The Christmas Post

On Friday, I slept in more than I had expected. Still, I found candy canes, magical elves, and a chocolate orange after a long hunt through every store I could think of before drifting out of the rain into a bookstore. Also, I found turkish delight in a pound store.

For the win!

I actually grabbed all different colours from two different containers without looking.

A magical elf.

At last, the hard-won candy canes!

It's real!

Of course, it was pretty gross. "Rose" isn't a very strong flavour, so I mostly got "sugar" for that one, and lemon actually tasted exactly the same.

I had read Hogfather the day before, so I watched the movie, a made-for-tv affair. It was okay, and nowhere near as bad as it could have been. Almost all the actors were british, and they followed most of the plot pretty well. Death was a little weird; I always figured him as pretty impassive, but this one had an angry skull. The voice wasn't too bad, though. Susan was played by, as Jessi pointed out, "the girl from Downton Abbey," which sounded more vague than it was, and she did okay. Mustrum Ridcully was played by Joss Ackland with a beard, which disguised him pretty well, since he was bald and beardless as the Russian ambassador in The Hunt for Red October (and also as the villain in Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey).

Saturday, I slept in again It is vacation... Or, as they say here, holidays. Jessi had already left to meet her parents, probably at the airport. Over the course of the afternoon, I decided not to go with chinese takeaway because it just doesn't sound appealing. Also, the restaurant that's closest to Clanny is pretty pricey for just one dish, and I felt that I'd already spent a lot of money on food.
In the interests of exploration, I tried blue cheese for the first time in about 17 years. It started as "For SCIENCE!" and ended as "I know too much science to eat that." The non-blue parts aren't too bad, but thinking about putting large quantities of concentrated, highly visible bacteria into my mouth freaks me out (I added those qualifiers because, you know, we put a ton of bacteria into our mouths on a regular basis, we just can't see it). I killed some in the oven, and it didn't taste too bad, but... shudder. It's that horrible feeling that you get when you touch something gross... Just... ugh.
It wasn't just for exploration and science, it was that lots of people I know like blue cheese (also the food blogs, but I really do know people, real people, in real life that like the stuff), and I thought, maybe I've got this all wrong and I'm letting a barely-remembered incident and my parent's opinion colour my perception of this rather famous, generally accepted cheese.
Now, it's my opinion. If you got rid of all the mould, it wouldn't be too bad.

To distract you from blue cheese, here's some pictures of fairly delicious candy!

Hawick Balls (mint, if you can believe it).

Rhubarb and Custard thingies

Dandelion and Burdock bottles

I think these are either rhubarb or strawberry 

Silver things. They turned out to be kind of minty, but I mostly got them because they were shiny.

Sounds exciting...

Nothing too magical.

Barley sugar, I believe. I always wondered what it was, and I still wonder why it's called that.

Treacle Toffees: Purchased out of curiosity. Such things exist?

Clove somethings

Around the plate of candy, which includes the above plus some chocolates not mentioned, we have a mince pie, a chocolate orange, cookies, a slice of fruitcake, and oranges. Also Hogfather between the cookies and the cake.

Repast. And yeah, I was kind of into taking pictures of my food that night.

Pure Heaven white grape and peach non-alcoholic sparkling beverage.

...Which had a fancy cork! 

Luckily, Adam had left his leatherman in the kitchen, so I set about opening the first cork I'd ever encountered.

After a long and arduous battle, I won.

Someone left a wine glass. I took advantage of it.

I roasted chestnuts. From left: uncooked, cooked, opened and half eaten.
They weren't very good, actually. A little to sweet and spongy for me.

I had a santa hat, and I wore it all day. This is my facebook profile now...

In addition to stuffing myself with cheese, I watched a lot of movies. I forget all of them, but I watched Polar Express and Nativity Story on Christmas Eve for sure, and I also watched, during the course of the weekend, Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Miracle on 34th Street, A Charlie Brown Christmas, Home Alone, Die Hard, Die Hard 2, Gremlins (those last four are all set on Christmas and/or Christmas Eve), and all three of The Santa Clause series.

Sunday, I was planning on going to St. Gabriel's for their Christmas Day service, to be in church when I couldn't be with family and friends, and to see what an anglican church is like. I'm curious, after learning quite a bit about their formation in Core 150 and English Social History 1500-1750. We don't really see many of those in the US; probably something about being the whole reason that the religious establishment in the states was what it was.
Unfortunately, I woke up ten minutes before the service was to start, due to my really annoying habit of turning my alarm off in my sleep. I ended up getting up around 11, again.
In the afternoon, happily after I was up and had made my bed and stuff, Jessi and her parents came by. Fortunately, they spoke enough english to make things not-awkward, and Jessi translated when their english failed them. My german never came into play, although I did pick up on some of what they said. They were pretty nice.
After they left, I got started on dinner, and it resulted in this rather suspicious-looking concoction.

