Mixing it up

Today I woke up around 9:30 for my 10 o'clock class and plodded my way to the English Department block of buildings, which is literally as far away from my dorm as is possible. It takes me a good twenty minutes to walk the distance, but luckily I remembered to bring my iPod this time and the music made the walk bearable. The class was on Modernist Poetry and it looks like it will be great course. The professor seems really into it, and just a little bit crazy, so the course will probably be a blast.

Immediately after my poetry course, I went to my Financial Economics course. It was good, but pretty basic. After taking MacroEconomics at Whitman, I feel a bit ahead of everyone else and pretty bored. However, I'm sure it will ramp up soon.

I am actually considering changing up some of my courses. As it stands, I am taking too many credits and so I am thinking that I am actually going to drop my Modernist Poetry course for a course in Creative Writing, so long as Whitman will give me the same amount of credits for the course. With my two quantitative courses in Economics, it will be good to stimulate my creative side as well.

Signing out from St. Andrews,

Staten

Classes and Clubs

I haven't written in a while because life has been a whirlwind thus far. Classes started today and registering for them was a bit of a nightmare. Luckily, I seem to have everything sorted now, so I can begin getting into the flow of student life. My likely schedule is going to be Capital Investment Analysis, Literary Theory, and Problems in Financial Economics. It looks heavy, but I'm hoping it will be a lot of fun. The Capital Investment Analysis course looks especially interesting since it will cover a lot of the topics that a Corporate Finance class at business school would cover.

Funwise, I've become involved in quite a few clubs. A couple days ago, the school had a Fresher's Faire where all of the student clubs held booths and told students who they were and what they were about. I joined the Poker Society, Flyfishing club, some internship club and Harry Potter and Gin society. I went with a friend from my hall, Nathaniel, who signed up for the Jewish Society, even though he is not one bit Jewish, because, he says, "Jewish women are some of the prettiest in the world, and Jewish men are some of the ugliest, so it will be like shooting fish in a barrel". Makes sense to me.

Tonight, the poker society is hosting a freeroll tournament with a cash pot of 200 pounds going to the winner. A freeroll means its free to enter, so Jan, Nathaniel  and I are going to enter and see what happens. Hopefully I'll be 200 pounds richer by the end, but probably not.

I also went on a walk with the guys around the Old Course. It really is an amazing course, very unlike the Leavenworth Course. Being a links style course, it doesn't have any trees, but the many mini-hills all around make the course both pretty and pretty ruthless for novice golfers. Pictures below:

Nathaniel, Jan and I with the famous clubhouse behind us.

What a bunker!

Other things that I've noticed in St. Andrews: the people are all fashion-obsessed! Now I don't make any claims about being the best-dressed person or anything, but I feel like I dress reasonably respectably. Here, I literally look like a vagrant. The guys are all dressed in expensive looking trench coats with nice boots and expensive looking skinny jeans. The girls spend even more time on their appearance. This one girl in Melville even consults a personal stylist before she makes any purchases. Supposedly her stylist has even banned her from wearing certain colors. Its crazy. I wonder how long she spends in front of the mirror before she goes out...

Anyway, I will post more as I get into the swing of things here. 

Signing out from the home of golf,

Staten 

More pictures of Crail

Here are some more pictures of the town of Crail. I guess I should organize this blog a bit better, since I posted about Crail a post of two ago, but I thought these were kind of cool.

My Room

Here is a video of my room:

The last couple of days

The last couple of days have been pretty hectic, so I apologize for not posting sooner. My first day went pretty smoothly. Our hall, Andrew Melville, had a BBQ dinner to kick off the start of Fresher's week and I met a couple people (mostly Americans) who live near me in my dorm. . Fresher's week, for those who don't know,  is the week before school starts that kind of eases the Freshman (Fresher's) into college life. Easing is not quite the right word, as there are a ton of school-sanctioned drinking activities. Our first night, in fact, there was an Andrew Melville Hall pub crawl where the Resident Advisors showed us around the different bars and pubs and bought a few pints for us. This was definitely different from my first night at Whitman. I think we played board games and heard horror stories about the dangers of alcohol. Different culture.

Jan, my best friend from Whitman, arrived about a day ago and it has been cool to have someone I know really well with me. The people are generally pretty friendly, at least the kids are, and it is easy to strike up a conversation with most everyone. Jan lives about a 30-minute walk from my dorm, which is terrible for him because he doesn't really enjoy his roommates' company. They are all 17-18 years old and he says that all they do is play video games. Sounds like my kind of people. So he has been spending most of his time in my hall, eating in our dining room--he even slept in my room last night because he didn't want to walk all the way back to his dorm.

