"The Trouble With Poet is How Do You Know Its Deceased?"

First of all I want to inform you all that after losing my sense of smell, sounding like a man all week and excessive self-medication I am no longer sick.  Thank god.  It was a such a downer being in one of the most incredible cities in the world and unable to get out of bed without coughing up a lung.

Anyways, illness aside its been a pretty exciting few days.  Sunday I was still a little sick, but I managed to drag myself out of bed and make it across the bridge into new town so that I could see a little more of the city and run some errands.  For those of you who don't know the city of Edinburgh is divided into old town and new town.  Old town has been around since like the foundation of Scotland and new town started growing in the late 18th century so it really isn't that new, but I guess in Scotland the standards of age are slightly different than we're used to in America.  Now when I say divided I don't mean divided by just a little street or sign or anything.  Edinburgh old town and new town are separated by a huge ravine (which is now where the trains travel through) and beautiful parks on either side.  The only way to get across to either old town or new town is to cross one of the beautiful bridges that spans the length of the ravine.  Once over the bridge you're in the other part of town.

View of new town from old town and the train station below

 I live in old town Scotland about five minutes from the center of the university.  From what I've seen the entirety of the University of Edinburgh is in old town.  Also in old town is Parliament (where I'll be working), the Queen's palace at Holyrood, Arthur's seat, the Edinburgh castle and most of the more famous tourist sites.  However, new town has a lot to offer too.  Its much more modern with better known stores and it still has plenty of amazing places to see.

Sunday night I met some friends at one of the pubs to watch the football games.  A surprising amount of Scottish pubs were showing the games (probably because of all the Americans in Edinburgh) which was very exciting.  Unfortunately however a vast amount of people in these pubs were also Packers fans which was quite depressing considering my current anger towards all things Green Bay. We were joined for the football watching by two of our friends from Spain who found the whole experience very amusing.  Both of them kept making comments about how many breaks were in the game and couldnt understand why the players didn't "just play straight through" a quarter.  Of course we all enjoyed their comments and did our best to set them straight.

Proof I ate Haggis!!!!

Monday I had class in the morning which was a struggle considering I was still hacking and unable to talk, but I managed to get through that and spent the rest of my afternoon sleeping off my pain.  That night I felt good enough to attend the traditional Burns Supper I had rsvped to the week before. 

Now, the details of a Burns Supper definitely require some explanation.  Robert Burns is Scotland's most famous poet (and the inspiration for the title of my blog)  and they basically idolize him so every year in his honor they hold a "Burns Supper" which is a traditional Scottish meal interspersed with poetry and cultural experiences. Pretty much every international student's dream.  We got tickets through one of our teachers and a bunch of us from the program went to the dinner.  Once there I immediately felt out of place given my lack of a kilt, ability to bagpipe, or knowledge of whiskey brands.  However it was out of place in a good way and the whole experience was simply fantastic.  We toasted, recited traditional scottish poetry, ate haggis, neeps and tatties, listened to a fifteen minute toast to women in power (clearly one of my favorite parts of the evening) and just had a long night of drinking, eating, and fun all in honor of Robert Burns.  Before I went to the meal one of my English friends told me that it was the Scots way of brainwashing people to be obsessed with Burns, and maybe she was right because it totally worked.  I am a huge Robert Burns fan now ;)

Tuesday we had class in the morning and then went to Parliament for the first time! Our program just had a normal tour of the building, but at the end we got to sit in on one of the committee meetings of the day.  This was both a good and bad experience.  Good because we got to see the process up close and really experience the type of stuff we're going to be working on once we start our parliamentary internships.  Bad because the committee meeting was on finance and once I hear the words revenue, interest rate and savings accounts I'm already fading, but add a recent illness, scottish accents, and a hot room and I'm gone.  The whole thing was filmed for the Scottish version of C-span so lets just hope that me struggling to not fall asleep didn't air to the entirety of the Scottish population...

Today we went to the National Gallery of Art where I saw some amazing paintings including ones by Vermeer, Botticelli, Raphael and DaVinci.   Apparently the DaVinci one had been stolen from the museum a couple years back and now has all this added high tech security around it.  I totally had a Thomas Crown Affair moment trying to figure out all the tricks to protecting it but in the end I figured art theft was just a bit out of my league...

That's all for now but I hope you all made it through this insanely long post!

P.S.- those paying attention may have noticed I've taken to giving my posts titles from movie quotes that I think fit.  Extra points to whoever can tell me what movie this tricky one is from! (hint its not really a movie but a movie musical ;)