Finding the Firth (but not the Colin). Or, If the Scottish don't want to be stereotyped, then perhaps there should be less spontaneous bagpiping.

A trip to Edinburgh was a last minute thing. Sinead mentioned Claire, an American girl from her hallway, was going to Scotland over Reading Week (a mid-term break in classes) by herself, but wouldn’t mind a companion. I hemmed and hawed for awhile. I wanted to go, but by the end of last week had talked myself out of it. It was too expensive. I needed to work on assignments. But last weekend I suffered in boredom, and Monday, as I watched Sinead pack for Rome, I got a twinge of jealousy. Why should I sit in this dingy old dorm while everyone else is out and about in Europe? So I ran and found Claire and told her I was going. I booked my ticket on the GNER, reserved a bed in the hostel, and packed. I was off!

We were on separate trains. The ticket booking here tries to be simple but ends up being complicated as all get out. There are about 8 different advanced booking saver fares, and once those run out, you get to pay full price. So to get slightly cheaper tickets, I took a train that left a half hour later on Tuesday morning. I was afraid that four and a half hours on a train by myself might be boring. But it wasn’t. After Claire departed, I had a half hour to kill, so I wandered around the bookstore in King’s Cross looking for something to read on the train. I finally settled on Michael Palin’s Around the World in 80 Days, which was absolutely the perfect thing to read on a train. It made me appreciate how smoothly everything went. Also, he writes like me. Or I write like him. Which is obscenely presumptuous, I know, him being a Mighty Monty Python and all, but I couldn’t help thinking as I read that if I were on that journey, I would have noticed and written about the same things as he did. I guess all that means is that I’ve paid attention in class. Anyhow, enough about that. Just read the book.

Tuesday

So, boom, off to Edinburgh. As I walked to the platform ready to depart, I looked to the left and saw this:



…and laughed and laughed. I don’t know if it’s real (as in actually from the movie, not really a magical train platform) or a gag, but it’s funny.

My seat on the train was one of four tiny little seats crammed around a table. The train was clearly from the 1970’s. I’d heard great things about the British rail system, and nothing so far had proven itself. Still, you couldn’t beat the view. The first thing I noticed as we rumbled through the English countryside was how very much it reminded me of Wisconsin. With more sheep than cows, and more stone houses than wood, but still – in general - it’s the same thing. Once we got north of York, though, everything changed. The green fields gave way to rolling hills and the coastline started appearing in the distance. The further north we got, the closer to the coast, until at points it looked like a sheer drop from the tracks down to the sea. I didn’t realize until I saw it that all I needed was something sparkling, blue and expansive. It was breathtaking. From there we moved into Scotland and sped through evergreen forests and rocky hills. It wasn’t long until we crossed a long bridge and rolled into Edinburgh.

I didn’t see much as we pulled into the station. The plan was to meet up with Claire at the Visitor’s Center, which she described as on the second floor of the train station. The first thing I noticed about the train station was that there was no second floor. I found a long ramp that led outside and started walking up. It was there I got my first view of the city. It’s absolutely gorgeous. To my left, high above me, was the Old Town part of the city, with the castle at the highest point, and hundreds of old stone buildings working their way down the royal mile. To my left, the New Town part of the city stretched down towards the sea.

West end of Old Town

More of Old Town

Old town, towards Edinburgh castle.

Edinburgh Castle.

I worked my way around the train station and finally found Claire coming out of the Visitor’s Center, which was on top of the train station (but not the second floor!). Claire had a strict plan for the three days we were there, and I was merely following along. Which was fine, since I hadn’t had much time to plan, and she had the Rick Steves’ guide book in hand (she has a thing for Rick Steves!). This would prove to be detrimental to my lower appendages, which were fully unprepared for the amount of hills we would encounter. But I did my best to keep up and stay jolly. Anything to get out of London for a day!

First stop was the hostel. We stayed at the Castle Rock hostel, which is located, conveniently, at the base of Edinburgh castle.

Castle Rock Hostel.