Soup. More of a stew, actually. I slaved over this.

It was delicious, and ended up feeding me for three days.

I skyped with my parents in the GMT afternoon and the rest of my dad's side of the family in the PST afternoon, which was nice. I've been talking to people back home more and more, and I'm getting pretty excited to get to the house in spokane, and to be back at whitworth, and to see my family in person. I haven't actually had a major W-curve depression moment, although I'm pretty disillusioned with the University in general. That sort of depressed mood hits me at whitworth, too, like when I get a particularly bad mark, or I'm having a hard time with an assignment, or a professor isn't being helpful. It happens a lot less at whitworth, and the professors are a lot less unhelpful than here, and I also have a great advisor at whitworth who has proved her worth by helping me get here and by not judging me for having a breakdown in her office over physics. I think she probably sees a lot of that from science major freshmen, you know, the ones who were pretty darn smart in high school, were at the tops of their classes without trying, who never had to study (oh, how I miss those days)... 

Overall, Christmas was a success. It was helped more when my flatmate that moved away (causing the sad puppy whimpers from me) invited me to visit her at her boyfriend's house in Beford for a few days and maybe spend new years eve with them and another flatmate who's been traveling. I didn't start any big traditions (I was hoping for Chinese on Christmas Eve, like crepe tuesdays. In retrospect, I didn't have any family or friends around to make it a worthwhile tradition, so I just continued in the family habit of eating cheese and crackers for Christmas Eve), but I didn't have an emotional breakdown and I don't think my family did, either. 

Oh, and I intend to call christmas lights "fairy lights" for the rest of my life. It just sounds so much cooler.

Edinburgh — Friday 28 October to Monday 31 October

Friday was a day of sleeping in and moving slowly until about half an hour before it was time to catch the metro to Newcastle, where we would catch the Megabus to Edinburgh. In addition to frantic packing activities, Adam was missing. We decided that he could drive to Newcastle if he had to, and set off for the metro with way too much luggage. The best part was all the food that was being packed. Josie thought it was the funniest thing that Jessi was packing for the apocalypse for a four-hour endeavor, since she had to drive an hour and a half to get to the supermarket in her home, um, town.
When we got to the metro, Flo, Lisa, and Josie realised that they didn't have enough change for the fare (£3, and it has to be coins) and hurried over to the Aldi (right next to the station, but we were on the other side of the tracks) to buy something that cost less than £2.
While Jessi, Conor, and I were guarding the luggage (so much luggage!), Adam showed up to let us know that he couldn't come. He had a big project due for his film class (he ended up interviewing a DJ instead of a prostitute), and the main problem with it was his fault. There were many sad faces made by all parties.
After an unnervingly long time, Josie, Flo, and Lisa came running (and that's not hyperbole) down the stairs to the platform. They'd been stuck behind this guy with a trolley (cart) full of stuff who had refused to let three kids with one thing each go ahead of him. He took forever, and then he bought fireworks.
Geh. In any case, they made it with just enough time to buy tickets. The train came, we said good bye to Adam, and then we were off!
Flo brought out his food about two stops in. It takes about a minute and a half to go between stops in Sunderland.
We did get stuck at one station, but that was about five, maybe ten minutes of waiting.
Jessi brought out her food at that point. Josie made faces at them.
We finally got moving, and I understood why Adam thinks that the metro is populated entirely by sketchy people. It's a long train ride to Newcastle, and there are a lot of sketchy little stops along the way. In my limited experience, which is pretty limited to Sunderland, there's not a lot of open space in England.
There was enough open space between Sunderland and Newcastle to provide ample sketchy metro stops.
We made it to Newcastle, which is a rather pretty city that I'd like to spend time in not at the airport between 23:00 and 01:00, without being threatened by any of the metro regulars.
I didn't get to see any more of Newcastle than the metro and the very short walk from the station to the megabus stop allowed. We found our bus easily and boarded without incident.
I got an aisle seat, which was disappointing, because the countryside was very pretty. It got dark pretty quickly, and I spent about an hour in drooly snoozing that didn't leave me very rested. After that, I tried to stare out the windows at the dark landscape, but I was foiled by the shade on the windscreen (windshield) and the bald guy in front of me. I did see the Conan Doyle Tavern on the way in to Edinburgh, but that was about it.
There are so many castles and spires and the like in Edinburgh. It was incredible. In the dark, at least, it was beautiful. I was not expecting this. Big cities in the states are not considered beautiful, as a rule. Striking, sure, and occasionally intriguing, but rarely beautiful.
On the long walk to the hostel, we joked constantly about how this castle or that imposing building was actually the hostel, and learned that Josie's parents met at while staying at a hostel that was in a castle in Edinburgh. Her dad actually broke a hundred-year-old stained glass window when he and his friends got locked out. We also made fun of Flo, who griped the whole way about how hungry he was and how heavy his bag was (it held his and Lisa's clothes and was a duffel with no shoulder strap). Jessi borrowed Josie's rolling suitcase and rested her bag on it.
After arguing a little bit over which building was the Edinburgh Castle and which was the building that Flo was pointing at, we reached the Budget Backpackers hostel.

