Loch Ness, Glencoe, & The Highlands

Spot the bird?

Yesterday started bright and early with a 6:30 am wake-up call - we needed to be at the bus meeting point by 7:45, a point that was about 30 min walk away from my flat. Still not really awake, we wandered up to the meeting point (right up by Edinburgh Castle) where we were greeted by Timberbush Tours and divided into two buses.

We did the one-day trip to Loch Ness, Glencoe, and the Highlands, leaving Edinburgh at 8am and returning around 8pm that night. As we were covering a large amount of ground in a very short amount of time, none of our stops were very long, but our driver, Jamie, was extremely entertaining, and kept up a commentary of interesting historical information for much of the trip.

Our first stop was at a small tourist trap just before we started getting into the Scottish "mountains", where we got to see some adorable Highland Cows. While the majority of highland cows used to be black, they are now more commonly tan, with black highland cows being a rare sight. The three at this particular place were called Hamish, Heather, and their daughter Honey. Hamish has a facebook page.

It was also a loop, heading up on the back roads and back down on the main ones, so there was little repeats in terms of the view outside of the bus.

If you want an idea of where we went, this map is roughly the main stops on our trip, though I don't know if it is the exact route we took.

However, this does mean that a lot of the pictures I took were through a bus window, so apologies for any drop in my usual wonderful quality of pictures.

Some fun Scottish terminology before we begin: a glen is a valley, 'ben' means mountain, and a loch is a lake.

While the human population of Scotland is 5 million, the population of sheep is about 10 million.

After this, we headed up into the Highlands, hearing more about the Scottish wars of independence, including how historically inaccurate Braveheart, based on the real-life Sir William Wallace, actually was.

We passed through the valley where the Mackay clan traditionally resided (though we didn't happen to stop there).

We also heard about Robert the Bruce. Fun fact: before he was King of the independent Scotland, Robert the Bruce stabbed  John III "Red" Comyn to death on the alter of an abby, for which crime he asked, after his death, that his heart be cut from his chest and carried to the Holy Land by his friend Sir James Douglas. However, Douglas was mortally wounded before he reached the Holy Land. Certain accounts hold that as he was dying, he threw Robert's heart out before him, saying "Go forth my braveheart", so thats where the movie title came from.

Robert the Bruce decisively secured Scottish independence in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Significantly, while Scottish independence was won militarily in 1314, Scottish independence will be voted on through referendum by the Scottish people in 2014.

We passed Stirling Castle, where Mary, Queen of Scots was crowned at one year old. She is considered Scotland's most tragic queen.

We passed the castle where Monty Python's Holy Grail was filmed, but too fast for me to get a picture.

We travelled through the Great Glen, which is a natural fault running across Scotland, containing several glens and lochs, running from Inverness to Fort William.

We travelled through where one of the glens where Skyfall was shot, at which point our bus driver played the Skyfall song.

Its really funny, our guide kept pointing out, oh, this is where scenes from Harry Potter/Game of Thrones/Monty Python/etc was shot. In particular, we passed where the scenes for Hagrid's cottage were shot in the third Harry Potter film. While they intended to leave the cottage up, they ended up having to take it down because people kept stealing bits of it - ask our guide, he has the front door to Hagrid's cottage in his house.

We also passed through Glencoe, where we heard about the massacre of the McDonalds by the Campbells. While there were various wars fought in Scotland, much of the killing of Scots was done by their fellow Scots.

Our big stop of the day was at Loch Ness, where I went on an hour-long boat trip around the Loch, passing by Urquhart Castle.

Caty, me, and Tori with Nessie

We stopped at the Commando Memorial, erected in the Scottish highlands where they train, memorializing the men who fought in WWII.

During the 18th and 19th centuries, Highland farmers were forced out by wealthy Scottish landowners who believed they could make more money hosting animals on their land instead of tenant farmers in the Highland Clearance. Memorials to this exist in both Scotland and Canada. Our guide told us that while the population of Scotland is 5 million, there is an estimated 25 million people of Scottish descent around the world, a large number of that due to the clearances.

There are so many friggin castles in Scotland. We passed at least eight that I can remember, probably more. Much of them are only ruins though - a lot of them were blown up or set fire to over the course of various wars with the English.

Bridge in Inverness

Overall, an awesome and very informative day.

Put my scarf over my head because it was wet and the wind would just blow my hood off... belatedly realized it made me look like a little old lady. 

