14. so I'm still bad at remembering my blog exists

Okay, new plan guys. Here is how I am going to cover all the exciting things I did on Spring Break:
Step 1: You buy me a drink (it doesn't even have to be alcoholic! I am just that gracious. Also I enjoy a good smoothie)
Step 2: You make eye contact (it's important for good communication!)
Step 3: You say "Tell me about your spring break Caitlin"
Step 4: I tell you. Probably with wild hand gestures.
I think this is a viable plan. Let's roll with it on the 29th when I fly home.

Today was not so much exciting as intensely nerve-wracking as I took my first timed final in years. Knox, you see, just requires me to submit portfolios which I can write in my sweatpants at 3am sitting under my lofted bed and occasionally yelling/throwing random things at my roommate. St. Andrews, however, requires you to wear clothes with, like, zippers and buttons and stuff, and go sit at a desk and not talk or throw things at anyone and...generally behave like a human being rather than a zoo animal. Naturally this was trying for me and was made worse by having to answer questions about the theme of betrayal in post-modern surrealist literature. But I think I did pretty well, knock on wood, this morning other than almost falling off my chair in jittery panic when a proctor tapped me on the shoulder to ask me to move my jacket. Because apparently jackets are NOT ALLOWED. COLD IS PART OF THE EXAM. Or something like that.

So that done I rewarded myself for my excellent non-zoo-animal behavior by buying some ice cream and wandering around enjoying the nice weather and taking pictures. These pictures, let me show you them:





Scotland is actually super pretty when it's Sunday


Look at this here artsy shit


Pretty arch-thing on the way to the harbor


A couple of the baby bunnies that are EVERYWHERE now that it is spring

Anyway, I'm off for celebratory drinks before I plunge back into studying for my next final which will ask me such exciting questions as: "What does the ‘transformation’ of music hall c.1880-1914 tell us about contemporary
attitudes towards popular culture?" I don't think they will take "Uh. Lady Gaga or something?" as an answer.

13. oh right, I have a blog. also: spring break!

I don't do well with mental transitions. You know how some people feel all rested and refreshed and ready to spring back into work after the weekend? I am not that person. I am the person who is in class glaring at everyone with red eyes on Wednesday because she can't process that it isn't still the weekend and stayed up to watch BBC iplay documentaries before realizing, at around midnight, that she hadn't done the reading because there was class tomorrow because Tuesday isn't Friday. Who knew? Thursday is, in fact, my only productive day of the week and then any show I watch on TV ever comes on Thursdays so after 8pm I'm useless again and then it is Friday so why bother? It's amazing I am even alive with how lazy I am. So that's kind of my explanation as to why I have not updated this in eighty-nine million years.

I am even worse after a vacation. I come home, unpack, draw up a list of what needs doing for the week...and then buy some chocolate, pull out an old novel I have already read three thousand times, and get nothing done for two weeks. My brain just absolutely refuses to accept that it is no longer vacation. So tonight I have decided to indulge it and actually write about my vacation. I kept a journal while I was traipsing around Europe because I am twenty-one and very, very white so a lot of this will be paraphrased from that. Also please imagine me as this guy while I am talking about traveling forever after this:
(note: “gap year” is a year between high school and college a lot of British students take off to travel around and backpack and become insufferable and never shut up about)


London
I took a bus to Leuchers with a dozen or so other St. Andrews students heading to the train station but my friends Claire and Kathleen in particular. We sat on the platform all out in the middle of nowhere, perched on our suitcases, having the sort of truncated, nervous conversations people have when they're wondering when their train will come and where their seats are and whether they've left anything at home. At one point I went to buy a little meat pie from a stand and the man behind the counter insisted I say hello to the Queen for him, “Tell 'er Frank says hello! That's Frank! You want diet coke? You don't need a diet! There's a smile! What a nice smile! Have a good trip!” This began a trend of everyone being incredibly effusive everywhere I went all Spring break.

The train from Leuchars to London was about six hours. I sat next to morose looking high school age boy who never looked up from his phone on which he texted furiously until getting up and walking away and then...never returning (wherever you are morose teenage seatmate I hope you have cut your hair and did not throw yourself off the train or something). I debated anxiously over whether to scoot over to his window seat for about half an hour, weighing the better view against the possibility that a conductor would suddenly appear, scream “THAT'S NOT YOUR SEAT” and chuck me out the window. Eventually I braved the inching over and watched out the window as we sped past hills and lakes and the sea until we were passing little suburbs with their neat boxy houses and gardens and then, finally, London. I hadn't thought much about London. It was mainly a way-station to Paris and Italy in my mind, a chance to start out with friends from St. Andrews, but as the train pulled into King's Cross and I looked up at the slightly shabby, stolid brick buildings of Islington I remember thinking: Oh, this is somewhere I could live.