Hostel! The colours outside are pretty tame compared to inside.

We had a bit of a hard time explaining that we were missing on person, lowering our party count to six, and only four of us were staying for three days, and two of us were only staying for two days, but we all booked together. It was great. (Flo and Lisa had to go back for class on monday. Our megabus tickets got us back well before 6 PM, so I was fine for class)
Almost immediately after checking in, getting our bedding on, and ditching our luggage in the lockers, we set out in search of food. Flo was hungry, and the rest of us were starting to feel peckish as well.
We argued over whether we should try for Pizza Express or something cooler. We argued kind of a lot this trip...
We settled on The Castle Arms, a little restaurant on top of some shops. It was okay, but nothing to write home about.

Dinner. The better part was looking around the city, since the food was pretty "meh." 

I had "soup" that ended up being a vegetable stew-y sort of affair, while everyone else had a main course. I foresaw my eating habits in this. Yay, vegetarians! At least I have a valid excuse for avoiding haggis if it ever crosses my path.

After the castle arms, we ambled around the city. It was about 8PM at this point, I want to say, but the city was still nice to look at. We found a graveyard (which freaked Jessi out for some reason), and kept an eye out for tour guides with white facepaint and anachronistic clothes. I quickly determined that they were from the "Witchery Tours" across the street from where we ate, which I thought would be very interesting. They were very popular around Halloween, though, so I didn't bring it up to the others. There was no way we'd be able to afford it even if we managed to book a spot.

After lots of ambling, we ended up at a coffee shop that looked like it had cake, which Jessi was craving. It turned out to be The Elephant House, billed as the birthplace of Harry Potter.

Edinburgh is kind of obsessed. There's one shop that has a "JK Rowling was never in this shop" sign.

Apparently, Joanna (JK) Rowling had a bit of a rough start. She was a single mom without a steady enough job to pay for heat, so she took her kid(s) around to coffee shops where she could sit and write. I wasn't too impressed by Elephant House as a coffee shop. I suspect that they get by on their fame rather than their coffee. The mocha that I had made me tired, which was rather distressing.

After the Elephant House, we moved on to The Last Drop pub, which we later learned is where the condemned had their last glass of whiskey before being hung out in the Grassmarket. The Grassmarket was actually sort of across the street from the hostel.

The Last Drop tavern had several movie quotes. I took a picture of the Sean Connery one because he's Scottish. And Batman is in the picture, too.

 The Last Drop was really crowded, so it was also really warm. I dozed while waiting for everyone else to be ready to go, which was a little embarrassing. It was fine, though, since I was able to fall asleep pretty quickly once we did get back to the hostel. I felt a little sorry for our asian roommate, who was asleep before we got back around 11 PM.

No one really felt sorry for asian roommate when she woke everyone except me up at four in the morning moving out.
Saturday is the picture day. Edinburgh was even prettier in the daytime, and the whole city was like the cool walls that make me so ridiculously happy in Sunderland.
We had already decided to go on the free walking tour at 11 AM, so we ambled downstairs for breakfast at 10:30-ish. All the breakfast foods were overpriced, but I got a large bowl of greek yogurt with honey. It was delightful.
There were three or four other people on the walking tour, all from Holland. It was led by Will from Australia, who was traveling around Europe and decided to stay in Edinburgh about six months ago. I'm slightly jealous of the ability to pick up and just start life over in a new place.
Don't worry, mom and dad, I'm coming home in january. I want to do science (which I can't do if I get a degree from here) more than I want to go globe-hopping.
We started off by learning about Greyfriars Bobby, whose statue across the street from the Greyfriars Bobby Tavern that's right next to the entrance of Greyfriars Kirkyard (the cemetery we visited friday night) is the most photographed statue in Scotland. I took a picture of it, but it didn't turn out well enough for me to keep when I ran out of space on my camera.

