So much happened this week.
This is already my last week of classes. I had my last Scottish Politics class today. These last five weeks have really just flown by. Finals and final papers are all due next week (I'm pretty confident in saying that I will be able to pass them all).
But 6 October our ten weeks of interning for the Scottish Parliament begin! I was assigned my MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament) last week and got to meet with him briefly last Thursday. His name is Rob Gibson and is a constituency representative of the SNP (Scottish National Party) (Scotland uses the Additional Member System to elect MSPs, so he was chosen based on party proportional representation from a list of possible politicians rather than directly elected by the people from a constituency) whose base area is the Northern Highlands and the Isles (which will hopefully merit a trip to the area as well as hopefully getting to attend the SNP conference to see the choosing of the new party leader now that Salmond is stepping down (Nicola Sturgeon)). He has a specific interest in Scottish culture, is a traditional Scottish singer, and has a political focus on the environment with a current push for land reform. He wore a mostly yellow tie with stripes and polka dots. I get my own desk and desktop computer right outside his thinking pod.
When I told him I was taking a weekend trip to the Highlands, he leant me the tourist guide to the Highlands that he had in his office.
Which brings me to the next event: I went to the Highlands last weekend. The Isle of Skye, to be precise. Along with six other friends, we spent four days there: one in Fort William, two and a half in Kyleakin, and the rest of the time on buses traveling. The trip is about six hours each way and involved switching buses twice. I got well-acquainted with the buses' bathrooms as I get motion sick and threw up multiple times.
But it was well worth it. The scenery was so beautiful (you really have to look at the pictures I uploaded, however, they aren't in order because Weebly uploaded them wrong and I have no time right now to sort them out like I usually do). On this trip we only stayed on the Isle of Skye, a larger island-area in the west/northish part of Scotland. We did some exploring on our own and took a one day tour, doing a figure eight all over the island, getting a brief amount of time in most of the favorite tourist spots. Everything was breathtaking.
We saw mountains that were formed by ancient warrior giants fighting, dipped our faces in an enchanted faerie pool that will make us look young forever, and visited the Hebrides landscape that inspired the terrain in The Lord of the Rings. The sheep were thick like fog. The fog was thick like sheep. All of the signs were in Gaelic with English translations below. I heard Scottish rap music. We visited Eilean Donan, one of Scotland's most iconic castles, where every picture looks like a postcard, but they still sell postcards for 40p.
But I only saw two Highland cows. From a distance. Out of the bus window. For five seconds. Maybe next time...
The hostel we stayed at in Kyleakin was a thing itself. Our reservations were for the "Starship Enterprise Caravan." And besides the fact that "caravan" is really just a fancy name for "trailer out back with five bunk beds," it did not disappoint. The inside walls had space murals, the sheets were all Star Trek print, miniature posters of the movies hung on one of the walls, and each of the bunk beds were labeled with the name of one of the characters. I had started with the Scotty bed, but while we were out a woman from Spain stole it and I was downgraded to Klingon.
But they also had free Wi-Fi, hot chocolate, coffee, and tea. One could hardly ask for more. Especially of a hostel in a small town outside of the tourist ring.
It was foggy, windy, the rain poured and stopped unpredictably, the ground squelched whenever you took a grassy step, and I loved every minute of it. The one conflict was whether to look up to not miss any of the Highlands' majesty, or whether to look down to avoid tripping. I tripped a lot.
I can't wait to go back in less than two weeks to hit Inverness.
And I joined the University of Edinburgh Knitting Society. We just sit around the Jazz Bar and knit. It's pretty great.