Living with a lot of Freshman has been weird for both Jan and I. We both say that we feel like absolute "Bosses", and its true. Freshman already seem to have some sort of weird reverence for us. I definitely feel a lot less shy talking to people who are only my brother's age and look like they are only 16 years old.

At St. Andrews, Wednesday's are designated as Sports Days. Students do not have classes at all on Wednesday and are expected to participate in some sort of physical activity. Since it is Fresher's Week, all of the sports clubs are trying hard to recruit new members and, feeling the spirit, I decided to give squash, table tennis, and badminton a try. I haven't played any of the three all that much, but figured that I would be able to cope. I went to squash first and played with some beginner-ish players who could barely hit the ball. The guy who was organizing the whole thing pretty quickly took me off and told me to come back for the more advanced session later that day, which I did. At the advanced practice, I played one match against a very good English player who is going to try out for the First or Second team. I did well against him, actually. The match went down to the final point, which he won, but it was great fun to play against someone that was really good. He was surprised to find out that I hadn't really played at all since I was about 13 years old. We have a couple people in my hall that are avid squash players as well, so I don't think it should be too much trouble to find a regular game.

Badminton was also very fun, but table tennis was a joke. Some of the more experienced guys took it way too seriously, smashing back every return and serving with ungodly amounts of spin. I tried to rally with this one guy from Finland for at least 5 minutes and I don't think we got past a 3-hit set. I think I'm destined to just play recreationally.

Tonight I think I'm going to have a slow night, maybe chill at home and hopefully play a game of some sort.

The town of Crail

After spending all of the day on my feet, as soon as I made it to my hotel I crashed. I slept from about 2pm to 7pm Scotland time and woke up to some silly British television talk show with Tom Jones as the guest. It was actually pretty funny. My stomach began rumbling about this point and I decided to go out and get some food. Luckily, the town of Crail is tiny and so I literally walked about two minutes before I was able to find a fish and chips restaurant which looked good. I hadn't gone to a fish and chips joint since South Africa. I ordered the fish and chips platter and applied liberal amounts of vinegar and salt--like you're supposed to. I chatted with a couple visiting from England and they asked where I was from and I told them America and the older lady was literally like "Duh! Where in America". I almost laughed out loud, but somehow contained myself and told her that I was from Washington state and that I would be attending the University of St. Andrews this semester. "Great college!" she told me. So I got that going for me, which is nice.

Finishing my fish and chips I went back to my room and watched some more "telly" (I think that's what the British call tv's). There was this show on there called "The InBetweeners" that is basically "DeGrassi" except not nearly as lame and follows this cast of really nerdy dudes who are desperately trying to be cool. I'm not going to lie, I kind of identify with a lot of the cast. Look it up. It's classic.

The next day, I had some time to kill because I could only register for my room at St. Andrews at 2pm. I took the time to walk around the town of Crail, which I found out is actually a small fishing village with spectacular views of the ocean and the Scottish Isles. I won't go to the trouble of describing in words what the view was look because I have a couple pictures that tell the whole story.

I walked along the waterfront for about a mile and then turned off a side street that wound its way through farm land before ending up back on the main road. As I making my way back to the city center, I passed by a small park on my right which intrigued me and so I decided to see what it was all about, having nothing better to do. There was a dirt path that encircled a tiny stream, with bridges criss-crossing the stream every couple hundred meters. I walked to the far end of the park, far away from the main road and found a break in the hedge that had been the western boundary of the park. I walked through the hedge and found myself in the ancient graveyard of Crail church. Some of the markers were dated back as far as 1750. Some were so old that I couldn't make out when they were dated. 

First Post: Arrival

So my day started at 6:30 in the morning. I woke up to my Dad taking a shower and lazily put on my clothes and got up. Dad accompanied me on my way to the airport and then we said goodbye to each other and I went through customs.

My flight from Seattle to Philadelphia wasn't too eventful. On arrival I walked to A24, which was the gate listed on my boarding pass, only to find out that my gate had changed to A11, the gate two away from my arrival gate. Uh! I had about a 2 hour layover and then was off to Glasgow. I sat next to this Scottish couple who lived in Glasgow. I struck up a conversation with the wife, who ended up being really chatty. She said that I absolutely had to visit Edinburgh Castle and that I should never ask a Scot to play cricket because that was "an English sport". From the airplane, I got a good view of what I think were the Scottish moors. Thankfully it was a clear day and, as we left the darkness over the Atlantic and began flying over Scotland, the horizon seemed to bleed the early morning red sun while  pockets of purple clouds shaded the rolling green hills underneath. 