Friday Funday

Good news! I've downloaded the incredibly functional and well designed blogger app, so unless I want to put photos from my camera on a post, I will no longer have to wait until I have internet on my computer again to post!

My friends Caty and Tori arrived today from Glascow. They are on the last legs of a European tour (ten weeks down, two to go). I met them at the bus station, then we headed back to my flat, where we made some delicious lasagna, before heading over to a friends flat for her housewarming party. However, we didn't stay too late as we are going on a tour of Loch Ness and the Highlands early tomorrow morning - we leave the city at 8 in the morning and don't get back until 8 that night, so it will be a long but hopefully awesome day!

ETA: apparently forgot to actually hit 'post' last night. The trip was indeed awesome, but the post on it will have to wait until I actually have internet, as I took quite a few gorgeous pictures on my camera! However, as a bit of a sneak peak....

Money Woes

The fun part of studying abroad is paying for it. As you may deduce, it is quite expensive to study overseas. I am lucky in that my program is only one year in duration, otherwise I doubt I would be able to afford it.

The easiest way for me to pay my tuition is by visa, and, given that my student status doesn't exactly make the bank want to give me a very high limit, I set up a six-payment plan for my tuition, just enough that each payment would be less than my payment limit. 

Alas, tragedy! The first of the month revealed a pending charge on my visa greater than my limit. Panicking, I attempted to raise my limit. No go. I then transferred the money onto my visa pre-emptively, hoping that if the payment was already there, the charge would go through. 

To my great relief, a check on my account this morning showed that it had gone through. However, this still left the question of why I got charged so much more than I had calculated. I prepared to go to the school and inquire, or to call the bank and see if they perhaps had charged me some mystery fee. 

The mystery was solved this afternoon, however, when I realized that they day the charge had been processed, the conversion rate had been up from the 1.5 CAD to 1 GPB it had been holding at fairly steadily all summer to 1.7 (it's now back down to 1.6). 

Lesson learned: the conversion rate is definitely something to keep my eye on. 

More School (But Also Food!)

Day two (my tuesday schedule) once again started at 9 am with a hour lecture (Magazine Buisness). While all the publishing students attend this lecture, only the MSc Magazine Publishing students attend the tutorials, so I'm not entirely clear on whether or not there will be assignments for that class, or just attend and listen to the information. We then have an hour break, which my group used to get together and keep working on our group project (yesterday we were the first group to get our stock approved, so I think we are ahead of the game - definitely a good impression to make on the program leader!). Following that, we have another hour lecture (Publishing: Concept to Creation, which is where we'll be learning a lot of the practical stuff). Then we had a three hour break, the majority of which I spent in the library catching up on internet stuff (and this blog!). Finished the day with a three hour tutorial from 3-6 for Publishing: Concept to Creation.

Wednesday I don't have any classes, however, my group got up bright and early to make the trek out by bus to deliver the books we'd chosen to our school (we did a "Scottish fantasy collection" - five sets of Treasure Island, Peter and Wendy, and The Kelpie's Pearls). It was received with much enthusiasm, and after handing in all our paperwork, we went out for a celebratory breakfast/lunch.

Yum!

AND I finally got around to riding on the top floor of a bus! *super* exciting!

Thursday is a long day, starting at 9 with the four-hour Creative Toolkit. However, I am quite excited for Creative Toolkit, and the time today went by quite quickly. We'll be primarily learning InDesign and Photoshop, in the lovely Mac lab that is just for our program. After that I have the three hour Workshop, which you can come and go as you wish, and is basically just reserved computer time for your tutorial group to do whatever assignments were given to you that week. I spent quite a while in there today working on a list of book festivals in the UK our tutorial group had been assigned to put together (fun fact: there are 23 book festivals in July in the UK).

Jewelry Storage is a Bitch

I’m sure all of you have some awareness of the insane level of jewelry I possess. While a jewelry box might the conventional storage, a lot of my earrings won’t fit, and they’re pretty and I like displaying them. In Sackville, I sorted my jewelry into a variety of storage devices, including a martini, wine, and shot glass, a shallow glass dish, and a little box, hanging my necklaces from a hook.

At home, I used a corkboard to hang earrings and necklaces, and a lovely DIY earring frame my mum made me for the rest.

So, with a huge pile of earrings, I was looking for a way to store them here. My temporary solutions was to tie up ribbon and hang my earrings from those, but that just wasn’t working for me. Then, while going through the kitchen the other day, I happened upon an empty spice rack. I washed all the jars, and voila. Earring and necklace storage.

