This whole summer I told myself I would review everything I learned in my first year of Chinese classes and that I would get ahead so coming back after summer wouldn’t be hard. I never managed get myself to open a book about Chinese, so I was really nervous about coming back to it. I…
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Last week I went up to Pitlochry to stay with some family friends for a few days. They love on a farm, so I helped out around the farm while I was there, which was really fun. I went up Tuesday afternoon and got there just before dinner. We all hung out and ate dinner…
One year ago today, on September 2nd, 2014, I came to Scotland for the first time. I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on how much my life has changed and how much I have changed. Quite a while before September of last year, I started looking at colleges and thinking about what I…
One of the many festivals that comes to Edinburgh in August is the International Book Festival. The only event I got to go to was a talk by David Crystal. He was talking about his two latest books, one of which talked about dialects, and the other accents (which he co-wrote with his son). I…
A family friend happened to be visiting Scotland this month, so we decided to meet up. He and his wife were going on a little road trip and they invited me along, so I said yes (of course). I didn’t know exactly where we were going, and I was pleasantly surprised by all the cool…
On Wednesday, I slept in to recover from the long day in the Highlands, but in the evening I went to James’ going away party.James just left to spend a year in Norway studying Norwegian and Linguistics. I’ve gotten very close to James recently and he came with me to Finland, Talinn, and Stockholm and he hosted us…
I’ve been doing quite a bit of exploring the past couple of days, so this combination is a bit odd, but it’s basically just what I’ve been up to this week. On Sunday night, after a day we all used to catch up on sleep, Nikki and I decided to go on a walk. We…
About a week ago, while Emma and I were talking to James, he casually invited us to come stay at his family’s house just outside London, and we ended up taking him up on the offer!Since we only planned this trip 6 days before leaving, there were limited affordable options for getting to London. We…
This weekend, Nikki’s friend from college, Harry, came to visit. He’s currently doing an internship in London, but Nikki took it upon herself to make him fall in love with Scotland in 48 hours. While Nikki and Harry walked around, Emma and I took everyone’s dietary needs into account and made a vegetarian, gluten-free lasagna…
One of our family friend, Alison, owns a company in Edinburgh that runs courses for English teachers from all over Europe. She let me help out with one of the courses right after I got back from Finland, and so I worked pretty intensely for a week, but it wasn’t all work. Part of having…