As I departed the airplane with my new friends, I was whipped by a cold wind and said "I don't know if I'm ready for this". The husband, who hadn't really talked that much on the flight, turns to me, laughs and says: "This is war-um!" With that unsettling thought in my head, I made my way to customs, pulled out my address information and...hit a brick wall! Not really, the customs official just stopped me because I didn't have any proof that I was actually a student at the University of St. Andrews and, since I was applying for temporary residence on a student visa, I kind of needed some sort of proof that I wasn't just going to bum around Scotland. I had to move away from the booth and sit in a row of chairs while everyone else on my plane passed through customs. After 15 or so minutes, the customs official walked over to me, asked me a couple questions about St. Andrews to make sure I was actually a student and then gave me the benefit of the doubt. Whew! 

After such a rigmarole, I hoped the rest of my trip would be relatively smooth sailing. Man, was I wrong! I hopped a bus at the Glasgow airport direct to St. Andrews. The trip took approximately 2 hours and wound its way through downtown Glasgow, which is ancient and beautiful, before heading out into the Scottish countryside. The scenery reminded me of Walla Walla in some ways, with endless bails of hay corded up and ready for delivery in farm after farm. We travelled north, passing through an endless stream of villages, each with two-lane roads the size of American one-ways. My bus would have to frequently have pull over to the side of the road in order to let oncoming traffic pass before we could continue on. The towns are so old that the foundations were built with only single lanes, or only two-way buggy lanes, in mind. The towns wear their age well. From what I could see from the bus, most are relatively well-kept. Some are so worn down that they seem to wear their decay as a badge of honor, almost like the town fool who wears his shabby coat with absolute pride. The churches are the centerpieces of every town, it seems, with big stain-glass windows and bell towers that look over the town.

When I finally arrived at the St. Andrews bus terminal it was around 10 o'clock and I decided to walk down to Old Course before trying to find my room at Andrew Melville Hall. The course was full of people, it seemed like groups of six or more were playing at once and every hole had a group  on it. Instead of heavy Scottish brogues, the gentlemen playing the course had some of the liltiest British accents I'd ever heard: "Jolly good ro-o-und, Bernahd". The British call these accents "posh". Anyway, once I'd had all the posh I could handle I stumbled my way over to my dorm. My hall is probably the ugliest building on campus. It was designed to look like two ships crashing into each other but it kind of looks like a three-dimensional space invader, with portholes. Ugly. I walked up to the lobby and asked the front desk lady if I could check in and she looked at me like I was crazy. She asked if I was with the early group and I said yes. She tried to find my name and couldn't and so I told her my story and she said that I was actually a day early and that I could check in the next day at 2:00. Luckily she allowed me to stow my big rolly bag in my room or else I would have had to tow that thing around the town. She told me that I should find a Bed and Breakfast in town and she directed me to the Murray Street, where most every B&B in St. Andrews is located. 

I went to Murray Street and found every inn, B&B, hotel and lodge with a "No Vacancy" sign hanging on the door or in the window. Great. I decided that I had to go to the visitor's information center and hope that they could help me. I had a hell of a time finding the place. Along with poorly laid out cities, it seems the Scots don't know how to label things very well or provide adequate direction. There was sign in the center of town indicating that the information booth was up North of the city so that was the direction I headed. After I while I saw another one, except it pointed right at an Presbyterian Church and tried to tell me that that was the visitor's center. After those two, there was no other sign for about half a mile so I figured I must have missed the center and turned back. After walking all the way back, I still hadn't found the information booth and so decided to ask someone at the Student's store. The lady told me that I should just continue along the same road I'd been on and that it was about a mile more up the road. Eventually I found it and asked the lady there if she could find me a room in the town. Unfortunately, she said, the hotels were all full with the parents of first-year students who had arrived early like me. She told me my best option would be to get a hotel in one of the surrounding towns. She contacted a B&B in the nearby town of Crail and got me a room. So I had to walk back to the bus station, where I had arrived around three hours earlier, in order to get on a bus to get out of town.

Finally, I made it. After being on my feet for what seemed like forever, it was incredible to lie in bed and do absolutely nothing. That's what I am going to do for the rest of the day. And tomorrow I check in to school.