Sunday, March 13, 2011

Daylight Savings, Church, and Red Nose Day

Hello everyone! After a very eventful day yesterday, today was a relaxed day for me.  I learned something today.  Scotland (and the UK as a whole) didn't have a time change last night.  This caused a lot of confusion in my life.  I figured that it would make perfect sense for Scotland to have Daylight Savings at the same time as the US, well evidently it doesn't make sense to anyone else.  I wasn't entirely sure when I went to bed last night if it was going to happen or not.  So, this morning when I woke up at 8:45 (we were being picked up to go to church at 10:00) I freaked out a little wondering if the time change happened.  I got conflicting answers. The time on my phone didn't change but the time on my computer did change.  Eventually I Googled it and discovered that the UK does recognize Daylight Savings, but not until March 27.  Why this occurs differently than the US, I have no idea ( I sincerely think it's just to confuse study abroad students like myself).  So, now the time difference between home and here is completely messed up until March 27.

After I overcame my confusion and finally figured out what was going on, I got ready to go to church.  We went back to the Methodist Church that we visited a few weeks ago.  This time, we were picked up by a really nice lady that we met at church.  (She also took us to the Ceilidh last night.)  And, we were actually on time.  This was a really great thing.

Church was good again.  There was a different pastor (it was explained to us that he is one of the regular ministers of the church.  Evidently they have a few different ones).  I really liked him.  He had a PowerPoint with visuals.  I was pretty happy.  We also used a different hymnal this time.  We sang some more modern songs which was nice.  It was also great to see how excited everyone in the church was have new songs to sing.  I really liked the mix of modern and traditional music.  He also did a really cool prayer. He put up pictures on his PowerPoint and asked us to reflect on the images and pray for those people (So, he showed pictures from Japan after the earthquake/tsunami, Libya, and India for Red Nose Day, which I'll explain later).  Then, we sang between each round of pictures.  It was something I've never seen done before, but I think was a lot more effective than just talking.  I really liked it.

After church, we stayed to chat with everybody, drink coffee and eat cake (it was a lady's 90th Birthday, so we had Birthday Cake).  We a good time talking about the Ceilidh last night with everybody.  A lot of the people at church were also there last night.  We had a good time.

We discovered today that Tesco is really close to church.  This is good, because then we can get groceries after going to church on Sundays.  So, after we went to Tesco we went back to campus.  I worked on my essays and did some reading before we met for dinner tonight (and to finish our game of Uno that we started on the train to Linlithgow).  Tomorrow I have classes and then will probably be at the library all day (weather permitting.  Evidently, we are supposed to get snow and everybody is freaking out about it.  I don't really know how valid this because it's 40 degrees outside and is supposed to stay that way).

Now, I'll explain a little about what Red Nose Day is.  This is a big thing here.  So big in fact, that everybody knows what it is and you have to go to the website to understand what it's all about.  Red Nose Day is kind of like a telethon, but sounds a whole lot better.  It's this Friday on BBC.  Basically it's a night of comics (red nose = clown = funny = comedian.  It took me a long time to figure that out.) doing their thing on TV to raise money for underprivileged people around the world.  It's extremely successful (last year it made 48 million pounds, so about 70 million dollars). Part of this campaign is to send comedians to underprivileged countries for "Comic Relief" (hints the pictures during the prayer in church).  Overall, it sounds really fun. (Here is the website if you want to know more. http://www.rednoseday.com/)

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