King's Cross was smaller than I imagined it and more open to the outside. Pigeons flew and strutted everywhere and a news stand outside sold magazines in German. Fast food and ominously named “pirate” bookshops surrounded it and there were no street signs to be found. Nevertheless we eventually found our hostel, Clink Youth Hostel, which occupied a renovated jail a couple blocks away and settled in. (picture of bed)
The rest of the day is something of a blur. We wandered around guided by Kathleen's twin sister Elizabeth who is studying nearby before heading to the Tate, a museum of modern art in a building that Elizabeth described as “the ugliest thing I have ever seen” where we met up with our friend Tim and looked at surrealist pictures. Here is some advice: if you are really tired and out of it definitely go to a surrealist exhibit. Suddenly it all makes sense. After Tate we continued our surrealist kick by going to a restaurant called Sushi Yo! where you took a seat at a counter with a conveyor belt that ran around the whole garishly lit restaurant. Different meals whizzed by and you grabbed ones you wanted off the belt as they passed. More advice: if you are bad at decision making and want to lose weight eat all your meals here. I was so paralyzed by indecision I ended up eating almost nothing. After that we finished the night at a pub and then dragged ourselves back to the hostel to pass out. Just before I went to bed I switched in my American sim card and found a text from the day before saying my friend's water had just broken: as I was reading the message she'd delivered a baby girl all the way back home and across the ocean.


The next day was another blur as we rushed around the underground trying to see Important Things. The impression of London as somewhere livable remained though. I would live there if only to visit the lovely St. James park (right by Buckingham Palace) on sunny afternoons. Though the red-eyed ducks are a bit terrifying.

My last full day in London was spent with a friend from elementary school, Maxine, who is studying at University College London. We have a more relaxed, meandering day catching up and riding double decker buses and I'm struck by how different it is to travel with someone you know well enough to forget, if that makes any sense. I didn't have to think about what I was going to say to her or what impression I was giving off and so I was free to concentrate on what was around me like, oh say, the mugging and seizure I witnessed in the touristy shopping district. Yeah, violent times in London! Otherwise the day is sedate, pouring over ironwork in the Victoria and Albert museum, buying a jacket at Primark, and finishing it off in an Irish pub drinking Guinness and catching up with one of my oldest friends.

The final day I have a couple hours to kill before I board my train and so I spend them in the British National Library where I look over Freudian manuscripts, learn about Chopin's strange burial, visit the magna carta, smile at an original manuscript from Charlotte Bronte, trace the history of Alice in Wonderland in illustration, and accidentally commit petty theft. Yeah, uh, apparently no one notices if you walk out of the gift shop still holding a pen. Or cares really. When I noticed what I'd done I sprinted back inside, thrust the pen onto the counter, and apologized profusely. The cashier raised his eyebrows, nodded silently, and placed the pen back in the display. I slunk off to be embarrassing somewhere else. Somewhere else like McDonalds because oh my God you guys, do you what they have there? Cadbury Egg McFlurries. They are so, so good. I ate at least three while I was in London and each one sent me into a euphoric haze unmatched until gelato in Italy.

My new addiction satisfied I then boarded the train for Paris which I will write about tomorrow.

So there you are, I'm still alive! And writing about London rather badly because I just want to sleep! Better entries to come, I swear on the memory of Cadbury McFlurries.

Pictures: are on facebook. I am too lazy to put them here tonight, sorry!

12. of mice and men (no rabbits were harmed in the making of this blog entry)

My plans, they have gone awry. I am about to leave for a two week spree in London, Paris, Florence, and Rome and I had such PLANS to tell you all about. I had spreadsheets of budgets, I had maps, I had lists of attractions categorized and cross-referenced by price and location and what way the wind might blow next Saturday and I wanted to share a sample of this might preparation with you. But no, that will not happen. Nor will you see the pictures of my dad's visit and the ball (fancy!) until I am home from vacation and have forgotten them and only want to talk about the vacation I have just gotten back from and my posts about these lovely things will be as lame as my Edinburgh post. I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, but you see I have to be up at 7 and it is almost 3am and I am still packing so sorry, sorry, sorry but I have to forge on with that. No statistics, no pictures. Only guilt and sore eyes.

