A second Thanksgiving away from home.

My visit to Leeds last weekend was lovely.  Leeds has a very American feel to it.  It's very spread out, the way many cities in the US are.  Kat tells me that this is because Leeds was once several separate villages, which gradually got larger and eventually morphed into one city.  It's got a very industrial feel to it as well, but also has a lot of green areas.  It actually reminded me a lot of my own hometown of Durham, NC in this way - the juxtaposition of brick-laid urbanity with nature.

I have not been able to shake this cough I caught on Iona, and Chaz had something similar, so we spent the evenings in Kat's living room drinking tea and watching Disney movies.  We also visited the Christmas market, the university, took a long-ish walk along the Liverpool & Leeds Canal, and visited the armory, wherein I fired a crossbow and finally hit the target on my eighth and final try.  The highlight of the weekend was undoubtedly Wendy House, which I gather is a dance night that happens at the University of Leeds once a month.  Instead of the usual techno and house drivel that gets played in the average nightclub around here, the music consisted of alternative rock, heavy metal, and 80s music, and everyone dressed up.  There were many corsets, zippers, belts, buckles, jackets, phantom masks, and flowing tresses.  I wore a very steampunk jacket and top hat combo, borrowed from Chaz.  We left at 2am, when I could no longer stand.  The second highlight of the weekend was the American-style candy store they took me to, which contained sugary goodness the likes of which I have not seen since my last visit to the US.  I bought peanut butter M&Ms, lemonheads, pop rocks, and whoppers.  It was glorious.

This week has been a pretty quiet one.  I've been trying to take it easy and not aggravate my cough.  However, now that I have less than 3 weeks to go, I've made the decision that I'm not going to skulk around my flat anymore.  From here on out, I'm doing something fun and interesting every day, dad-gummit!  Tomorrow I'm off to Nottinghamshire to visit distant cousins.

All in all, I'd say this second Thanksgiving away from home was much less hellacious than my first one.  I am thankful for rodent-free living quarters, thank you God, amen.

Cheers, y'all.

Cleaning house.

I've begun going through my things, earmarking what I'm going to donate or sell when my departure date gets a bit closer.  All my linens except two small blankets are going to be left, as are all of my office supplies.  I'll probably let my flatmates have the pick of those.  I've set aside six or seven books which I know I'm not going to read again, which I'm going to see if I can sell cheap at a secondhand bookstore.  The next step is going through the contents of my desk, and throwing most of it away.

This is a project I really meant to begin last week, but I've been in intense denial about my impending move back to the States.  Now I'm viewing it with a bit more equanimity - enough to start this particularly undertaking, anyway.

Tomorrow I'm off to Leeds!

Cheers, y'all.

Music and rugby.

This was a grand weekend all around.  The RSNO concert on Friday night was great, even though I was violently suppressing a coughing fit for most of one of the quiet bits of Carmina Burana.  The Tallis Fantasia was AMAZING.  So exquisitely beautiful.  I will never get tired of that piece.

On Saturday night I went to a small get-together at my classmate Audrey's house in West Lothian, and yesterday I went to a pub in Stockbridge with Charley and some of her friends to watch the Scotland vs. New Zealand rugby game.  New Zealand won, quelle surprise.  Afterward, we stayed at the pub for a while and eventually Charley, her boyfriend Thomas, and I wound up at Thomas's flat in Newhaven.  We ate pizza and watched Disney's Fantasia.

I solemnly swear that I will start getting things organized to pack this week.

Cheers, y'all.

Music!...and coughing.

Good news: I'm going to Usher Hall to see a concert by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra tonight.  They're playing Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana, which are two of my favorite pieces of music. 

Bad news: I have a cough.  An obnoxious, chesty one.  I just went out and bought two rolls of cough drops, and I'm foreseeing myself sucking on them nonstop from now until the concert's over.  This is shaping up to be an interesting battle of wills, because I refuse to be That Person - the one who coughs all the way through the concert.

Cheers, y'all.

A moment of celebration.

We got 99 problems, but Mitt ain't one!  Thanks for not being idiots, my fellow Americans.

*Ahem*  This blog shall now cease to be political and go back to our regularly scheduled programming.  :)

Cheers, y'all.

Thoughts on the election.

I bought a plane ticket a few days ago.  I will officially be a United States resident again as of 12 December, 2012.

The kind of country that I'm going to be returning to will be decided tonight.  I sincerely hope it's one in which Obama is still in charge.  Things have not been a bed of roses for the last four years.  But what most Americans don't seem to understand is that this recession going on is a worldwide one.  The stuff that's going on in some European countries right now is mind-boggling.  Spain's entire 18-24 age bracket is leaving the country en masse, because NONE of them can get jobs.  Greece's economy has been in the shitter for years.  Ireland is talking about reverting back to the pound.  And I'm wondering how long Germany can keep bailing everyone out before they run into trouble, too.

It's a ludicrous situation, and it's ludicrous to expect one man to fix it, especially when he's a Democrat president saddled with a majority-Republican Congress which has actively done everything within its power to block all the measures he's tried to enact.  I'm frankly astonished (and also very grateful) that the healthcare reforms got through, and that DADT was repealed.

