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20 September 2008
I’ve officially been in Scotland for one week. It seems like the time has simultaneously flown by and been in slow motion. One week down. Eleven weeks to go. Crazy.
Today was a lot of fun, overall. I woke up around 8, went to the Co-op food store to buy more groceries, as my supply of food had dwindled down to only Nutella. I then got ready to meet my friends in the atrium quarter to ten. Our plan was to meet Laura, who lives in town, at ten o’clock. How it actually happened, on the other hand, is another story.
When I got to the atrium Sarah, Becca, and Annelise were waiting. Lauren hadn’t shown up yet, so I sat with them and we waited.
And waited.
And waited.
After waiting for about ten minutes, I wandered into the library to check email and Facebook. Becca got me about ten minutes later.
Apparently the group was sick of waiting and decided to walk to Lauren’s flat to see if she wanted to go into town with us. She lived in the apartments that were about ten minutes away from campus - a long trek, by our standards, since it was all the way past the castle and the golf course. When we reached her flat, we rang the bell. No answer. Finally, one of her flatmates appeared. Lauren mumbled hello in the distance, followed by a hurried string of apologizes for not showing up when she was supposed to. She’d set her alarm for 9PM instead of 9AM. So she ushered us in to the flat and dashed to her room to get ready. We made ourselves comfortable in her rather spacious living room and watched Friends along with the flatmate who had answered the door.
Lauren appeared ten minutes later, we headed out the door after bidding the roommate goodbye, then waited at the bus stop outside her flat. No bus came. So, we walked back to the main bus depot on campus, hopped a bus heading into town, and reached our friend Laura’s flat in no time.
Laura was there waiting. She’d slept in too, so it was better we hadn’t arrived when we were supposed to. Life does have a funny way of coming together, most times. She led us through the streets to the main mall strip leading to the Thistle Mall. We did some serious shopping. I went away several nice items of clothing and a fashionable bag with pink flowers. I felt accomplished in the realm of consumerism.
We also ate lunch at the mall. There wasn’t a food court, but there was a tasty restaurant, The Marches. I had a hot ham and cheese sandwich, while the majority of the other girls there had beef pie. The food was good, though, and I was starved, so it suited me and the rest just fine.
After our eating excursion we wandered through Old Town Stirling to the Stirling Castle where we bought tickets for admission to the castle grounds, walked around, and took pictures. It was a lot of fun. And, for once, it was SUNNY outside, so the landscape beyond the castle was extra picturesque.
We finished the tour around 4:30. By that time, Becca, Laura, and I had split off from the others and made our own way back to town. We stopped at The Bean Scene, a café in the city centre. Becca bought a mocha and I had a vanilla shake. The coffee shop was cute. Definitely a place I want to revisit.
After visiting the coffee shop Becca, Laura, and I walked through the mall again to help Laura pick out some different wellies (slang for rain boots). She didn’t like the ones she’d purchased earlier. And, although she got her money back, she didn’t get other wellies to replace the ones she had returned. She and Becca said they would come back later to shop around some more.
We also went into a few more clothing stores where I bought two more shirts, making the grand total: three. Then we went to the pound store - everything was a pound, go figure. I came away with two air fresheners (to mask the smell of smoke that diffuses throughout the chalet at random hours of the daytime and night) and Curly Wurly’s, chocolate-and-caramel candy sticks. (They are amazing!)
Our last stop of the day before returning to Uni was to Tesco, the Walmart/Target superstore. I desperately needed to buy some dinner food for that evening. So I bought a chicken fajita wrap (already made - no cooking necessary, thank God!) and some fruity twist Fanta (that stuff is sooo addicting).
When we got back to campus, Becca and I agreed to hang out later in the evening, after we’d eaten. I walked back to my chalet, put my shopping items away, gathered up my laptop and my dinner and headed toward the atrium to access the Internet and eat dinner in peace.
Kyle showed up a few minutes after I’d finished my dinner. He was checking his email in one of the computer labs, saw that I was sitting down, and decided to say “Hi.” We didn’t talk long, just about our days and everything. He’d had practice for the American football team and slept most of the day. I told him about our little adventure into the city. Great fun.
After he left, I waited around for Becca to meet me. I’d told her I would meet her in the atrium and then we could walk to the chalet together. She brought all her DVDs to give us a wide variety of movies to choose from. We eventually settled on Grey’s Anatomy (it wasn’t really a difficult decision). We watched three episodes of that, then she went back to her flat across campus.
There’s a few parties going on in the chalets tonight. I think the boys next door are hosting a party. Nuella, one of my chaletmates, said Becca and I could go to it if we wanted. The chalet was invited. Given the walking we had done earlier in the day and the fact we both weren’t dressed for a party, we decided against attending the party. I probably wouldn’t’ve gone even if I had decided to dress up. The scene of seeing a lot of rugby players get trashed doesn’t sound fun to me, for some reason.
Tomorrow I think I am going to take it easy, start reading Handbooks for my courses and maybe even crack the spine of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors. I also might go to the Mountaineering Club’s outing - walking the paths in and around the hills beyond Stirling (I’m not sure what they’re called. Something that starts with a D, though I haven’t really bothered to look the name up. I should, though...maybe I will mention it in the next post.)...
An Updated from Last Night:
My roommates went out. I'm not sure what time they came back, but I remembered hearing them shouting at one another around 2 in the morning. This was not cool. Apparently Jemma had offended her friend (not a flatmate but a girl who comes over every day) and her friend, drunk and loud, was furious. She, Nuella, and Jemma fought in the kitchen for a little while. I was very tired, too tired to get up and tell them to be quiet, but eventually they quieted down. Still. It's not fun being woken up nearly every night by either their drunken talking or their arguing. It's ridiculous. Don't they realize there are other people in the chalet who want to sleep, who actually aren't vampyrik and can get eight hours of sleep? Honestly...Talk about rude. Oh well. Hopefully everything is smoothed over between them and they won't argue anymore.
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