We both trudged up the hill with our heavy backpacks, and finally found it, checked in, and immediately realized that we had foolishly signed ourselves up to stay in a hostel. As far as hostels go, this one actually isn’t so bad. There are lots of common areas to hang out, and they had a movie playing every night. It was a good place to be. Apparently so good that many of the people staying there had seemed to take up permanent residence. Unfortunately, there is a certain kind of person who would take up residence in a hostel, and we were surrounded by them. They are a bit smelly, rant about pesticides, and like having heated debates about Bush and propaganda while I’m trying to eat my breakfast. But I kept my chin up, in a very English sort of way (I’m learning quick!), kept to myself, and made it through. By the end of the week I’d had enough, though. I think Cartman said it best when he said: "I'm trying to make the best out of a bad situation. I don't need to hear crap from a bunch of hippie freaks living in denial! Screw you guys, I'm going home."

However, if you don’t mind that sort of thing, and you only have £12.50 a night to spend on a bed, then I fully recommend the Castle Rock Hostel.

After checking in, Claire declared she was in dire need of food, and her low blood sugar could result in the snapping off of heads. Not wanting to risk that at all, we headed out, blissfully downhill, towards the Rick Steves-approved Filling Station (we did not do anything in Edinburgh that was not Rick Steves-approved!). It was in effect like eating at Applebees, which I was a tad grateful for since it seemed American. I happily ordered a veggie burrito, only to find it laden with things like baby corn, zucchini, broccoli, and mushrooms. Claire didn’t quite understand why I looked at her like she was crazy when she said all veggie burritos have vegetables in them. Apparently people in the Pacific Northwest are just as weird as the British when it comes to Mexican food. I tried to explain to her that veggie burritos mean beans, guacamole, lettuce and tomatoes. Not this crazy mixture of stirfry ingredients. She still didn’t get it. But I did figure out what my first meal will be when I fly back into Chicago. Anyhow, it was a very un-Scottish meal, but it was warm and killed sometime before our next event.

Something neither of us thought about when coming to Scotland on the off-season was that it is both very dark and very cold. I had brought lots of clothes for layering, and was currently wearing all possible layers (four), but the chill in the air was too much for all of them. Also, it was barely five o’clock and pitch black. Our next thing to do was some scary Haunted Edinburgh tour that would take us into the vaults underneath Edinburgh. I thought this bit of history sounded very interesting, but we had a few more hours to kill, so we headed back down to Princes Street, which bisects Old and New Town, and looked around a few department stores. Then we wandered around, got a bit lost, and finally made it back for the 7pm tour. When I saw our tour guide, a young girl with long blond hair, a cane, a long skirt, and a corset, I couldn’t quite figure out what we had gotten ourselves into. I mean, I was putting all my trust into Rick Steves here, but this looked a lot more like Fright Fest at Great America than some sort of historical tour. Apparently this tour was more theatrical than informative. But I figured as it was still pretty close to Halloween, that I would just enjoy it. She took us around Old Town, telling us about the dark early days of Edinburgh. My favourite was the bit about Gardyloo, from the French gardez l’eau, meaning watch for the water. Basically 10pm every night was the time to empty your day’s waste out into the street, and you would call out “Gardyloo!” to warn anyone passing beneath. Fun times! After the surface street tour, she took us down into the vaults, a city beneath the city. Originally used for storage, they were taken up as housing when overcrowding in Edinburgh became a problem. It was pitch black down there, except for a few security lights, and water dripped down the walls and into puddles on the floor. As miserable was it was this night, it would have been a thousand times more so with hundreds of sick and poor people huddled down there every night. Then the tour guide started going on about poltergeists and ghostly activity down there, and I just wanted to get the heck out! I don’t know how much was real and how much was theatrics, but it was totally creepy and not the most fun part of the tour. All I could think about was these poor people who had to make this dark, dank place their home and they’re trying to scare us with ghost stories. When she stuck us in a room without any lights, divided by sex (because apparently one side of the room was bad for women to be on, and they would frequently come out with scratches all over their bodies), and then promptly shut off her flashlight I nearly lost it. She started dragging her cane along the floor and talking about the evil poltergeist. The tension was palpable and there was no way out! Suddenly, there was a flash of light and someone else who worked there effectively jumped out of the doorway with a cape on and yelled “Boo!” Cripes.

We headed back to the hostel after that, because we were both freezing and tired from a day of travelling and being scared out of our wits. We watched A Knight’s Tale (blech!) in the movie room and then went to bed.

Wednesday

Having no timepiece of my own to keep track of time, and having laid awake shivering all night interrupted by a few periods of light sleep, I finally awoke in the morning to find Claire fully dressed by my bed practically tapping her watch. I asked her what time it was, about quarter after 8, and dragged myself off of the board I slept on all night.

