June 3, 2005: Edinburgh, Scotland

7am came early that morning [I am not a morning person]! A lot of the group went out the night before, to the pubs for Vana's Birthday! She turned 20! She's really nice and super funny [awww, very true!]. I went to a pub for her birthday, as well. I went to the Hairy Lemon for a short while with Rhea, Lindsay and Amanda. It was very smokey [I hate smoke] and we had to be up at 6am, so we didn't stay long.

Our bus left at 7am to go to Edinburgh, Scotland. It was a 2 1/2 hour bus ride! The bus ride was long and tiring. Everyone fell asleep at one point or another. My friend, Matt, took an awesome picture of a rainbow along the way. There were only a handful of people that got to see it, because everyone was sleeping. It was amazing to be in another country, in a green field and see a perfect rainbow! It was only for about 2 minutes, if that! [That may be a dumb thing to write about - seeing a rainbow, but it really was a moment that I will remember forever. As soon as I saw the entry about Scotland, I instantly thought about that rainbow!] Our British Professor, Christine, was giving us information about what type of events occurred in the areas we were driving by. It was interesting for the parts I was awake to hear [one of many times I may not have been awake to hear her]! We finally got into Edinburgh, Scotland and stopped on a hill/lookout over the city. It had a lot of architecture around, including the Scots version of the Grecian Coliseum [I want to go to Greece]. It was amazing to see an old, but extremely large city! Never in my life have I seen anything like it! Alnwick, England, which is where I live [oooohh, I wish I could still say that!], isn't the same kind of "old city." Yes, they are both very old, Alnwick is over 1,000 years old (or at least the castle is) and Edinburgh Castle was present in 600 AD!!! [Both of which, still amaze me!]

We arrived late, so we only had 15 minutes to walk around this hill. I was so shocked at how gorgeous the view was. It really hit home then, that I was in a foreign country, seeing things I had never seen before and would never see in the United States - buildings that were hundreds to thousands of years old, brick and stone streets and statues and monuments everywhere you look [ok, you can see the last ones in DC]. It was hard to take everything in. Everywhere you turned, you'd see something else new and wonderful!