Last weekend was incredible. I went to whales with the mountineering club. We climbed a mountain in Snowdonia the first day. It was quite rough because it was raining and windy. Everybody in my group got pretty beat up. My knees were feeling just awful by the time we got to the bottom. Then right at the carpark I slipped on a rock and just fell straight onto my back. That evening I spent just laying around trying to recouperate (and working on a composition haha...band geek). The next morning my plan of just going to a pub and hanging out until we left did not work so well. I heard the bus going to Snowdon was leaving and I just figured I had to jump on it. I heard the walk up snowdon was an easy one and figured I could do it. Well...the group I went with was a group of super experienced climbers. We climbed along the ridgeline of the mountain next to it going over to Snowdon. We were climbing on a peak that was about 6 inches wide If you were to fall one direction you would go down a 100 meter drop or the other side where there was a steep shale slide for a couple hundred meters. We would come to huge pillars of rock and so we just climbed over them....don't even think about going around....or ropes....or the fact that there was TONS of wind, wow. So we made it alive (much to my suprise), summited, summited again and got a picture this time, then had to run down the easy trail to get to the bottom in 40 minutes. It was crazy to say the least. The picture that is with this post was taken by a guy in our group who does photo editing and photography for a magazine. It's pretty neat some of the ones he took :)

Travel plans!

Today I started looking at train tickets and flights for my Christmas Break. It looks like I will have about three weeks. I am thinking of starting in Italy and traveling around there a bit before going to France and then heading over to Spain for my first warm Christmas break. I'm still not sure where I'll actually be spending Christmas or New Years. If anybody has ideas let me know!!!

:D ahhhhhhh I'M SO EXCITED!!!!!

Greetings from Newcastle

I don't think I'm too great at this whole 'writing on blog' thing...haha. I'll get better I promise.

I am now in Newcastle. It is pretty magnificent. My friend Robin had an extra ticket to watch Ludovico Einaudi and considering I am a HUGE fan he offered it to me. We drove down from Glasgow Friday evening. I really really really hate the road system in Glasgow. It makes no sense and took us about an hour to get out of Glasgow. Saturday we woke up and went with a group of people from Robins street for a hike out in the country. We hiked around peoples fields, a stream, in a valley and ended up at a pub for lunch. The pub was so cute! The little village that it was in had one road that wound through it and we were the only people at the pub. We walked back and got home just after dark. We then got ready to go watch Einaudi which was absolutely incredible! I was totally blown away. If you have not heard him then youtube him and listen. It is SOOO much better live. He had a cello player (who I thought was the best player), a viola, a violin/percussion, a violin/guitar, and a mixer. It was so incredible that I don't even have words to say how amazing it is. The building that it was in was amazing aswell. The sound quality was immense. After the concert we all walked down by the waterfront and through town. I have to say that the nightlife is really crazy. Considering it was halloween and there were a lot of drunk Uni. students everywhere I think it was slightly abnormal but incredibly entertaining. I have to say that I fell in love with Newcastle. It is sooo beautiful!

Looking forward to another weekend with not internet...

So today marks the second week of Hadassah not having internet in her room (Thank you Glasgow Housing Services...) and no bank account (Thank you Bank of Scotland for taking over a month to make my account active). Arg!

Other than that the weekend should be fun. I will be heading to Stirling on Sunday to play in an Ultimate Frisbee Tournament against a few other universities which should be quite fun. Other than that (and Ultimate Frisbee practice tonight) I have absolutely nothing planned for the weekend. I am thinking it will probably be time to catch up on reading and get in some good practice time.

Last night me and four other girls went to Kathrines house for a Jane Austin movie night (since we have to read the books for English Lit. anyways). We had pizza, hot chocolate, IRN BRU!, icecream, popcorn with...sugar?, and a yummy crisps. We watched the movie in our pjs and then just laid around and talked until we had to head home somewhere around midnight. It was absolutely incredible girl time that was much much needed.

Something Blot-worthy

Sorry for the month-long delay between blogs. I have been having the time of my life here in Glasgow. This last weekend I went up to Glencoe, Scotland with the Mountineering Club and did some climbing.

Day one of climbing was not exactly the best hiking trip I have ever been on. We went up to Lost Valley just past Glencoe Valley. It just so happened to be pouring down rain the entire time with 40 mph winds constantly. That changed as soon as we started reaching the summit of a Monroe (the name has slipped my mind) where it increased to 80-90 mph. It was quite terrifying actually. There were a few girls with us who were not prepared and apparrently do not do so well with high places and they were in tears before we even got up to the top. The fact that we were all soaked and freezing and facing a 4 hour walk back to the road. I actually had to hold a girls hand the entire way down the mountain. She would not move an inch if she was not holding somebodys hand. The weather improoved for the last hour of the hike though! It was quite an experience I'll tell you what!