Our first stop was to be Edinburgh Castle, which opened at 9:30. Claire wanted to be the first people there. I dressed and came upstairs to eat breakfast, which she had eaten an hour before, and we plotted our day. After the castle, we would make our way down (down! Hurrah!) the Royal Mile towards Holyrood, where the Queen stays when she visits Scotland. Then a climb up (up! Oh no!) Arthur’s Seat, a big ol’ hill overlooking Edinburgh which was featured in the film Chariots of Fire. After Claire mentioned this, the theme song was stuck in my head the rest of the trip. Then back to the hostel to clean up and find a pub playing “Authentic Scottish Folk Music” to end the day.

Across the street from the hostel was a set of stairs, which we climbed up and found ourselves at the entrance to Edinburgh castle. £9.50 later and we were inside the gate. Fortunately, there is a whole lot of stuff inside the gate, so it was pretty much worth the £9.50 (as long as you don’t translate that into American dollars). We took a brief introductory tour given by a man in a kilt. He told us all about the uniting of the kingdoms of Scotland and England, and how the Scottish crown jewels were taken by England who wouldn’t give them back, and how this is where Mary Queen of Scots lived and gave birth to the future King James I. When we were set free, Claire and I wandered around visiting the Scottish War Memorial, saw the Crown Jewels, the Royal apartments, and the where they kept all the Prisoners of War. We went into lots of different mini-museums in there. My favourite was the view, and I took lots of pictures from up there. It was beautiful!

Edinburgh Castle from in front of hostel.

Downtown Edinburgh from Castle.

More of Edinburgh from Castle.

Arthur's Seat from Castle.

Pretty, pretty Edinburgh.

Castle grounds.

St. Margaret's Chapel. Oldest building in Edinburgh.

Scottish War Memorial.

Great Hall.

Prisoner's Quarters.

It was about 12 or 12:30 when we were finished up there. We then started down the Royal Mile, which is the main drag of Old Town and filled with lots of Tartan shops and tiny little museums. I shopped around a bit looking at the cashmere scarves (only 20 quid!) while Claire tried to find some plaid scarves for her and her mom. It was a bit sad that this historical street had turned into a mile of stores for tourists and that’s it. Claire had decided since we spent so much on the castle, that we would only do free things as we wandered down the road. So we stopped in the Writer’s Museum and saw their exhibits on Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Further down the mile we stopped and looked around in St. Giles Cathedral and the Scottish Parliament building. Further still we stopped into some Edinburgh historical museum which was mainly little artifacts and trinkets from the 18th century. By then it was mid-afternoon and we were nearing the end. Claire desperately wanted to visit this tea house, which sounded delightfully cozy since I was freezing cold. But, of course, she wanted to visit it AFTER climbing the big scary mountain. So we walked on by down to Holyrood, which cost money so we just looked at it from the outside, and then over to the mountain.

Holyrood

Since Claire was already showing a propensity to walk a quarter mile ahead of me at all times and race through the exhibits while I liked to stop and read things, I knew that trying to do this together was a big mistake. Especially since I planned to bail way before reaching the top, I told her to go on ahead and I’d meet her at the tearoom when she was finished. So she barrelled on ahead and I slowly crept up, taking lots of photos, and generally watching the kind of people that hung around a mountain on a chilly November day (lots of Labradors and their owners).

It's bigger than it looks!

Highest point, as I started to climb.

The city below.

I was quite proud. I made it about a third of the way up, and would have gone further if my legs were already worn out from walking up and down hills for the past day and a half, in addition to the fact that the trail began to get less obvious and I didn’t really know what I was doing. So instead I sat on the side and watched a lovely view as the sun began setting over Edinburgh.


I started back down and found myself walking around the base of the hill which was a steep grade down and a very long distance. It took me at least a half hour to get from where I stopped climbing back to where I started. It was this that I paid for the rest of my time in Scotland. My shins were not happy with me at all! I made my way back to the tearoom and met up with Claire about 15 minutes later. We sat in a small room surrounded by lace doilies and tiny china tea cups and had tea and cake in our clothes splattered with mud and crazy hair sticking out every which way. Lovely.