The plastic thing hanging above it is the bottom of a spray bottle - I was originally going to use it to put my phone next to my bed, as I don’t have room for a bedside table, but I then decided that I could just put my phone on the ground, and adapted the storage device for more jewelry (feather earrings are a real nightmare to store and move).

For those of you who were not privy to my facebook discussion of this, I went to rearrange the furniture in my room a bit, only to discover, when I moved my wardrobe, a cupboard built into the wall of my room. Both excited and sketched out, we speculated about why it was blocked off (the popular theories were hiding place for a dead body (my immediate thought), portal to Narnia, and some vague references to Harry Potter).

While the cupboard itself revealed itself to be really not sketchy, the panel of wall below it is, as it fell open as I moved the wardrobe (it was just propped against the rest of the wall) to reveal what I assume is part of the heating system. I asked my landlord, and he said the cupboard is fine to use, though it does get really warm inside of it, so I've been leaving the doors open to avoid melting any of my things (mostly my make up).

I moved my dresser underneath it though, making the hole in the wall be propped shut again, and it is very nice! Pretty much quadrupled the storage in my room: win!

Pictured: totally not sketchy cupboard. 

No Internet Blues

I am currently (September 30th) typing this post up on my internet-less computer so I can quickly copy and paste it onto my blog tomorrow. My roommate neglected to transfer the internet from his former roommate to himself when said roommate moved out, and his attempt to transfer it last Friday has resulted in our internet being shut off until they can set us back up, which for some mysterious reason, can’t happen until around October 13th, to my extreme annoyance.

On the other hand, I knit half a hat this weekend, finished a book, and watched a lot of old movies and episodes of TV shows, which was fun.

Look at those pretty needle markers Connie made me.

Then again, I can’t watch the Breaking Bad finale, which is extremely aggravating (and before you suggest it, no, I cannot set up at campus or in a coffee shop to watch it, as 90% of the time while watching Breaking Bad I end up screaming at Walter White for all his poor choices and dickish behaviour).

Friday was another extremely busy day. We arrived at campus at 9:30 for more information about the school and our courses, followed by a goal setting seminar, and finally a presentation from The Society for Young Publishers Scotland (which I am now a member of, thank you very much). We also received information about an 8-month internship with Floris Books, which I am hoping to apply for.

We were also finally assigned our tutorial groups, which means I now know my entire class schedule for the first semester.

Monday: Publishing in Context Lecture 9-10, Publishing in Context Tutorial 11-1, Meida Monday Lecture 1-2.
Tuesday: Magazine Business Lecture 9-10, Publishing in Practice Lecture 11-12, Publishing in Practice Tutorial 3-6.
Thursday: Creative Toolkit 9-1, Digital Workshop 1-5

Publishing in Context is the only lecture I had today, seems like we’ll be taking a very broad look at publishing in a historical and modern context in that class. There is no exam, but rather a single case study which makes up 100% of my grade and is due after Christmas (eep!). The tutorials seem to be kind of like discussion groups, there are 13 people in my tutorial, lots of them are from the UK, as well as a girl from China, a girl from France, a girl and guy from the states, and Kate, one of the other Canadians (there are four of us from what I can tell). We didn’t have Media Monday today, as my impression is that it is largely guest lecturers. The creative toolkit is a kind of computer class, where we will be learning InDesign and Photoshop, among others, while the digital workshop is basically a chance for us to use the computer lab for whatever course work we need to.

Wednesday nights there is an optional but heavily recommended movie night. The first couple movies include Agora (2009), The Name of the Rose (1986), and The Ninth Gate (1999). They are, ostensibly, films featuring books (though in a very broad sense). Which ought to be fun.

We also received a print out of the timetable for the year. The weeks are numbered, ie. I am currently in postgraduate week 1, but since the undergraduates start much earlier than the postgraduates, they are on week 4. However, apparently most of the emailed information about events, days off, etc. tend to have the undergraduate weeks, so postgrads have to double check everything.

Some pertinent/exciting dates:
October 21 - Reading week, the Burns trip is also this week.
December 23 - January 3 - Christmas Break
January 8 - assessment for trimester one due
January 11 - trimester one ends
January 23 - induction for trimester two
January 27 - trimester two begins
April 14-25 - Easter break
May 10 - trimester two ends
May 19 - trimester three begins
August 30 - trimester three ends

I also got my new phone case in the mail (thanks again mum). Look at how cute it is!