If Mittens gets elected, I can say goodbye to my healthcare and reproductive rights inside of a year.  I would bet money on that.  And that alone was enough for him to lose my vote.  But aside from that, if he gets elected, all his friends are going to get elected too, because Mittens has proven himself to be a wishy-washy waffler who does his utmost to pander to the people whose votes he wants, and tailors and adjusts his political positions accordingly.  He's a puppet.  And the guys who are pulling the strings are the ones who are really going to be in charge.  And the US will be run by rich, middle-aged, out-of-touch, conservative white men for at least the next four years.  And that prospect makes my stomach clench.

I've done what it's in my power to do: I cast my absentee ballot and voted for Obama.  Now I just have to sit back and see what happens tonight.

Cheers, y'all.

Mull and Iona.

On 30 October, I took the train to Oban, a small town on Scotland's west-central coast and a major gateway to the western isles.  The train ride from Glasgow to Oban is probably my favorite, out of all the train rides I've ever been on.  I think it's even more picturesque than the one from Glasgow to Fort William. 

The next day (Halloween, incidentally) I caught the 8am ferry to Craignure, on the island of Mull.  Mull is one of the larger Scottish islands, and is shaped somewhat like a W on its left side.  It's very mountainous, and is the location of the only Munro not on the Scottish mainland.  After arriving in Craignure after the 45-minute ride from Oban, I boarded a bus to Tobermory.

Tobermory is a town on the northernmost stroke of the sideways W that is Mull, and is known for its colorful waterfront buildings:

I spent a pleasant day there, looking around in the shops, buying some local whisky from the distillery, and going for a walk in the woods.  I also got some fried scallops from the local fish-and-chips cart at lunchtime, and they were AMAZING, with the roe still on.  At about 3:30pm, I got the bus back to Craignure for the 5pm ferry back to Oban.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that my roommate in the twin room I was assigned at my hostel had left, so I effectively had a hotel room for the next three nights, for the price of a hostel!  Can't beat that!

On 1 November, I caught the same ferry back to Craignure, and got on the bus to Fionnphort, at the tip of the southernmost of Mull's westward peninsulas.  This drive was incredibly picturesque.  Mull is very orange and red, or at least it looked that way as the sun rose on this autumn day.  We went by Ben More, and saw a doe by a stream.  If I ever manage to get back to Mull, I'll have to rent a car, because there were some areas I saw on this bus ride that I definitely want to explore further.

In Fionnphort, I caught the ferry to Iona, a 10-minute ride.  The weather got iffy at this point, but basically held off to the north for the time being.  As I disembarked from the ferry, a rainbow appeared over Iona Abbey.

There has been a religious building on this site since AD 563, starting with a monastery founded by St. Columba.  This was Christianity's first main foothold in Scotland, and several ancient Scottish kings are meant to be buried here.  Plus, it's featured in Tori Amos's song "Twinkle" ("Last time I knew, she worked at an abbey, in Iona...").

Before I checked out the abbey, I decided to scamper up Dun I, which at 331 feet is Iona's highest point.  It is apparently a hill fort dating from the Iron Age, and in spite of not being very high, it is freaking steep, with a disturbing mixture of rocks and bogs.  There's only one safe path up, and it's not terribly well-marked, and I had to step very, very gingerly because I hadn't had the foresight to wear waterproofs and didn't fancy wearing muddy jeans all the way back to Oban if I slipped and fell, but I did eventually make it to the top.

I ate a sausage roll (procured at the local Spar), huddled in the wind-shadow of the summit cairn, and watched the weather front off to the north get slowly closer.  Then I very carefully descended the hill.  I had to butt-surf on some wet rocks near the bottom, but ultimately made it down, having only gotten a little muddy.  Then it was off to the abbey.

I had Iona Abbey mostly to myself, which was partly my design in climbing Dun I first.  The abbey wasn't what I was expecting.  The present building is only a little over 100 years old, older buildings having been destroyed by at least two Viking raids, and later by the Reformation.  It's something new, trying to masquerade as something old, and I'm not quite sure it works.  Nevertheless, there's a certain atmosphere to it, especially in the older parts of the grounds.  It's quiet and pastoral, not ornate and ostentatiously impressive like other religious buildings I've seen.  Think a shepherd herding his flock, rather than a Pentecostal preacher overawing his congregation.

The bad weather finally hit while I was exploring the abbey, and my fellow day-trippers and I were obliged to stand shivering on the quay in the wind and sleet, waiting for the ferry.  Luckily it came on time, and after an exciting ride back to Fionnphort, we warmed up a bit in the waiting room before the bus ride back to Craignure in the driving rain.  After arriving back in Oban, I got chips with curry from the chippy and watched South Park.

I was undecided about what to do on my last day.  I had thought I might hang out in the area immediately around Craignure, but I was a but disenchanted with the 8am ferry departures every day.  I seriously considered going to Lismore, which had a slightly shorter and cheaper ferry ride, which left an hour later.  But upon researching it, there didn't seem to be much to do there.  In the end, I ended up just staying in Oban for the day on 2 November.  The slight hint of a sore throat which had been following me around for a week finally blossomed into a full-blown cough (thanks no doubt to the horrendous weather on Iona the previous afternoon), so I had a nice lie-in and took it easy on this day.  The very kind lady at the gift shop on Iona had given me a bunch of paracetamol the previous day, when I'd mentioned to her that my throat was hurting, and it definitely helped.

The next day, I returned to Edinburgh, extremely satisfied to have finally gone on this trip, which I've been trying to go on for the past year!  Victory is mine!

One last parting shot: moonset over Kerrera and Mull, just before dawn on Halloween:

Cheers, y'all.