I <3 Edinburgh

There are so many things to say right now, the most important of which being this: I LOVE SCOTLAND. It is my favorite. I want to live here. Seriously.

Okay, now that I got that off my chest, I am going to disappoint you by saying this is going to be brief and un-entertaining compared to my usual standards of bragging about the super cool places I go. In the past week I’ve been in four countries (England, Sweden, Denmark (the airport SO counts!), and Scotland) and 8 different cities (London, Copenhagen, Lund, Malmo, Ystad, Newcastle, Durham and Edinburgh). It has been awesome…in a very tiring sort of way. We have gone to so many cool places and learned so many new (well…technically very old) things, that I do not even know where to start talking about it all. Plains, trains, busses, subways, and most often our own feet, have been our means of transportation. We’ve met Brits and Geordies, Scotts and Swedes—all of which want to know what the hell a group of Californians are doing in this part of the world at this time of year. One Scottish man nicely put it like this: “Whet are ye doo’in here for sprring brek? Tey call it sprring brek fer a reson. Doo’nt ye kno’ that Spring is broo’ken here? The sen doo’nt shaine.” That was the most concise and accurate description of the weather in Northern England and Scotland I have heard thus far.

Museums, bridges, hotel rooms, giant hikes up hills, giant hikes down hills, awesomely ancient cathedrals, castles, walls, graveyards, pubs, football matches, Scottish boys, English boys, and Irish boys, massive castles, snowy streets, and weird foods are just a few things we’ve seen, done, and experienced in the past few days—so many new and exciting things to do with barely any time to do them. My camera also conveniently decided to go into a coma right in the middle of this. One second it was happily snapping shots of a castle, and then the next it refused to see anything but a black screen. Its temporary loss of brain power lasted for a whole day, a day in which I prayed for its little camera life every time I saw someone posing for a picture that I could not take, which BELIEVE ME added up to a LOT of praying time. Miraculously, the little-camera-that-could resurrected itself this morning much to my great joy, and is currently working with minimal residual damage. I have a feeling, however, that this is going to be a recurring problem.

I will load pictures tonight. Be ready.*





*pleeease don't kill me if I do not =) I am going to do my best... but sometimes it just doesn't happen no matter how hard i try!