Thoughts from Recent Days

It continues to be wonderful to be back here. I've enjoed fish almost everyday, and while at times its been grey and rainy, it's so gorgeously sunny now. I'm in the library writing this and am a bit blinded with the window next to me but I love the warmth and sunshine so much.

This area is so beautiful to me. It also symbolizes my Raisin Monday foam fight experience last October, and just so much of the ancient-ness of St Andrews.

This afternoon the sun was calling to me and I walked along the ocean and then the pier. It was a wonderfully reflective time for me with such natural beauty. Packs of seagulls flew all along the ocean, and the sun was strong and warm.

A few kayakers in the St Andrews harbor.

Seagulls on the pier.

The harbor.

The pier.

And then I spotted an ocean swan, who seemed to follow me as I walked alone down the pier. It was peaceful.

Last night I attended my friend Millie's (my academic aunt) 21st birthday celebration and it was so so fun. I brought along Miriam, and was able to reunite with my academic family. There was so much laughter and it was a great night. A little past midnight, we ventured to St Andrews only techno dance club, which usually isn't my type of thing, but it was incredibly fun and a great experience.

I received my final submission (exam) for Creative Writing yesterday when I visited the School of English office, and I was very pleased. I had never received a grade that high, and I think once I find some time, I hope to submit the short story somewhere.

Yesterday I attended my second class, The Early Tudors: Literature and Reformation and it was just as great as American poetry had been the day before. Certainly very challening, but just fascinating and I'm enjoying both of my classes greatly. The Tudors incorporates quite a bit of language work which I know will be a challenge, a lot of old English and a bit of Latin, but I know it will be great to learn. We're also a class of thirteen which is nice and are the first ever to experience the class, as it's brand new (and a bit experimental). The course focuses greatly on the literature, humanism, visual art, innovation - including the recent invention of the printing press - and the effects of the Protestant Reformation all within a closely cropped time period stretching from the reign of King Henry VII to the 1570s - the reign of Elizabeth I. Interestingly too, nearly all of the authors we're reading were either imprisoned, executed or exiled by the monarchs during the period.

The transition back besides re-understanding the fluency of varying international accents has been quite nice, I've gotten back into a few of the British spellings and recognizing the date as day/month/year rather than month/day/year and have bagged up my American coins for my change purse full of pence in between becoming re-acquainted to a few words and phrases I had forgotten the meaning of. Overall, it's been such a quick and easy transition as I've arrived back. I think above all, I just feel so grateful and lucky to be here. Not only with it being St Andrews' 600th anniversary this year, but just being a part of this community, finding academic challenge, enjoying the sea, the cobblestone streets, the steeples and beauty everywhere between the laughter and friendships.

I love it here so much. The community. The people. The experiences. The natural beauty.

Beautiful Days

I've been back by the sea for a few days now and things have returned to familiarity.

Saturday was a fun day to reunite with friends and I found the guys from Singapore and Hong Kong I share a kitchen with had returned. I tried authentic Chinese food that evening which one of the guys had made, and drank plenty of green tea with them.

I also have a roommate this semester! Kerry is from Oregon and has been a great companion. She's a geology/dentisty major and is quite athletic and plays the ukelele often. :) She's made the room a very fun place, and it's been great getting to know her the last few days.

Sunday I enjoyed a church service with my Scottish friend Miriam and afterwards we both were hungry and visited our favorite panini place for a takeaway lunch. We had planned on sitting somewhere by the ocean, but it was a bit chilly to sit still, so we walked for the next hour all around the town eating our paninis on the way. :) It's wonderful to be back in the town, the blue skies and the ocean continue to be inspiring.

This is a small beach area that Miriam and I explored. Unfortunately it was closed last semester, so it was nice to see it up close.

I also began classes this morning with American Poetry since 1950. I was advised to take it back when I chose my classes in September because the professor, John Burnside, is quite the accomplished writer and one of the most well-known educators in the English department. There are about fifteen of us and at the beginning of the class, Professor Burnside asked which students were American. Only myself and one other student raised our hands, and we found we were then told, "I don't care what they taught you in your history classes, Abraham Lincoln was not the Great Emancipator...Walt Whitman was!" That made us all laugh. I loved the lecture. It sounds like it will be a great class with culture and historical content explored through American literature of the mid-twentieth century until present-day. The past few days I've also found understanding the varying accents is coming back slower than I thought after being home for a month. Professor Burnside has a strong Scottish accent I had to focus much more on than I imaged I would, or that I might have in mid-December. My kitchen-mates from Hong Kong and Singapore too, sadly are consistently being asked to repeat themselves. Hopefully the fluency in understanding will return soon. :)

Today was pretty grey before turning quite wet. It certainly feels like winter with temperatures in the thirties and forties (fahrenheit) here, yet this morning the air felt and smelled almost spring-like. It's great to look forward to warm days ahead.

