A New Semester, A New Blog

As promised I am back blogging!  Here is the new address... http://jennifers-lifeandtimes.blogspot.com/.  Enjoy!

Last Day in Scotland

Hello everyone! Today was my last day in Scotland.  We got a bus from campus early after doing the final packing up of our rooms and checking out.  Then we dragged all of our luggage all the way to the bus stop and got our bus to Edinburgh.  Luckily, the bus actually stopped right at the Marriott so we didn't have to take any extra buses.  We checked into our rooms, and then head to the Executive Lounge.  We somehow managed to make breakfast which was wonderful.  Then, we took a nap and headed into Edinburgh for some final shopping.  Now, we are just hanging out in the hotel and enjoying our last few hours in Scotland.  Tomorrow, we're leaving for the airport at 6:45 and I get into Louisville at 6:00.  I'm excited to come home, but leaving is already really sad.  But, before I get too emotional, let's move on to other orders of business.

Now, I have my Top 10 (I know, I'm switching it up) of my study abroad.  These are all equally as awesome so, I'm not going to rank them in number order.  But, there are 10 of them.

** The Ceilidh

** Singing karaoke in Barry

** Climbing Dumyat

** Climbing the William Wallace Monument

** Stockholm (even with Katelin constantly telling me to leave her homeland because I was tainting it with my brunette-ness.)

** Loch Ness boat tour/Urquhart Castle

** Homestay (Are you as surprised at this one as I am?  I was dreading this and it turned out to be a great experience.)

** Watching the Royal Wedding in Hyde Park

** Rugby

** Family dinners

As part of my last blog from Scotland, I wanted to say a few things and make an announcement.  First of all, I have enjoyed blogging so much this semester and I am so excited that I have this blog with all of my memories in it, that I have decided to continue blogging once I get home (mainly to remember my summer and my senior year at Butler).  I'm going to create a new a blog (the address will be in my last blog post which I will write from home) and it will be up and running this summer.  Now, I probably won't write everyday like I did for this one, but I plan on doing it at least every week if not more often than that.  So, be prepared.  You thought this was the end of my blogging?  Well, you thought wrong.  Now, for the sentimental part of my blog (you may need some tissues ready for this one...).

To my family and friends back home:

Thanks for following my blog for all these past months.  I hope that you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.  I'm happy that you could follow me in this journey and that I have something to look back on once I'm home to remember everything that happened.  I enjoyed being able to share all of this with you and I can't wait to get home and hear what you have to say about my adventures, talk with you face to face and give you your souvenirs! Thanks and I will be seeing you soon.

To Katelin, Grace, Kristy, and Dana:

First of all, I just want you to know that I was prepared to come abroad and hate everyone in my study abroad group and have no friends.  So, the fact that I made such good ones still boggles my mind even though it's our last night in Scotland.  Thanks for being such great friends.  This semester wouldn't have been nearly as much fun without you. I'm lucky that I came abroad and managed to make great friends.  Thanks for putting up with my Frodo-ing, eating my cheddar garlic biscuits, enjoying my Jennifer-isms and making such great memories with me.  So, before I get too emotional, I was on Stumpleupon (seriously, the best website ever) and came across this quote (who said this? I don't remember. But that isn't important) that I want to leave you with.  "We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a piece of each other everywhere."  Have great senior years and expect daily texts from me!

Final Day in Stirling

Hello everyone!  Today was my last full day in Stirling.  Tomorrow at 9:00 I am moving out of my room and at 9:30 I will be on a bus to Edinburgh, staying the night and then leaving Scotland on Sunday morning.  So, today was dedicated to packing.  It was also the hottest day in Scotland so far (it was about 78) and I was burning up.  I don't think this bodes well for coming back to 90 + temps.  But, I'll deal with that when it happens.  It's supposed to be back down to a lovely 56 tomorrow.  So, I'll have 1 last day of perfect temperatures before coming back to the sticky heat of Evansville.  But anyways, as I said, I spent most of my day packing.  I'll be honest, it was really depressing.  And I have a lot of stuff (think 1 carry on suitcase, a bag (with my computer in it), a large suitcase and a duffel bag).  It took most of the day.

For dinner, all of my IFSA friends and I went into town one last time and got fired pizza for dinner.  We hiked up to the lawns of the castle and ate our pizza looking out over Stirling.  It was beautiful.

Here's my pizza.

And the view.

We ate and sat up there for a long time.  It was a perfect day.  There were no clouds in the sky and everything just looked perfect.  There were lots of people up at the castle for some reason.

Like this guy.

But it was really nice.  Now your just going to have to enjoy some of my view pictures.

