Oh The Places We’ll Go

I guess I should start off by saying sorry for the delay on this post.  The last few days have been absolutely insane.  Lots of walking, shopping, getting things sorted out, sitting in absolute boredom.  All that fun stuff.

Thomas and I split up from the Glasgow Youth Hostel on Monday after I got my keys to my apartment.  We made the journey two days straight out to the airport, first to pick up Erica, my friend from UCSB, and then Molly, my friend from high school in Rocklin.  We all made it to our apartments easily enough, and picking up our keys was just a matter of signing on a dotted line.  Turns out I’m in the same building as Molly, who is on the floor above me, which is pretty cool.  After we got in on Monday, I didn’t have much time to unpack so most of my stuff was just left in a huge pile on my bed.  I’m not used to having a variety of shirts to choose from, so I was pretty excited about having more than one sweatshirt to wear.  Yay!  Mom and Grandma made it safe to Scotland too.  They brought along my comforter among other things.  Shoes, clothes, scarves.  They’re staying in a hotel on the West End, so they aren’t too far from where my apartment is.

My roommate Laura, as it turns out, is from Estonia.  She’s pretty petite, which I could automatically tell even before I met her since her flip flops were so teeny.  She’s completely fluent in English, which I’m sure she credits her schooling last year for since she spent a year of college in England before she moved up to Scotland.  She’s really nice, but pretty shy which will be nice since I talk a lot and living with someone who talks as much as I do would probably be really annoying after a while.

Orientation has been really boring.  A lot of lecturing, a lot of confusion.  The signing up for classes process here is really complex, no pressing buttons after looking at course descriptions.  They’re pretty behind on the whole integrating schooling into their technological resources.  You have to consult all kinds of people on classes, there is no set schedule on what time classes are, so it’s really hard to figure out what you can and can’t take.  Arg.  All of us are pretty frustrated and confused by it, so hopefully it all works out soon.  I can’t stand not being able to look up things online and know what I’m doing, so Glasgow needs to get on the technological ball ASAP.

Thomas left this morning, but I’m not sure of all of the details of how or when he’s getting home.  There was all kinds of chaos going on in the last 2 days as far as getting a hold of people, trying to reach people and being unable to, etc.  Not having a cellphone hasn’t really been a problem up until the last few days since all of us (me, grandma, mom, thomas) are all in different places.  We made plans to go out the night before Thomas left and everything got all messed up since Thomas showed up an hour after we told him to meet up, and we never saw him since we had left 15 minutes beforehand.  Thomas left his Ipod here, so he’s having fun I’m sure suffering on a cross country flight with nothing but his PSP.  Thomas’s flight passes got all messed up too, so I’m not exactly sure what happened but all I know is that he had a really hard time getting on a plane back to the states down at Heathrow in London.

In other words, things got all messed up, and I have no idea what’s going on.

Since there was nothing going on today for orientation, a group of us went out to the Sports Cafe to watch Scotland vs. Iceland, a World Cup Qualification game.  Scotland scored early in the first half, great goal, and then scored again in the second half early before Sean McManus was ejected for using a hand inside the box.  Penalty kick, Iceland scored.  Scotland held them off for the last 10 minutes to win 2-1, so they survived the scare.  Lots of singing “I would walk 500 miles” (even though they don’t use miles in the UK?) and “We’ll be coming down the road”.  Drunk people singing, priceless.

Another thing- people here in Scotland really love their Braveheart.  I’ve heard the Mel Gibson “they’ll never take our freedom” speech at least 4 times in pubs since I’ve been here.  Pretty funny.  

Tomorrow more orientation stuff, trying not to fall asleep when I should be paying attention, etc.  As far as I know, I’ve only got stuff in the morning on Friday so Friday should be a good night.  And this weekend, exploring Glasgow in the West End should be good.  Did I mention my apartment is like, a 3 minute walk from the Uni main gate?  Pretty sweet if I do say so myself.

Also, for my phone, I’ve got a Skypephone so if anyone has Skype they should add me to their buddies.  If my phone is logged into Skype, if you call me it transfers the call to my phone so you can call my cellphone for REALLY cheap instead of trying to call from a landline.  Pretty sweet deal.  My Skype name is beach3bum, but you can search for me online.  I’m pretty sure at least you can.  As for pictures, I’ve got a lot to go through and have had NO time to do it so patience, please.  Haha.  I’ve got all of mine and Thomas’s to do so it may take a couple of days but when it’s done they will be all nice, pretty and organized.

I’ll be sure to post more often now that I have my COMPUTER!  

-Catherine

We left Manchester on the 1st of September and headed to Glasgow to check out where I’m going to be going to school for the next year!  Very exciting.  Our bus journey was much more pleasant than our last one.  A double decker bus and a lot fewer people, likely because it was a Tuesday (?) afternoon and less people were out and traveling than on a Sunday before school starts from London!  Gee, imagine that.

Scotland is absolutely beautiful.  Just seeing the countryside from the bus window heading up here, there is so much green, so many animals and farms, just rolling hill to rolling hill of green as far as the eye can see.  It’s pretty amazing, nothing like in California.  The weather here is a little bizarre too.  Sunshine, and then rain, and then pouring rain, and then sunshine.  All in one day.  Very bizzare, nothing like it is in California and it’s like that here all the time.  The accents are pretty fantastic too.  So far we haven’t had any problems understanding people since most of them are pretty easy to understand, Scottish accents aren’t THAT insanely different from anything else we’ve heard, but I’m guessing sometime along the next year I’m going to run into someone that I don’t understand at all.