The Journey

Greetings from St. Andrews!
It is beautiful to be back here. I just woke up from fourteen hours of sleep and am looking forward to an enjoyable day.

I left Concord, New Hampshire sometime Thursday afternoon. Like most of New England, I woke up earlier that morning to subzero temperatures and finished packing and emptying much of my room. Like when I left for Scotland in the fall, I was unsure if I would return to the room or home I had grown up in, and again this time, I imagined a move might occur while in Scotland. I feel as if I've detached myself a bit from the house. While it certainly is hard to imagine leaving, I know it will happen soon and that's it. Life continues to change and it's very good. I arrived at Concord Trailways around 2:30 pm and boarded my bus to Logan Airport. The men on the bus platform spoke of the cold and the bus seats reminded me of train or airplane seats. Leaving Concord for Interstate 93 South and passing the familiar landmarks of Concord brought back several memories. The turquois-roofed plaza of Fort Eddy Road, the heavy power lines by the highway and the tangle of transformers and metal that I thought was a playground when I was younger. And that restaurant, the Common Man, designed to look like a nineteenth century farm house, but built ten years ago. And of course the capitol. The gold dome. The New Hampshire flag and the U.S. flag. And the steeples. The many churches all across downtown. The square brick buildings. The snow-covered railroad tracks where the homeless live. It was barely nine degrees.

An hour and a half later, we arrived at Logan. I was very early for my flight, but I was able to drop my bag (a bit too heavy this trip) and bought a couple of bottles of water before settling into a chair to read for a couple of hours. My friend Julie, who I had planned to fly back over with arrived with her family around 7pm and we soon were through Boston security and by 9pm had boarded our flight to London. It was a semi-full flight, I had a window seat with an open seat next to me. I enjoyed hearing the accents again from the flight crew and many of the English passengers. Drinks and meals and boarding cards are passed out in the first two hours of the flight and once all that was finished I think I may have slept an hour before being awoken by the sunrise which we were chasing.

I think this may have been Wales.

We landed in London about 7:30am London time (2:30am Eastern time) and I soon found I was dizzy with exhaustion. Julie and I made our way through Heathrow, first boarding a tram then progressing through Border Patrol where our visas were checked before our biometric exam took our thumb and index finger prints before our irises were examined with a red light. We worked our way through security and found a comfy area to await our flight to Edinburgh. I drank more bottles of water and ate a sandwich before dozing off for a few ten minute increments. Around 11am, I was examining the departure board as Julie and I were trying to find our gate to depart for Edinburgh when my Creative writing classmate, Lydia from last semester stumbled upon us. She had flown in from Denver and was flying with us to Edinburgh. It was wonderful catching up with her as we found our gate and boarded for our flight to Edinburgh. Once in my seat, I fell asleep and awoke about fifteen minutes later when a basket of snacks was being passed to me. In the few minutes of the flight when I wasn't sleeping, I loved seeing the English countryside so snowy. Even as we landed in Scotland, the fields surrounding the city were covered with a dusting of snow. As the plane landed, the Scottish pilot annonced that tennis player Andy Murray had just won a match to reach the Australian Open. Most passengers cheered. It was exciting.

Once off the plane, Julie, Lydia and I found our bags were quick to arrive, and Julie and I said goodbye to Lydia to go board a bus for Ferrytoll Park and Ride where we would connect to St. Andrews. It was 1:30 pm in Edinburgh, and outside felt about 35-40 degrees yet it was felt so beautifully warm. It was wet and snow-raining, and the humidity in the air felt wonderful! Julie and I boarded the next bus, which came around 2pm and arrived in Ferrytoll twenty minutes later. Our books were back out and we read for the next hour as we awaited our bus to St. Andrews. We ran into my academic sister, Anneka and it was fun catching up with her before we all boarded the bus. I soon fell asleep and found an hour later when we arrived in Glenrothes, the snow had been piling up. It had snowed throughout our bus ride from Ferrytoll, but the roads and ground were so wet it hadn't piled up to much. Most of the road signs, though, were covered in snow and the roads were a mushy brown slush. In Glenrothes, I texted my friend who lives there about the snow, and he said it had snowed all day and night but just started to stay on the ground. About thirty minutes later, we arrived in St. Andrews and were off to our residences. I met up with my friend, Susanna, for dinner and found St. Andrews was cold and snowy, but it was wonderful to be back. :)

Some Favorites

I changed around the blog a bit earlier today (including the title!) with the help of my great friend Sheilly who has a beautiful blog at http://icedpeppermintmocha.blogspot.com/. I posted about books the other day, and as I've been busy while home sorting through photos, I thought I'd share a few of my favorites from the past year. Most are nature or outdoor themed and I think all have been featured on the blog before.

All were taken by myself in either Burlington/Colchester Vermont, Concord, New Hampshire, St. Andrews/Perth/Glasgow/somewhere in the Highlands, Scotland and London, England.