There and Back Again/To Scotland I Go!

Well, I'm back again.  Not without a certain amount of last minute hysteria, but the good news is I got it out of my system at home with dogs to pet on and my mom to hug me and everyone else to be sympathetic.

The weather has been pretty bad, but it's England in the winter, and honestly I missed the worst!  Or maybe the best, from my POV, since I LOVE the snow and they had a whole mess of it right after I left.  We've had some since then.  In fact we had some night before last, so we all went out and played in it and had ourselves a great snowball fight!

Now, let me begin this next adventure by telling you what time I got up this morning.  4:00.  Yes, 4:00AM.  I'm not even sure why I slept, since really I just laid there pretending for about 3 hours with a bunch of hooligans shouting to high heaven down below my window, but at least I was resting, as my mother would say.  So I got up at 4 and got ready to be a thinking human being instead of a human-shaped amoeba blob, and went to catch the taxi with Daniel, Nerea, Edu, and Daniel to the train station where we met lots of other people and boarded the train for Edinburgh!  Mostly we've slept the whole way, but then I discovered that unlike the rest of England, Eastern seems to have installed wireless on their trains.  Most excellent!  So I got on my computer.

Right now we've just stopped at Dunbar, so I don't have too very long, and of course I have no pictures (which is becoming somewhat of a trend, I realize).  I looked up from my nap out the window and even though I had my glasses on I thought, "Goodness, that is a dark grey cloud."  Then my brain caught up with itself and went, "No, that's a great big OCEAN."  This got me all excited, which I think is tangentially related to being landlocked my entire life and only seeing the ocean rarely.  I get all excited every time and start going, "Look!  Water!" which makes people think I'm absolutely /insane/.  Anyway, I quickly woke everyone up to show them my discovery of BIG WATER, and they got all excited, so we all looked insane together.

To put it simply and in no way to do it justice, this is some BEAUTIFUL country I'm seeing out the window.  I'd been really emo last semester because I've been told by both of my friends in Scotland that they never want to leave.  I'm not sure I'd want to either if this was what I saw every day.  Oh my LORD, it's gorgeous.  Where we're at right now is wonderfully wide open and flat, which is so nice to see for a change of pace.  The weather is absolutely horrid- worse than anything I've seen in Sheffield- but somehow here's Scotland just being all pretty and mysterious, clothed in fog and clouds and the great grey ocean out there looking very cold and more than a bit choppy.  Even the best pictures I don't quite think would do this justice.  It reminds me a little of when we got to the Andes and I just about flipped out.  Except then it was more a matter of Giant Mountain instead of Giant Ocean and it was a different kind of pretty entirely.  But I still just wanted to stare at all of it everywhere, and I kept giving myself a headache cause all I did was stare intently out the bus window and try to memorize everything.  I don't remember much but a general splendor, though I probably remember more than if I hadn't been trying to memorize everything.

Anyway, me waxing on poetic about mountains and water and things aside, I really am very excited for Edinburgh.  Adam says it's a very interesting town, and I can't wait to really honestly use this new camera of mine for pictures that aren't just at get-togethers.  I was playing with the different white balances last night and found out it has about 8 different settings JUST for fluorescent lights, and for every one you pick the shade of the light and it balances that out and doesn't turn people like... oompa-loompa orange or whatever the color of the light is.  Very neat trick.  I think here I will be using the various degrees of "cloudy" it is probably equipped with.  I am SO glad I'm staying with Lindsey and not in the drafty church-turned-hostel everyone else is staying in.  Besides liking to be warm when I sleep, I get to see one of my friends from home!  Yay!  Now I just need to make it up to Aberdeen sometime.  Oh chore, having to ride on a nice warm train through pretty country.  However shall I survive?!

Also I've noticed, typing for about 45 to 50 minutes and playing on my computer for about an hour and a half, that I haven't gotten the slightest bit motion sick.  I wonder why that is.  I forgot to take my medicine, but it doesn't seem to bother me.  Just saw a dog running in a field outside the window.  Ooooh, I would love it if the dogs could just see this.  I think they'd love England, with the big open fields and all.  I see a lot of Border Collies here, and they remind me of my girls.  I met one that was just like Abby, little and black and had her fur, but not her fine long face, and I stopped and loved on her and she'd been playing in puddles so I smelled of wet dog the rest of the evening, and I didn't mind.  I don't mind the smell of wet dog, like I don't mind the smell of horses in general.

Right, so, we've learned one valuable thing from this entry, haven't we?  Besides getting ridiculously sentimental and badly poetic, I wander off in new and interesting directions when I'm tired!  Haha.  Ya'll take care, I gotta pack up so I can get off the train when we stop!