So there was this policeman who had a dog, which was unexpectedly a skye terrier instead of some more terrifying breed. John the policeman and Bobby were an inseparable pair until John died, after which Bobby sat at his grave (in Greyfriars) every single day for, I believe, 16 years. Stray dogs weren't allowed in Edinburgh, so the people sent around a petition that basically elected Bobby to parliament. Since killing a member of parliament was illegal, Bobby was able to keep his vigil without worrying about having no owner. When he died, he got his own grave at the front of the cemetery, a statue across the street, and a pub named after him.  

Most haunted graveyard, thanks to the various epidemics that swept the british isles. 

Greyfriars has 400 headstones and about 400,000, um, occupants. It's on what is referred to as "the mound", which was actually created by the mass burials during plague and epidemic years. Lovely.

Here's the most haunted part of the most haunted graveyard: this row was a prison for the few thousand survivors of an assault on Edinburgh by the english. George "Bloody" Mackenzie was the guy in charge, and apparently he felt the need to teach the Scots a lesson. 100 were taken out and hanged all at once in the Grassmarket at the beginning, and the 700 or so who survived after several months of bad treatment were tortured. 

The single most haunted place in the graveyard: the tomb of George Mackenzie, the guy who masterminded the atrocities from the picture before this.

It was all so pretty...

"Worst thing that happened to Scotland"

 The Flodden Wall (FLOW-dn) was built by some Scottish king to keep the English out. It was a mile square, and it held the entire population of Edinburgh for way too long. Unfortunately, when the English came, no one was guarding the gate, so they just walked in. Oops.

Allegedly the place where Joanna Rowling first had the idea for Harry Potter when talking to a little boy about what they did in the building there.

Graveyards: beautiful. Also, that's Flo there in the foreground.

There were so many spires and steeples.

For any Harry Potter fans who read this blog: Tom Riddle's grave.

Edinburgh Castle. Pretty awesome.

The sun was shining from behind, so the lighting was almost surreal.

Either St. Augustine's or Greyfriars church.

So. Pretty.

National library. Huge. 

Apparently, it's great fun to watch drunk girls in high heels try to walk on cobblestones. 

Castle. That cliff is where they threw suspected witches into the lake that used to be there. If they hit a rock on the way down (likely), they weren't a witch and their soul went to heaven. If they drowned (very likely), they weren't a witch and their soul went to heaven. If they somehow managed to survive, they were a witch and were tortured to death.
In the words of Will the tour guide, "Basically, if you were accused of being a witch, you were in a whole s***load of trouble."

Princes gardens. Yes, that's grammatically correct. This is where the lake (which was full of non-witch corpses and nasty refuse from the city, hence the great soil that leads to gorgeous gardens today) used to be.

Monument to Sir Walter Scott.

Scott himself.

There's this weirdly modern section of the city. Most of it is awesome and old, but if you look between the two old buildings, there's a new, glass building. 

Some cool stuff. I never really figured out what they are, but it's pretty.

Will the tour guide from Australia. Also "Edinburgh's Disgrace" in the background.

Will again and Conor. I was aiming for the unfinished amphitheatre. Edinburgh was trying to promote itself as a centre for the arts, but they ran out of money. It was all a bit embarrassing, I gather.

That cool thing and also the whole city.

The city and the harbor. I'm not sure which body of water that is. I think the North Sea is nearby-ish.

I can't remember what it was called, but that's where they'd signal the ships to move out at 13:00 (1:00 PM) every day. Somebody would climb up and fire a rifle until the city started absorbing the noise; they put ip a white flag on the cross-looking thing up there. Also, Jessi in the foreground.

So much old stuff. 

Again with all the cool old buildings! So pretty!

...Mansion? Classic country estate looking place.

So cool.

Fancy hotel has a courtyard on top.

St. Giles. Next to the Scottish Parliament's headquarters, which used to be a prison.

I think someone's heart is actually in the middle there; I could be wrong. I kind of missed the first part of Will's explanation. It's the only place where it's legal to spit in Scotland, however, so we all spat and dodged the flying globs of saliva.

These are not TARDISes. But they almost are...

