And then we walked around the Royal Mile for a bit, then located Elephant House, which is where JK Rowling wrote the first bits of Harry Potter, which is super cool. I think, though, enough people have been like "let's go visit where Harry Potter was written" that the cafe realized it and made it kind of touristy (or, the cafe "sold out" if you prefer that set of vocabulary). Afterwards, a humorous bit regarding wigs occurred, which is observable via Facebook.
The first night we took a haunted ghost tour of Edinburgh's vaults. The thing is with the vaults, they're built inside one of Edinburgh's bridges (I believe it's the south bridge?), and without ventilation, lighting, and, you know, basic living conditions, it was a pretty terrible place to be. With regards to the tour and the guide itself, it was pretty impressive with the way everything built up to near the end, with stories accompanying each vault that, along with most people being particularly suggestible in the vaults due to the conditions, amplified the fear bits in people. It climaxed with a story in a particular room where 96 women and children were killed by their husbands because of the great fire in Edinburgh which cooked the vault's inhabitants (and thus the husbands essentially mercy-killed their families). Apparently (I did not actually see the perpetrator) then around this point, an extra tour guide jumped out into the entrance and scared the whole group. Funnily enough, and maybe as a result from not actually seeing what was going on, I only jumped a bit was only really rattled because everyone else freaked out. The tour itself took the stories and made them "ghost"-y to scare people, but I would hazard to guess that most of the stories were true, which is kind of scary, when you think about it.
The second day involved a trip to St. Andrew's, famous for it's Old Course and the Chariots of Fire scene where they run on the beach. There's also a very run-down cathedral there, but all in all St. Andrew's is a very small town/city and so it didn't take a long time.
And then we went back to Edinburgh and took a night bus back, which was pretty terrible, to be honest. Not a lot of room, plus a bumpy bus makes for not happy sleepers and people.
Otherwise, there really hasn't been a lot going on (especially since Italy did in fact fall apart, as evidenced by the Edinburgh trip), but now that third term starts today, I need to get cranking and start studying for two finals and write another paper. Here is how it works out:
ECON3019 exam (2010.05.11) - 100% of my grade
ECON3019 exam (2010.05.17) - 100% of my grade
HIST2312B paper (2010.05.17) - 60% of my grade
So as it turns out, this sucks because my grades hinge entirely on one test for two of the classes, and one paper can swing my grade from really good to really bad (and vice versa, hopefully)...though given my first paper (which I collect back today) and its quality (probably not very good, the more I think about it), any effort on the second paper will be more of a "bad to good" scenario than the other way around. Or so I hope.
But yeah, three weeks and two days until I return! It's weird to think about that. No matter how much it sucks to be not around all my friends back home, I've established a nice friend network here and London has become rather bearable despite all its quirks...and I'll actually miss it when I get back, which part of me never really expected given how hard it was to adjust to here and everything (and part of me never expected to fully adjust). I'll be back soon (and it'll be great to be back, trust me).
-e.
NP: Wilco - A.M.
An old standby of mine. Some tracks are kinda weird, but it's Wilco and I love it all the same.
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