And, of course, excitement! London! Paris! Florence! Rome!

11. invisible edinburgh aka look I am alive!

Hey, hello, hi! Look, Scotland has not eaten me! I'm coming slowly back to the surface after a two week period that involved: five papers (I still have small, shaky, tremors remembering them but now all I have for the rest of the year, academics wise, is one Scottish fiction paper and my exams in May), my father visiting, the New Hall Ball, and various other diversions. But we're not going to talk about that today. Today we are going to talk about Edinburgh and more of my weird quirks.

So, here is another weird quirk for you: I hate taking my camera out in a public place. HATE. Mostly this is because I don't like to be conspicuous. Move along folks, nothing to see here, I'm certainly not a tourist, nope. Which is why, to you fine folks, Edinburgh is unfortunately going to be mostly invisible. But I did go there...about a month ago (have I really been here a month? But then...have I really ever gone to school anywhere else?) to visit my friend Alicia.

Visiting Alicia is nice because we are both perfectly content just walking around places. One day, for example, we spent a solid four hours just walking around pretending we were trying to decide where to get dinner. I say pretending because all the places we looked at were clearly waaaayyy out of our price range but they were pretty and in pretty places so we just...walked around. The whole time though we totally kept up the fiction to each other and ourselves that maybe we would eat here, or here, or...nope...hmm...let's just walk to the other side of the city. Good idea!

And it was a beautiful city indeed. The most amazing skyline and I took no good pictures of it, like, at all because the few times I tried I just sort of whipped my camera out, flailed it in some random direction, and then clicked before anyone could see me. Here are the pictures of the skyline I did manage to take:






Yeah, those are kind of dark, know why? Because apparently Edinburgh- when not rainy- is aligned just right so that at every hour of the day the sun is blinding you. Seriously, there were some streets we could not walk down in a certain direction without searing our retinas. This does not make for good picture taking.

You know what does though? Alicia. Cause she's pretty and standing in front of a cool building:


Said pretty friend and cool building are up atop a very steep hill called Calton Hill which you can read about by clicking the link. It has an amalgamation of historical plaques and weird buildings:



See that one with all the columns? That was supposed to be a copy of the Parthenon but apparently the builders ran out of money and so went "eh, screw it" after one wall before going off to the pub. The Scottish: my kind of people.

That about wraps it up, sorry to be kind of lackluster but this did all happen a month ago and my mind is rather more focused on tying up loose ends here before leaving for SPRING BREAK (!!!!) which is going to be wonderful and is really all I care about at the moment.

Next time on Everywhere To Go: my dad's visit, the new hall ball, culinary wizardry, travel plans
Other statistics: I am too lazy for them.

10. tea time

So I have a lot coming up this week to the tune of:
-An English paper
-Two 2,000 word presentations
-A course diary
-A novel to read
-The unholy ordeal that is attempting to top up my Nomi mobile phone which, okay, seriously, why would any self respecting capitalist venture make it this hard for me to give them money? Why would ANYONE? I mean I'm not exactly a captain of industry over here with my creative writing degree in progress but if someone came up to me on the street and was like "Can I give you 20 pounds?" I certainly wouldn't make them beg and jump through hoops and talk to people with fake names (Yeah "Rachel" and "Tim" with your thick Indian accents I'M ON TO YOU and why do I care what your name is anyway? Your name, like the unfortunate boy I knew in second grade, could be Jihad and if you fixed my phone we'd be cool) before I would take it.
-My dad coming to visit! Hopefully after I finish all this stuff! Yay!

But you know what makes it better? Tea. I'm serious. You drink a nice big mug of tea and suddenly all of your problems just melt away into an herbal haze. I now understand why British people can be so polite all the time. They are medicated. With tea.

So because I have so much coming up and then my dad is visiting me (yay!) and you probably won't hear from me for two weeks and I don't even have pictures of Edinburgh to show you here are...pictures of me drinking tea! In the bathroom! Not where I usually drink tea but it has the best mirror so...there we are, my journey from skepticism about the powers of tea to glee.




Panic: managed with tea
Other statistics: irrelevant

09. I made you this lame video because I love you

So, yeah, the weather here? Kind of unpredictable. It's sunny! It's raining! It's snowing! It's...been two hours! But almost always it is windy. So here are some photos and a silly video I recorded while I was taking a walk in the rain.