I have a thing for tall buildings. I think this one is the HUB, the only place where a parliament meets over a cafe. 

Just outside the hostel. Old wall!

Other side of hostel.

Arthur's Seat, the mountainy hilly thing that King Arthur allegedly climbed to look over Edinburgh. We climbed it, too. Well, we actually climbed the taller hill in the middle, but we were close enough.

Climbing Arthur's Seat.

A... house? 

Jessi in front, Conor to the side taking a picture, two random people, then Flo and Lisa. I think Josie was ahead of me.

That is a really bad place to have a house. No wonder it fell down.

Me on top of the world. If you embiggen (by clicking, I think; if that doesn't work, try right clicking and opening the image in a new tab) and highlight, you can see a non-edinburgh town about a million feet below me.

Everyone else: Conor, Josie, Flo, Jessi, and Lisa was behind me. Flo kept playing with the wind and jumping to see if it would carry him back. It did. It was so windy up there... 

What a view. Totally worth the brutal climb.

Another gorgeous view. The green stretch in the middle of the picture is the actual Seat; we went up to the taller part behind the Seat. 

After we climbed back down the Seat, Flo and Lisa went to sort out their train tickets back to Sunderland while the rest of us played hearts before ambling around again. We acquired two new roommates, an older guy who turned out to be from Ecuador and an even older guy who didn't speak english. Flo and Lisa got back before we did, and Flo planted a large fake spider in Jessi's bed. Jessi hates spiders.
It was hilarious.
I must be a very deep sleeper, because apparently the guy who doesn't speak english woke everyone else up at about 4 AM. This seems to be a common theme. Apparently, he was folding shopping bags for at least half an hour. Jessi asked him if he was done at one point, and he just said, "Hello." Jessi was not amused, and ranted later, when we were all awake, about how he could have said he was sorry, or that he didn't speak any english. I'm not sure where I developed my sense of sympathy for people who can't speak the language of the country they're in very well, since I've only been in El Salvador, and I picked up enough spanish to make my needs known or was around a translator who could help me. I think it very odd that Jessi, who is not speaking in her native language and who went to America with iffy english skills when she was in high school, is incredibly frustrated by people who don't speak english. I realised at about that point that I will probably not get along with Jessi at all by the end of november. Call it personality clash, culture shock setting in, or familiarity breeding contempt, but I will probably have an outburst when we move in on december. I planned to take steps to push this issue back as long as possible, and it might be that she's having culture shock. She's used to living at home, not having a roommate, and speaking in German all the time. I'm used to living in a dorm, cooking for myself, having a roommate, and speaking english. This is probably why she occasionally turns into a total monster. She's also unwilling to simply accept the suppositions of others, and vocalises any doubts she might have. This drives me crazy. I don't mind when she gripes about the dishes, or when she is irrational about bugs, or when she sounds angry over something little, like me being in the way of the microwave, or when she's really lazy and gets everyone else to get things for her... This turned into Watson's "I never complain" rant (starts at 49 seconds) from the Sherlock Holmes movie, which has a SEQUEL coming out!

Sunday, we mostly slept in (after the noisy packer debacle), and I can't really remember what we did. Flo and Lisa checked out, and I think this is the day that we went shopping. I got yarn for Mom, some postcards, and some "Traditional Scottish Tea" in a cool box. I was hoping for a nifty scarf, or some other touristy thing, but there was nothing I liked enough to justify spending the money on it.
We had Pizza Express for dinner, and it was okay. The best part were the "dough balls" (like small round breadsticks) with nutella. So good.
We had three new roommates when we got back, a couple and their third wheel. There were a few awkward moments there, but they were polite enough and didn't wake us up at crazy early in the morning.

Monday was fine. We caught the bus back with no trouble, other than Jessi insisting upon asking the drivers where they were going instead of reading the sign on the bus and on the gate, which I told her about (eye twitch) and being sent back into the nasty, hot, smelly bus station because our bus wasn't loading yet. For the ride back, I got the window, which soothed my irritation with Jessi, and I watched the countryside amble past.
After a lengthy search of the train station for a bathroom, we bought our tickets for the metro, which were oddly small. Jessi, of course, had to make sure that they were proper and not invalid in some way instead of simply confirming that everyone else had the same thing, since we all used different machines. Not that I'm bitter. Anyway, the rest of the way home was uneventful, and my post-journey endorphines saved the day by making me essentially forget any frustrations for a few hours. It was good to get back to Sunderland.

Also, the time changed. I think it was Saturday night.