As I looked out back towards Arthur’s Seat, I pointed out to Claire something glowing on the top of the mountain. I thought it looked like someone up there had maybe put a light balloon up for people who wanted to hike in the dark. We sat there for awhile wondering what it was, until I noticed that it was growing, and realized that it was a half moon rising from behind the hill. It was an amazing site, and I tried to take a picture, but it didn’t turn out very well.



Knowing that a hike UP the Royal Mile was far beyond my capacity at that point, Claire and I separated once again. She wanted to make a trip over to Sainsbury’s in New Town and I wanted to get somewhere where I could sit down, so I grabbed a bus that took me halfway up and hiked straight back to the hostel to clean myself up. I sat watching a movie until she returned, and then we headed back out into the cold for dinner and a visit to a pub. The pub next to the hostel had some special “World Traveller’s” deal, so we went there for the cheap food, and Claire tried some vegetarian bangers and mash (weird!) while I opted for a simple burger. We then went wandering around until we found this bar that was recommended by a woman at the Visitor’s Center for particularly good folk music. Music was to start at 9. We arrived at 8:45 and each ordered some Scotch (when in Rome…!) and nursed them for an hour and a half while waiting for this alleged music. When it finally did start, it was four men that had been standing around the bar chatting since we’d arrived. I had been wondering how in the world in this tiny place they would play since there was no stage or empty space for them to stand. Turns out they were waiting for a couple to leave who were occupying the table where they ended up sitting around to play. I usually like this kind of music. I don’t seek it out to listen to, but I generally enjoy it when it’s playing. But maybe I was too tired, or maybe it was too casual a setup, because I just wasn’t into it. They didn’t seem to feel what they were playing, and I just wanted to go to bed. So finally Claire and I walked back out and headed to the hostel. It was just beginning to rain.

Thursday

I again woke to find Claire sitting on the edge of my bed fully dressed. Today she had let me sleep in until 8:45. She didn’t have to, of course, but it was nice as the rain had turned into a full on storm with gales of wind, and all night long the shutters banged against the window of the room. That coupled with people wandering in and out of the room all night, I maybe slept two hours all together. My shins were also hard as a rock and if you put your ears up to them you would have heard the muscles screaming obscenities at me. I got into a hot shower and directed the spray at my legs.

Today was to be a bit more laid back. We were to take a bus from downtown out to Ocean Centre where the Royal Yacht Britannia was permanently docked and turned into a museum. To save some money I skipped the hostel provided breakfast and munched on a few apples and tea. Claire claims to have already eaten breakfast, but she seemed pretty cranky, so I’m not quite so sure. As soon as we left the hostel she had bolted in front of me while I limped to keep up. By the time I’d reached the bottom of the hill, my legs had warmed up and I was ok, but she was far ahead. My punishment was to get annoyed responses everytime I tried to ask about what bus we were taking. I had no idea where we were going and she wouldn’t tell me. So I stood at the bus stop trying to figure it out until she dragged me on some random bus that had pulled in front. This resulted in me yelling at the bus driver because I was having trouble with the fare. Apparently Rick Steves had said the r/t ticket to the yacht was £2.50, and a day pass was £2.30, so Claire was trying to buy that. While looking at the signs, I had noticed that the fare each way was only 80p, so a day pass was overbuying. I didn’t have 80p, just two 1 pound coins. I kept trying to stick them in the machine, but the bus driver kept telling me no, asking me how much I had, and pointing to the rest of the loose change in my hand. I finally was like, “I can’t figure out what you want from me!” and was seriously about to get off the bus and say screw it to the stupid yacht trip. Unfortunately, the bus was already moving. Finally, the driver said to not waste the two one-pound coins and throw in all the spare change, which added up to about 40p. So, I did, and he printed off two tickets on his little machine and gave them to me. I’m so used to horrible bus drivers in London that it never struck me that he was being nice and trying to spare me from overpaying. I just thought he was yelling at me because I couldn’t add the change properly. Anyhow, I took a seat across from Claire, who continued to pout, and still felt like this trip was going to be terrible because of her mood. Ends up she was spending the entire trip hating the driver too because she never realized he was being nice to us. She took half my r/t ticket for herself and never even paid. So I ended up having to pay the full fare on the way back. Poo. Anyhow, we made it to the yacht in one piece. The driver pointed out where to pick up a better bus for the way back, which would never happen in London, and Claire glared at him as we got off.