Picture number 1.

Picture number 2.

I'll be honest, it started to get pretty emotional, but then a seagull swooped down and started pecking at Kristy's fired pizza box and Katelin ran after it yelling "hey, that isn't yours".  Then it calmed down again.  And it tore us away from the view.  So, we took a trail that goes around the back part of the castle to various other areas.

Here's the seagull. 

Grace led us to a pretty area where you could overlook Stirling, the Wallace Monument and the castle.  Then, we sat and enjoyed that for a while.

More pictures of the view.

The castle.

More view.

Then, we proceeded to walk around the main town of Stirling and take lots of awkward pictures of the main areas that we went to during our study abroad (I'll post these at a later date) and looked like big tourists.  From there, we headed to Tesco one last time and on to our tree and bench by the William Wallace Bridge.

The bridge and castle in the background.

The bridge from our bench.

Eventually, we came back to campus.  Then, I finished packing and getting ready for tomorrow.  Today was a great day.  It was a wonderful last day in Stirling.  I wouldn't have had it any other way.  Tomorrow we leave for Edinburgh.  We plan to do some shopping on the Royal Mile for a while and then just heading back to the hotel (thanks Dad and Mom.  Just a side note: IFSA totally left us stranded.  We don't fly out until the 5th but our room contracts end the 4th at 9:30am.  So, if it weren't for my parents, we would be left with no place to stay).  It should be a good, but melancholy day.  

Hill Walking Day

Hello everyone! Today was our hill climbing day.  As I said yesterday, there is a hill that overlooks the Stirling area that I have been wanted to climb all semester, so today Grace, Kristy and I went off to conquer Dumyat (see it has a name and everything.  Also, I should mention that Grace has done the climb 2 or 3 times and Kristy has done it 4 or 5 times.  And, I'm going to make you wait until the end of the post to see if I actually made it or not).  As previously mentioned, I am the least outdoors-y so we knew going into this that it was going to be interesting (the climb is mainly up steep hills), but I was determined to make it.  So, we left campus around noon in hopes of making it to the summit.  (Just as a side note, this is how I knew it was going to be a serious hike.  Grace told me yesterday "Jennifer, no messing around with this.  You need to wear your hiking shoes.  Don't wear your flats".  I think that really sums everything up perfectly.)

First of all, I made a montage here of pictures of Dumyat so you can see exactly what it is that I was attempting to climb.

This is from the bridge on Campus.  

Another campus picture.

This is from the Castle (it's the highest point behind the William Wallace).

This is from the top of the William Wallace monument.  (Again, it's the highest point).

So, we began our hike up a paved road behind campus that leads to a path into the hills.

Here is said paved road...it was real pretty, just not real fun to walk.

The view at this point was already starting to be worth it.

The road was not super fun.  There were some very cute sheep and lambs in the general area.  But anyways, the paved road was not so much a good time.  I kept taking progress pictures of how far away we were from the Dumyat.

Like this one.

But anyways, we eventually (I say eventually because Pocahontas here stopped about every 5 feet to either take a picture, catch her breath, or rest...like I said, the road was steep) we reached a fence that led to a path to the hills.  At this point, it was all through sheep grazing land.  It was pretty cool.  There were lots of little lambs everywhere (which means I took lots of lamb pictures that will be in this post).

Aren't they cute?

Just in case you weren't convinced.

We took a path that led past some ruins that were interesting.  

You could see that they were a house once-upon-a-time.

At this point, we stopped at a cool little bench and ate lunch.  The view at this point was already amazing.

This is what we looked at while we ate lunch.

After lunch, we continued on our hike.

We saw more lambs.

There were lots of lambs.

The path continued to be pretty steep and I continued to take frequent breaks.  But the view kept getting better and better.

See; better...

and better.

Eventually we came to the final push-ish.  (I saw ish, because I thought it would be right around the corner and it wasn't.)

See, it's deceptive.

But then, we finally reached the top! (See, I did make it to everyone who was doubting me.  It was definitely interesting at points (as in I had many times that a sank into some mud and tripped around), but the view from the top was absolutely worth it.

Overlooking the Firth of Forth.

The Ochil Hills.

Stirling itself.

There is a monument at the summit (it's a war memorial.  Honestly, what else would it be).

I took a lot of pictures at this point.

We could see a far way away.

And, I took a video.

After resting at the top for a while, we eventually made our way back down.  The walk down was a lot easier than the walk up.

Here are those ruins from a better angle.  You can see them a lot more clearly.

Here is campus.  There was a really good view from where we were walking.

