let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic

So Cricket - I'm officially a member! I was initiated this week, and it was absolutely ridiculous to say the least. We went on a pub crawl, and all the newbies wore white. Let me put it this way...there were lots of drinks and lots of dares. I convinced a random guy at the bar that I was one of the girls that took the incriminating photos of Hugh Grant with the St Andrews girls. He bought it and asked me to autograph his arm. All I know is that I was scrubbing off lots of permanent marker the next morning...definitely a turtleneck day.

On a very different note, the English beat the French in the semi-finals of the Rugby world cup. Pretty amazing, although I don't recall watching it exactly - it was more about socializing than sport for me. Rugby is beyond me even more so than American football. I didn't really know who to root for. My English roots on the Lyman side made me think I should root for England, but my Scottish friends would have made me into haggis if I did.

Went on a day trip up the east coast of Scotland on Sunday. I had a lovely Scottish gentlemen show me around, so I had an excellent tour guide as well! Stuart and I drove up to Stonehaven, stopping at the Dunnottar castle, the medieval fortress obviously most notable as the site where Hamlet with Mel Gibson was filmed (that's me...squishing the castle to the right). We visited the Stonehaven harbor on the North Sea, saw the oldest building in Stonehaven, and I even learned that Robert William Thomson - the inventor of the pneumatic tyre - was born there. Scotland seems to pride itself on its inventors of interesting objects like bicycles, telephones, ATMs, logarithms, radar, and cloned sheep. Not important, but fun fact for the day.

Finished the trip with a drive through the Cairngorm and Grampian mountains past towns that all started with B's. Banchory, Ballater, Braemar, Blairgowrie...stopped by the Royal Lochnagar Distillery (one of 423 Scottish distilleries, according to an unreliable source), and drove past one of the queen's many residences. In all, we saw really beautiful countryside with rolling hills and farms, rich fall foliage in forests of birch trees, and of course hit some rain through the curvy roads between sloping peaks. Really wonderful trip! Good music, good sights, and good company.

I'm also slowly learning some new words for things. For instance, a "lorry" is a big trailer truck. The hood of the car is called a "bonnet", and the trunk is the "boot". Also - pants? Not the same thing. Trousers are pants, and pants actually means underwear. I got a few laughs for that one. And suspenders are actually "braces" - suspenders are really those lingerie accessories which hold up women's stockings. Also, a "chav" is a term for a person of low intelligence who wears Burberry. Whatever that means. French fries are chips, and potato chips are crisps. Cookies are biscuits, and biscuits are scones. You don't study math, you study maths. "Neeps and tatties" are rutabagas and potatoes, which is usually served with haggis (which is not a small furry animal as they will lead you to believe, but actually a mixture of sheep organs with oatmeal and spices inside the animal's stomach).

Anyway, there's always lots going on here and I'm learning something new everyday! The MRes course is keeping me pretty (un)busy so far, so there's definitely plenty of time for experiencing Scotland.