Day two was magnificent. We drove to Glen Nevis early in the morning after a long night of funness including games, stories, and lots of food! Going through Glencoe we saw the Hogwartts Express!!! It was amazing and actually looked exactly like it did in Harry Potter. So that was fun. When we got to the mountain we had the option of going up Glen Nevis either on the walking trail or up te face of the mountain. So me, a girl, and three guys decided to tackle the face. The instructors that had told us where to go said it was scrambling and there was no need for ropes. Well...we definitely could have used ropes. The climb was amazing. We had the best weather you could ask for. It was sunny but slightly chilly to keep you from overheating. We saw a rainbow halfway up and you could just see for miles and miles (or meters and meters ;) haha). When I was just coming over the last rock at the summit of the monroe I got pelted with A SNOWBALL!!!!! Yes...I'm an Alaskan and I love snow...we had a snowball fight, built a mini-snowman, whitewashed each others faces and ate a little bit of natures goodness. After a while of sitting it started snowing!!! It was just the most amazing thing that I have seen since getting there. We got our own little snowstorm for about ten or fifteen minutes. It started raining on the way down (we were able to walk down on the walking trail) and so we spent the last three hours in pouring down rain. Then upon arriving at the car park we found that the mini-bus had left without us...so I got to experience hitchiking in a foreign country. We went in pairs and actually made it all the way back to our home for the night. I have to say it was the most incredible weekend since arriving here.

I need to run to class. Posting pictures soon!

Arrived in Glasgow

Yesterday I arrived in Glasgow Scotland after quite an ordeal at the airport. The next morning I woke up at a bright and early 3am and started the trek back to the airport at 4. I guess I was becoming a pro at it considering it was my third time making the commute...lol. I showed up at the ticket counter and the guy throws me a curve ball by telling me that I was not in the system because my ticket had been cancelled at some previous time. WHAT! I have no idea how it happened or why it happened. After a full hour of crazy running around trying to figure out what to do I was able to reschedule without having to pay an "at counter" ticket. I had allready paid the fee for my bags on my ticket that had been cancelled and so they made me pay that again because they had no proof that I had paid it. That made me extremely angry more than anything. That was a large sum of money that I did not need to spend! Anyways, the rest of my flight was lovely. I landed in Glasgow safely later that day. I was greeted at the gate and wisked off to my dorm. It was really weird getting at my dorm. The bus that is driven by Uni. volunteers just dropped me off on the street in front of my dorm...no explanation of what I was supposed to do...or where to go...it kinda freaked me out when I just saw it drive away. I figured out which dorm was mine and find out how to get my key and such. I set up my room (which basically means I dumped all of the contents of all my bags onto my bed), found out where I could buy some food, and walked around the area of town my dorm is in. It was interesting but since orientation does not start until Monday I did not meet anybody or anything which is slightly disappointing. I am hoping that will change on Monday.

Germany Day 5

On Thursday I was basically in a frenzy to get ready to leave. I spent the entire morning at the Hamburg History Museum. I had gotten to briefly glance at it earlier that week but not actually look and I was astounded at how big it was! I couldn't even believe it! It is the biggest museum in Germany so I guess it would be big. There was every display from the earliest settlers of Hamburg, to the Victorian era up until the Jews and the reign of Hitler. It finishes off with a boat that they had rebuilt INSIDE the museum! It was totally gigantic and actually slightly creepy. Then it had a lot of models of boats and things like that. I just couldn't believe how huge it was!!! So that was an awesome experience.

After about 6 hours in the Hamburg History museum I went to the spice museum. It was the strangest place I have ever gone. It was up two rather sketchy stairwells in a building that is a storage center for old broken stuff. If there were no signs for the museum ever 3 feet I would have been scared for my life ;) lol, not really but it was not really the kind of walk to a museum you would normally experience. The museum itself was one room and smelled magnificent. It had over 500 displays of different spices you could smell, touch, and taste (if you like tasting raw spices...) and gave the background history to a large number of them. There were also other displays like "things we have found in bags of sugar" and in the display would be flipflops, childrens toys, a snake, a rat, things like that. It was so crazy! Not exactly the average museum. OH! And they gave me a bag of pepper as a thank you for visiting their museum...guess they were hard up for customers. I enjoyed it and I would definitely suggest it for a future traveler to Hamburg.

The rest of my day I went back and packed up my stuff. At Hamburg airport there is a cool system where you can check your bags in a day early if your plane leaves before 8am so I thought this would be a fantastic deal! I drag all four of my bags all the way down to the airport (took about an hour between the two buses and two subways I had to take), arrive at the desk that says "early check-in" and find out that British Airways is the only airlines that does not have an early check-in service. Needless to say I was disappointed not only that I wasted three hours of my day but also that I would have to drag all my bags back home and then out again at 4am. I went home and just took the rest of the day easy, quite tired from my last week of running around.