sites that I haven't been able to visit yet, unfortunately however it seems my body is rebelling against my decision to live in freezing temperatures and I've been sick the past few days.  Obviously being sick sucks in general, but it especially sucks when you have the entire landscape of Scotland outside your window and you cant find the energy to get out of bed.  I did manage to make it to Tesco (the Scottish grocery store) today and got some medicine so hopefully ill be feeling better tomorrow.  Some of my friends are planning to go to a pub and watch some of the football games and obviously i would be very sad if i missed that.

Talk to you guys again soon!