"Get busy living, or get busy dying"

This week has been sooo busy but in a very fun, can't believe its already over kind of way.

Tuesday I was lucky enough to have the morning off so I could recover from my lack of sleep in Amsterdam and then that night I headed off to canvass with Alex.  The canvassing was a little different this time because we were doing flats in the city which meant that we had to be  buzzed in before we could knock on the doors we needed to.  This was a little challenging since people dont always want to let you in when you say you have a few political questions for them, fortunately however I seem to be pretty good at convincing people to talk to me (maybe its the novelty of my American accent?) and was able to get into most of the complexes iI needed to.  Even though I only canvassed for two hours I was pretty beat by the end (some people seriously grill you) so once I got back I immediately headed over to my friend Noah's for some much needed chill time.

Massive box of deliveries

The rest of the week pretty much followed the same pattern.  Work hard during the day and then have fun at night.  I realized that its a lot easier to get through a long day of labeling, or deliveries or phone calls if you have something to look forward to at night so its been really great to be able to just hang out in the evenings.

It's the University of Edinburgh's spring break so most of my friends not on the parliamentary program are off traveling around Europe.  Its been a little lonely being the only one in my flat and I'm missing a lot of my friends, but its also been great because most of us interns have our flats all to ourselves and thus a lot more space to be loud and obnoxious late into the evenings. 

Enjoying one of our nights off!

This weekend was my first one without traveling or having people visiting in a month so it was really nice to just chill and get some work done.  I slept in late on Saturday, worked on my paper, went to dinner with Lindsey and Becca at my new favorite hamburger place in Edinburgh (seriously these things were incredible, definitely at American standards) and then headed over to Monica's for her birthday party. Sunday I had to work all day which was a little frustrating, but since the campaign does most of its intense work on the weekends or at night it wasn't too surprising.  There were a bunch of Dutch liberal democrats visiting Alex's campaign to see how it worked so we had to show them the ropes and take them on deliveries and stuff.  Fortunately they were all very nice and one had even studied abroad at UCLA the semester before so we had plenty to talk about! I managed to make it through the day without too much trouble and slept for a solid 10 hours Sunday night.  Definitely a wonderful experience.

The campaign work has really started revving up since there's only a month left until election day, but apparently this is unusual for Scottish politics.  Most of the people I've talked to have all commented on how early Alex has started getting out there and how much more work he's done then anyone before him.  Its definitely an interesting perspective considering how early American elections start.  For example, Obama just announced his bid for reelection today, a whole year and a half before the actual election! The Scots definitely couldn't handle that.  Regardless, its been tough working this hard, but I still really like my internship and feel like I'm learning a lot.  I just appreciate my days off that much more!