One last Stirling picture, I promise.

Dumyat from the road back down. I feel like I really accomplished something.

Upon getting back to campus, I promptly collapsed on my bed until I could motivate myself to do anything else.  Then, everyone came over for our last family dinner.  And I must say, it was pretty awesome. It was a great day.  I'm very happy to be able to say that I conquered Dumyat!  

Stirling Day

Hello everyone! Today, Katelin, Kristy, Grace and I headed into Stirling for our Stirling Day.  The first thing we did upon entering into town was walk up to the Church of the Holy Rude (the one by the castle and the graveyard).  We decided a few weeks ago that we would donate all of our change that we accumulated over the semester (all of the stupid/worthless coins such as 2 pence, 1 pence and 5 pence for me at least) to the church.  (They have a little donation box by the door with a sign that says that the church's up keep is entirely reliant on donations.  It always made me feel really bad because they never had a lot in there).  So, with our 5 lbs (you think I'm kidding, but I'm not) of change in tow, we hauled it up the hill to the church.

Upon entering the church, we realized that putting our change coin by coin into the collection box wasn't going to work, so we combined all of our change into 1 Tesco bag (we had a lot of change) and I gave it to the man who was working at the church today (they always have people there to answer questions and give tours.  I think sometimes it's the minister and others it's just volunteers and members).  I think we pretty much made his day.  He looked pretty baffled, but got all excited and said things like "we've never gotten a bag full of money before! I'm going to lock this up right away!."  He was really nice.  We looked around at the stuff that they had for sale in the church and he told us we could take anything that we wanted.  So, we each got a paper postcard with things about the church on it.  (Mine is of a stained glass window in the church of an angel that was (quoting my card here) "designed to be an encouragement to us to be open to God's messengers and to see the angel in every person and in every situation.)

After visiting the Holy Rude, we walked back down the hill and went to the visitor information center (go figure, we head there on one of our last day in Stirling) to see what kind of merchandise they had.  Then, we walked around Stirling and visited some or our favorite shops again.  I finally bought my duffel bag and we had McDonald's for lunch.  It was a really nice day in Stirling.  Tomorrow we are going hill walking.  There is one hill that over looks the town and campus that I have been really wanting to climb because I know the view is going to be awesome (everybody else has already done it, but let's be real here, I'm the least outdoors-y of the bunch), but I've heard it's a pretty tough climb.  Well, tomorrow we're going to do it (and I'm going to take it slow).  Then, tomorrow night we're having out epic family dinner (in case you didn't know, my friends and I eat dinner together every night and we call those family dinners).  So, we're doing it pot luck style.  It should be really good.

Tonight, I am going to do a fun Top 5.  My Top 5 Foods (that I've eaten while over here).  There's no captions for these because they were all delicious.

5.) Nutella Milkshake

4.) Donuts!

 

3.) Ice Cream

 

 2.) Scottish Breakfast

 1.) Fish and Chips

Bridge of Allan Day

Hello! Today Katelin, Grace, Kristy and I explored Bridge of Allan.  Our goal for our final week (I guess days now) is to throughly explore different areas around Stirling and eat our favorite Scotland foods one last time.  So today, we walked into Bridge of Allan and just enjoyed the town and the beautiful weather (and in true Scottish fashion, it rained before it became beautiful).  We found a deserted playground (which was real creepy, but I swung on the swing anyways) and eventually got hungry so we headed to our fish and chips place (which was delicious as always).  Then, we went and ate them in the park by Bridge of Allan waters.  

Since I document everything I eat, here's my Bridge of Allan fish and chips.

After that, we just sat and enjoyed the sunshine for a while before heading back to campus and picking up some ice cream on the way. It was a really nice day.  

I mean, I have taken a picture of my ice cream every other time, so why should I stop now.

Stirling as seen from our walk back to campus.  

Tomorrow, we're having our Stirling day.  So, we're planning on heading into town and exploring some of the areas around the castle and beyond.  It should be a lot of fun.

Continuing on with my Top 5 theme, tonight I'm going to write about my Top 5 Destinations of the Semester (I'm sure everyone will be pleased to see that Scotland (mainly Stirling and Edinburgh) were left out of this topic.  I figured I should give every place else a chance).  

5.) London

The city was beautiful and I had a great time even if it was a little too hectic for me.

4.) Brighton

There was a beach. Enough said.

3.) Lancaster

This is kind of random, I just really liked this town.  It was so quaint.

2.) York

I could have spent a lot more time in this city.

1.) Stockholm

This city was awesome.  I think I could explore it for months and still not see everything.  I really want to go back and see more.