My First Week

I have now been living in Scotland for a little over a week, and yet in that time I feel as if I have been here much longer and spent more money on food and supplies than I could have imagined. The Scottish accent is becoming more familiar (just in time for lectures) and while I haven’t traveled far out of the Stirling area, I have had a few adventures over the weekend!

Courtesy of the university, exchange and international students were invited on a bus tour of Stirling and a small outlying town called Dunblane, where we were treated with brief stops in Old Town and the Stirling Castle, the gorgeous Dunblane cathedral, and the field of Bannockburn where Robert the Bruce (immortalized here as a massive statue seated on a horse) led the Scottish in victory against the English forces. While we had no time to explore the Castle or the heritage centre at Bannockburn, I was happy to have had the opportunity to visit a couple of historic places, and set foot inside the ancient Dunblane cathedral – a medieval masterpiece built in the 12^th and 13^th centuries, making it possibly the oldest building I’ve ever entered (at least on the trip thus far). 

Dunblane Cathedral

The interior

The outside

Later in the week my friends also suggested a trip up to the Wallace Monument, a short and serene walk in the woods to the base of the tower where we took pictures and got a little lost in the trails for a while before returning home. Unfortunately the monument was closed but next time I visit I will have to climb the steps to the top and see the view from there!

View from part of Stirling Castle

Cemetery from Stirling Castle

The Wallace Monument

 Just the other day I was also able to experience the Scottish wilderness on a hiking trip with friends from my hall. We traveled a few miles out of town by bus to the town of Gargunnock. While the name sounds like something J.K. Rowling considered for a Harry Potter goblin, the town itself was picturesque, with small white stucco houses lining a steep and narrow street. On our walk to the trail head we took pictures outside a small church with a large cemetery, asked a local for directions, and finally found ourselves on an ambling road through sheep pastures before finally being spit out on our own on the cliff-side with a vague idea of where to orient ourselves towards the waterfalls we were looking for. All over the hills are old mossy walls with gaps where the stones had tumbled down, and white sheep with bright spray-painted bellies or backs watched us from the lip of the cliff. We found our first waterfall (called Downie’s Loup) and then climbed up two more sections to reach the top where I was reminded how very much in Scotland I was. The view from the cliffs looked out over a basin with the tiny little Gargunnock houses, the mountains facing us from the other side, and a full rainbow touching the trees near where we had started the hike. A Scottish mist passed over us and the sheep we shared the view with before we started the trek down. Afterwards we stopped into a small pub afterwards for some chips and cheese and a half pint of something local. We were only wanting, as my Dad suggested, the sound of bagpipes to make it complete!

Cathedral in Gargunnock

The waterfall

Rock walls up on the hills

View from the top

Just today I also took a walk with a student from Norway to explore the wooded area just behind our dorm, which led to a beautiful field and snaked around towards a very old church (missing the roof and greater portion of two walls) and graveyard, then past the campus’ very own Airthrey Castle.

Old Logie Kirk

Airthrey Castle

The daily grind on campus and in the dorm is not as magical as the scenery, but I have had a good time in classes so far and am settling in to life in my hall. I really enjoy the company of my floormates and have often gone into town with friends to shop or see a movie. Primark, an inexpensive and high quality clothing store, is one of my favorites, where I picked up a pair of jeans, a top and boots for cheap the other day. I also went into a place called Argos, a store in which you order from a massive catalogue and the employees pull out your item from a warehouse in back. I’ve stopped in with friends at Costa Coffee, a popular UK coffee shop, and been to several different grocery stores (all of which stock a variety of digestive biscuits that never fail to amaze me – the Cadbury chocolate-coated kind are excellent!). On campus, there are no centralized dining halls that offer meal plans like at my home university, so I stock up on pasta, bread and deli meat for quick lunches and dinners in the hall. Just the other night I ventured to the other wing of my hall to have tea with an English and Scottish student and some fellow international students, and was informed on the proper way to put milk in tea and how to dunk biscuits!

Catalogues in Argos

My dorm room

My first week has been busy as I tie up odds and ends, like opening a bank account, getting registered with the doctor, buying creature comforts like towels and dishes, figuring out how to use the expensive laundry system, and doing my first readings for class. Already I have been to two lectures, one for my introductory psychology course and another for an English class that counts for a humanities requirement back home. The classes are located in only two buildings each about 5 minutes away, but Cottrell is deceptively large and complicated and Pathfoot (which looks a bit like a waffle fry from an aerial view) has several alphabetical corridors for offices and classrooms. The grading system at the university as it was explained to me is discouraging, as marks over 75% are not common (opposed to frequent instances of 80-100% marks in American schools) and I can expect to struggle for a high B in any of my classes. Often the grade in a class is divided between two or three large assignments, so that in one module I have two essays due in October and December respectively that count for 50% of my grade each, effectively eliminating busywork but also packing on the load of the class into two horrifyingly weighty pieces of schoolwork. It will be an interesting semester!

 On a final note, I randomly purchased a food item called Lee’s Scottish Tablet, which came in a package like a candy bar but was actually a thick slice of something like sweet white fudge in a wrapper. After consulting Wikipedia, I learned that “tablet” is a real Scottish sweet – it is very good but incredibly sugary! It is nice not to be able to know how many calories are in something when they are expressed on the labels as kilocalories or kilojoules. Who knows what I’ve been eating!