My friends, Erica and Molly, get here on the 7th and the 8th so by that time I’ll be officially done backpacking and more in the mode of getting prepared for school.  I get to pick up my key on the 8th, which is very exciting since I’ll finally have a bed and my own ROOM to put all of my crap in (yay!), and then on the 9th I get my computer!  Thank GOD!  After that, Thomas’s travels back to the States are pretty wide open as far as when he goes and everything since he’s just leaving straight from Glasgow to Vegas. 

I’m definitely going to keep the blog up and running, especially since I know I’ll be going around Scotland a lot exploring everything around here, and there will definitely be a lot more pictures posted on a regular basis with my computer coming and all.  I definitely want to make it up to the highland parts of Scotland to explore and look around, and of course I’ll make it over to Edinburgh at least once while I’m here.  I think the plans as far as out of Scotland goes includes a journey back to Barcelona with my friends from California, and then Christmas is wide open.  Right now the idea is maybe Greece?  Who knows.

We haven’t been doing much here in Glasgow since we’re just relaxing and waiting until football (World Cup Qualifiers) start in the next few days.  There’s a lot to do I guess if you want museums and exhibits and things, but Thomas and I are all touristed-out so we’re just hanging out and relaxing.  We definitely want to see Celtic Park where Celtic FC plays, but other than that I’m guessing we’re going to hermit until the 6th when Scotland plays Macedonia, I believe, and the 7th when Erica gets in from California.  We’ll see what happens.

The hostel we’re staying at was IMPOSSIBLE to find after we got into Glasgow, by the way.  The only directions on our reservation confirmation were to follow the signs after a certain bus stop.  There was 1 sign.  1.  In an entire neighborhood.  Didn’t really help all that much, let me tell you.  We ended up asking a local, and then 30 minutes later finally found the damn hostel.  Jesus, you’d think they’d give better directions to people who have never been in their country before, don’t you think?

Also, people in my room (separate womens and mens dorms, urg) are REALLY LOUD.  These two German girls woke me up at the ass crack of dawn this morning after squeezing every imaginable kind of plastic bag into their suitcases.  So annoying.  Very rude, really.  The other girls in my room are pretty easy going and nice.  2 of them are from Canada, so that’s cool.  They’re from Alberta, so they say ‘eh’ which I think is pretty funny, and definitely have the Canada accent going on.  Love it.

I’ll post more when I have more to say… it’s been pretty laid back for the last few days and will likely stay that way until my friends get here and my Mom and Grandma do too! 

I’ll try and get Thomas on here again, also.  He can tell everyone all about Old Trafford (which was awesome, btw).  I promise. 

-Catherine

This is going to be a super quick post since I want to let everyone know about the photos and I’ve been uploading just a few for the last HALF HOUR.  Turns out… takes a long time to upload photos onto the internet.  I could only add a few from Vatican City and ONE from Rome but they’re up for people to look at:  flickr.com/photos/cat1brad

I’m most likely not going to be able to add any more until later (likely until I get my computer back) but if I can I’ll try when we get another computer available to us. 

Old Trafford today was awesome- will write more about it later!

Again, flickr.com/photos/cat1brad.

And…

Ok so here we go…..while i may not be the writer-extraordinaire that Catherine is, I’ll do my best. So to summarize the previous post, it took ALL DAY to get to Paris. We left Barcelona where we had an awesome time and took a train to Montpeiller where we waited about 4 hours until we left for Lyon.

Montpeiller was nice as it was right on the coast of France and the weather was decent. The entire 4 hours we were there was spent sitting on a bench in the train station that smelled like a huge group of homeless guys peed near our seats. Why we sat there escapes me! Not only that but this weird old French guy kept walking past us every 5 minutes or so, grunting loudly and smelling of vomit. He looked like he was having the hardest time walking around and eventually thought it would be nice to come sit right next to me while Catherine was up checking the Departure Boards. AWESOME! The real icing on my cake right there.

So we leave Montpeiller to go to Lyon and then Paris. We arrive in Paris around 12:30 and make it to the hostel around 1:00. The Metro system here is really nice since you can take it pretty much anywhere. Why would anyone own a car here? Really? You dont need one at all. You could easily live on the outskirts of Paris and take the Metro into the city any time you wanted.

So Saturday we saw the Notre Dame cathedral, and it was epic. You walk up to this thing and you just look at all the detail they put into this church and you’re in shock at how beautiful it is. You wonder how someone could think up a design like they did. Its amazing. I actually expected it to be a bit bigger just from seeing it in movies and such but it was still amazing. The inside of the cathedral was even better with all the stained glass windows and the Mass going on at the time. It was really cool.

We spent the rest of the day walking from the Notre Dame to the Louvre to take pictures, and then on to the Eiffel Tower to see it as the sun set. At night it lights up blue! We took a million pictures…..probably too many but oh well. We didnt do much else since Catherine didnt get out of bed until 1:00 since she is sick. She’s been coughing and sneezing ever since we got here. On the train ride from Lyon to Paris she slept on the seat-back tray and woke up in a pool of snot and was like “meh, screw it…..whatever.” GROSS!

Today was the Louvre Museum and it was HUGE! We walked so much it was rediculous. We saw quite a few famous works of art. We saw the Code of Hammurabi, The Dying Slave by Michelangelo, Venus de Milo, and of course the Mona Lisa. All of the art was amazing.

We are on our way to Disneyland Paris and will update when we are done!

Peace

-Thomas