Ocean Centre turned out to be a gigantic mall with the Britannia tour center on the top floor. I’m not sure if the mall was built around the ship, or the ship was attached to the mall. Either way, I was strangely happy to be in a mall again because it felt very American and homey. For £5, we were given a little machine and sent off on our own little audio tour of Her Majesty’s Yacht, the Britannia. It was quite glamorous in a late-middle 20th century kind of way, and I can’t believe it was never redecorated even though it was still in use in the late 1990’s. It’s hard to imagine Diana travelling on that boat and restraining herself from ripping down the wood-panelled walls with her bare hands. It was what my grandmother’s house would have looked like if it were a yacht. It’s really strange to think of the reigning monarch in terms of a grandmotherly figure, but that’s essentially what she seemed like as I looked into their private areas. It was also a bit humorous seeing her room (she and the Duke of Edinburgh each had their separate rooms, of course) and the tiny twin bed that occupied it. It’s definitely a bit odd imagining the Queen trying not to fall out of a tiny little bed rather than spread out luxuriously on a monarch-sized mattress. All in all, it was very interesting, if only because all I could think as the posh British voice in the audio tour kept trying to add pomp and circumstance to every little detail (“This is where they prepared the Royal Tuna and Mayonnaise sandwiches!”), it just made them all seem a lot more human.

HMY Britannia

The start of the tour.


Looking out on the Firth.

Everyone should have a spare Rolls Royce!

After we passed through the gift shop, which merely made me wish I had some Queen-obsessed relative for whom to purchase replica Royal china saucers, Claire and I took a seat in the mall and nibbled on our packed lunches. She had no grand plans for the rest of the day, and was perfectly content with walking around New Town looking at the Georgian architecture and window shopping. That sounded fine by me, and so we headed off on the bus back to town. New Town was pretty, and definitely more modern relatively speaking. What’s modern to the British is colonial to the Americans. To deal with overcrowding, they had drained the Nor’Loch and built a whole new section of town on top of it. It was then, and still is today the rich part of town, which you can tell by all the designer shops you see as you walk down the street. It was also already dressed up for Christmas, which delighted Claire as she loves Christmas, and made me grumpy as it is hardly November and I’m trying to pretend there’s no Christmas this year. But I have to say it added a magical quality to the rapidly darkening streets. It started to rain again, so I asked Claire if we could duck into the National Portrait Gallery, which happened to be right there. It was amazing, but I found myself racing through it like Claire tends to, and missing out on lots of things I wanted to look at more closely. We headed back out once it stopped raining and chose a place for dinner, but since it wasn’t even 4pm, we continued to window shop forever. I was frankly hungry and ready to rest, but she wasn’t and was full of energy. I told her to run around for awhile and burn off some energy while I sat and waited for her somewhere warm. She assumed I wasn’t being serious.

We ate at a small Italian restaurant and were treated like queens by an older Italian gentleman who appeared to run the place. I selected Spaghetti Carbonara, because I was freezing cold and it seemed like something that would warm me up quickly. We were also given free still water, which is probably the nicest thing anyone has done for me since I arrived here. I will always appreciate what I get for free when I go out to eat now. Once finished, we headed back out towards the hostel to freshen up. Claire decided she wanted to have coffee and dessert later on, so we picked another Italian place on the way back to return to in a few hours.

As we climbed up the hill towards the hostel, we saw some people in kilts milling around on the side of the street. They looked like bagpipers ready for a parade, so we slowed and wondered what was going on. As we stopped, some of them picked up their bagpipes and headed across the street to the square in front of the Parliament building. Then I watched in puzzlement as they each found their separate little spaces in corners and behind cars to tune or warm up or something. Puzzling because bagpipes are really, really loud and there was no way that 30 bagpipers could easily get away from the noise of the rest of them. I told Claire that it looked like a little bagpiper Easter egg hunt the way they were dotting the square. But we were immediately enraptured. Claire saw a police officer standing and watching so she went to ask her what was going on, and was told, quite literally, that it was a “wee bit of bagpipe playing.” Thus clarified, we sat down and waited to see what was going on. Soon the bagpipers gathered into a circle and began playing together. There were all sorts of them: old, young, male, female. There were even a few “wee” players who couldn’t have been much older than 8 or 9. As we continued to watch, they eventually lined themselves up and began a small parade down the mile. Claire insisted we run after them, and we followed them as they turned into another square outside the city hall and played. To whom, I don’t know, but by then hundreds of other people had stopped and followed them into the square to watch and take pictures. The sound of them reverberating off the buildings as they played was tremendous. It went all through you. I tried to capture it, but the puny speakers on my camera could do so much, and it was dark, but I did what I could. It was the perfect thing to stumble upon in Scotland.