My favorite beach and a street in the snow:



The ocean in the rain:




aaaand last of all another awkward video shot with my camera in which I am weirdly fascinated by how windy it is and nervous the whole time that someone will amble along and see me shooting it and muttering to myself:

08. in which I make up for a week long lull by writing an epic complete with pictures

I think I cursed myself with that last post. Immediately after I wrote it I went to Edinburgh (SO PRETTY I am probably going to move there right now and you will never see me again, sorry!) and got absolutely nothing done except sight-seeing all weekend. Then I came home and spent Sunday at The Lizard which is the St. Andrews version of a club instead of, you know, sleeping and woke up Monday feeling a bit under the weather. That seemed to flip some switch in my brain, act as some sort of Pavlovian cue that made it go “Oh, staying out all night? I know what this means! I am on vacation!” I then proceeded to buy absurdly expensive French cheese, a bottle of wine, some bread, and absurd amounts of chocolate and spend the next three days doing nothing productive at all. And I mean nothing. Sorry friends and parents I just...ceased communication with! E-mails were just too much for me! Oops.

But this entry is not about that! This entry is about a long-ago time when it was not raining and it was the Saturday before last and I hiked the Fife Coastal Trail and basically produced a collection of photographs that should probably be entitled “No One Needs This Many Goddamn Pictures of the Coast Okay Caitlin?” So today you are going to get a kind of pictorial essay/psychological case study about that. Okay? Okay:

So to understand this you have to know something about me (some of you probably already know): I am scared of really weird things. Pumping gas, for example, makes my entire body tense up in rigid panic because I just know I'm going to somehow, someway, ignite the gasoline and create a fiery inferno. Also, midgets. Yeah, midgets, ha ha ha, laugh it up, I'll be over in the corner shaking. Probably the one I catch the most flak for, however, is my fear of cows. Yes, cows. Yes, I'm serious. Look they just...something is not right about cows. They stare and stare with their big, soulless eyes and they're always watching you and just...I don't know! But I am terrified of cows and that is the background you need before we launch into:

The Fife Coastal Path!
This lovely little path is just past the harbor I showed you last post and runs along the coast. As, you know, coastal paths often, hopefully, do.


The first part is a brief uphill climb


At the first summit you can see the town jutting out into the sea, a fairly constant view throughout the hike as you watch it get smaller and smaller over your shoulder


Then you hike along for awhile taking in the pretty golf course, looking down at the ocean from cliff edges, ducking through picturesque overgrown archways of brambles and branches, and hopping up and down steps made of rock












So, yeah, the first half of the hike is lovely. My photography skills are subpar. Hiking, hiking, so nice...oh, hey, what's that?


...oh, well, that's kind of disquieting. I thought, assuming this meant I might see some cattle in a pasture bordering the trail. I wasn't exactly psyched for cows watching me with their soulless killer eyes while I hiked but whatever, they'd be behind a fence right? Ooh look at the pretty beach with the cool rocks!






Yup, great hike, fun times...wait...what's that noise?

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Uh, yeah, apparently by "winter grazing land" they meant "cows will be looming on the cliffs overhead. Watching you. With no fences. Totally free to COME AND EAT YOU."


So I go along the trail for awhile longer, see some more pretty stuff, and stop to do some reading for class






Then, gathering my courage, I headed back towards town.


The cows had disappeared from the clifftops and I started to relax, figuring they'd ambled back to hell...er, their barn or whatever. Then I turned a corner and right there, close enough to bite me, was a giant cow staring with menacing vacancy. Here is where I would insert a picture of the beast if I had not responded by actually, audibly, yelping and throwing myself sideways into a bunch of bushes which I then proceeded to back through with my hands raised going "Sorry! Sorry! I'm leaving!" Which, okay, even I recognize how ridiculous that was. I don't know why I'm let out of the house. Um, the bushes I stumbled through were real pretty?


But I did make it back to town without being trampled by my bovine nemesis and may even attempt the hike again some time if I can bring someone with me to distract the cows or whatever so I'm counting this one as a success.

People I imagine have actually read this epic: the ones who share my DNA
Things I am becoming addicted to that I will jones for like a crackhead when I come home: Walks by the sea, tea and toast every day at 4pm (I know I CAN have it at home but I don't think anyone back in Illinois or NY will see it as an essential part of life that should override everything on my to-do list and yours as well), galaxy chocolate, pretty old buildings, cheeeeeeeeese