2nd Day

Today was a good day! It started with me finally getting out of bed after hitting the snooze button many times at 9:50. I took a shower, ate breakfast with my flat mates, who were confused about why they were already awake (they went back to bed after breakfast), then I went to the flat downstairs with the other Wash U girls. We were supposed to meet for coffee at 10:30 before orientation at 11 but they didn’t answer their door when I knocked so I went back to my flat for a few minutes. I found out later that they didn’t answer because their shower was on so they couldn’t hear me knocking, and they were trying to figure out how to turn the shower off. I guess the knob was stuck or something and they had to get maintenance and they couldn’t get it off either so they just left it when they went to orientation.

I met up with two girls, Mary and Ali, who I had met the day before. We stuck together for the orientation which was actually pretty good. We listened to a few talks, went on a campus tour, had a delicious bagged lunch, and listened to some more talks. At lunch I finally met up with the Wash U people. Apparently 3 of them had serious trouble getting here, and those 3 all lost their luggage.

After orientation, which ended a bit early at 3:15, we all went back to our flats. No one was in mine so I worked on my room and talked with Dillon. The other Wash U girls took naps then we all went to go shopping, but everything was closed, so we went to dinner. We went to a great place called The Elephant House, which is where J.K. Rowling started writing Harry Potter. The food and atmosphere were great, and there was an awesome view of the castle, all lit up at night, from the dining area. So that was a lot of fun. Oh, another cool thing about that place were the drawers on our table. Our table had 3 drawers, like for silverware, but inside there were dozens of notes written by visitors to the Elephant House. They were written on napkins and scraps of paper in lots of different languages and about lots of different things. They were about people's vacations, lives, or just drawings of elephants. Our table was the only one with drawers so we felt very special.

Mom, you would like this. From the Elephant House website: Ian Rankin, author of the bestselling Rebus novels, and Alexander McCall-Smith, author of The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency and other series of novels, have also frequented The Elephant House, as well as many others throughout the years.

After dinner I came back to my room and talked with my flat mates and 6 other people who were here getting ready to go out, and we all just talked for like 3 hours. Eventually my flat mates decided not to go out at all, so we kept talking for a bit. Now everyone, including me, is going to bed.

Classes start tomorrow, but I don’t have class on Mondays so I have another day to get settled. Tomorrow I have to officially register and meet with my Director of Studies. Other than that I’ll just shop, hang out with people, and get ready for classes on Tuesday.

One thing I like about living in the city is that you can walk virtually everywhere. It’ll be terrible when it starts raining but now it’s lovely. Edinburgh is a hard city to learn because the streets are all windy, on different levels, and named different things along the same road, but it’s fun figuring that out.

Oh tomorrow I’m also buying tickets to go to the zoo on Saturday. The International Student Center has excursions every Saturday for cheap, and I want to do a lot of them. This Saturday they’re going to the zoo, after that to St. Andrews, then a whiskey tour, then a skiing trip, followed by a trip to Lindisfarne/Holy Island (a castle), then a to be determined weekend trip, then Loch Lomond, then Linlithgow Palace, then white water rafting.

My thoughts are all now in a Scottish or English accent (depending on who I’ve most recently talked to), now I just have to work on speaking with an accent!