Bagpiping in the dark.

A spontaneous gaggle of bagpipers. Ach!

When they’d finished, Claire and I resumed our trek back to the hostel. After about an hour of relaxing and recuperating, she was ready to go out again and we headed back towards the Italian restaurant to get our dessert. However, they were apparently unenthusiastic about two grubby students coming in just to spend a few pounds on coffee and dessert, so we were turned away. We ended up walking forever trying to find another suitable place, with Claire of course a hundred yards ahead of me making my input into the decision making process useless, since she couldn’t hear anything from way up there. So I followed her around, slowing down and stopping to look at things since I figure it didn’t make a difference. Apparently some sort of school scavenger hunt event was going on, because I had no less than 6 groups of college students in silly costumes run past me as if being chased by the devil. There were fairies, and teletubbies, and nerds, and kids in nothing but togas despite the fact that it was about 40 degrees and raining. I wish I knew what was going on there! Finally, Claire took me to the bottom of an extremely steep hill and just to immediately turn right back around and begin heading back up it. At this point I’d had enough of being dragged around this crazy city with no plan and she was looking a bit frantic. So I stopped and we had a mini argument about the futileness of all of this and how stupid it was to be racing around in the dark and cold to find the perfect place for coffee and dessert when I wasn’t even hungry, especially when I had no say in even which direction we were headed. This proved to be futile as she couldn’t hear a thing I was saying. So, I looked back around the corner which we had been heading towards and found that it was a bit dark and scary looking with absolutely nothing there, so back up the hill we went anyways. Finally, we settled on this restaurant we had passed before that was nearly right around the corner from the hostel. *sigh* It was empty, looking like it was closing up, and there was Abba blasting over the speakers, but they warmly let us sit down and we were served with chamomile tea and dessert by a very kind, elderly gentleman. It was very, very nice and warm. It struck me that despite all the hills and everything, that I would be sad to leave Edinburgh because it was beautiful, and because people were kind and helpful. Sinead always rants about London, about how it’s cold and people don’t care about you or try and help with your problems. I never thought much of it, or found that it was too big of a deal, but coming to Scotland and on many occasions being treated kindly and given help even when it wasn’t asked for – it was an entirely different experience than being in London, or even Chicago. I finally understand what she’s been yelling about. Afterwards, we headed once again back to the hostel, which I realized to be my last journey up the hill and smiled.

Friday

My train was leaving two hours earlier than Claire’s, and she had many plans for more running around, so I decided that it was best we do our own thing in the morning. I wanted a slower morning where I ate my breakfast without feeling rushed and wandered around Edinburgh one last time at my own pace. However, Claire ended up sleeping in and was only minutes ahead of me out the door as I checked out. I walked down the hill one last time and looked into a few stores again. But clearly this morning was going to pass dreadfully slowly, since I didn’t have the Rick Steves guide and didn’t know where I could go to kill a few hours. So I headed to the train station to see what it would cost to get on an earlier train. Apparently, a lot. So, I forgo that and went outside to take a few last pictures and looked at all the Remembrance Day memorials. Time was beginning to move backwards, and as lovely as Edinburgh was, I just wanted to get going on the train. I read nearly all the rest of my Michael Palin book. I bought a Brie and Pear sandwich from Marks & Spencer and ate my lunch. I people-watched. Finally, the train platform came up and I got onto the train (The Flying Scotsman! A much nicer and more modern train than the one I came up on). We departed, and knowing only about half of my 5 hour trip would be in daylight, I watched the scenery and was again awed. Then darkness fell and I read my book until finally we pulled into King’s Cross.

Now I can say I’ve truly been to Scotland, even though I saw little more than Edinburgh. Alas, after tomorrow, Reading Week is over. I’ve done absolutely nothing as far as schoolwork, but I don’t care. I promised myself I wouldn’t take it too seriously anyways, because the experience of the UK was more important. I’ve fulfilled that promise as well. It just means that the coming weeks will be very busy with work. I think I’ll manage just fine, though. I hope!