Day 1: From Evansville to Edinburgh

Hello from Edinburgh! Well, after many hours of travel I finally made it to Scotland.  I flew out of Louisville yesterday morning into Newark.  Then from Newark to Edinburgh.  Amazingly, I only got my bag searched once!  (This is really amazing since one of my bags was very overweight and the other, my carry-on, was jammed packed.) The TSA lady told me I had a high count of metal in my bag and something was concealing it...traveling tip: don't stick adapters and batteries in rain boots; the TSA people don't like it.  She also told me that traveling with lots of books is considered suspicious. I don't really understand why reading is suspicious, but whatever.

Both of my flights were really empty.  The first one I had the entire row to myself. (and a really awesome view of the New York city skyline coming in). The second flight (from Newark to Edinburgh), also wasn't full.  At first, I was sitting next to some interesting Australian guys.  They were the chatty types.  The one sitting next to me began showing me pictures of his trip to New York, specifically of Trump Tower.  The stewardess must have seen the fear in eyes because he told me I could change seats.  I ended up with a full 3 seats to myself.  (Which was really lucky because evidently they sang songs all through the night.)

My first thought flying in to Scotland, was "wow it's really green here." Which sounds really stupid, but in winter everything is brown or white in Evansville.  Not in Scotland.  It is still green in February and the weather is really nice.  It's 40ish right now and there's no snow.  I got into to the hotel around 9:00.  Then, my IFSA friends and I went sightseeing.  We went walking around the castle and walked the Royal Mile. We have some orientation stuff tomorrow, but we're planning on going inside Edinburgh castle, seeing the Queen's residency and eating at the restaurant where J.K. Rowling wrote Harry Potter.  I don't leave to go to Stirling until Saturday, but so far, everything is going good!