Thanksgiving!

I was so nervous that I wasn't going to get to celebrate Thanksgiving this year because my friends and I were having a very hard time coming up with a plan. Finally, on Wednesday, I was invited to my friend Cora's flat to celebrate with her, her flatmates, and a couple of our other friends. It turned out to be so much fun! I brought stuffed mushrooms because it just isn't Thanksgiving without stuffed mushrooms! I was going to try to make Miriam's mushrooms, but after a warning from my mother that they are very difficult to make (and as I have just begun my endeavors in cooking), I opted to make more simple stuffed mushrooms. They turned out very well. I also wanted to make icebox rolls, but apparently shortening and buttermilk are not as easy to find in Scotland as they are in the States. So I will just have to have them sometime over Christmas break! The dinner itself was very good! We had turkey, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes with marshmallows (a first for me), stuffing, mini sausages, my mushrooms, apple-rasberry pie, red velvet cake, peanut butter and jelly cookies, and a lot more. Here are some pictures:




















The wonderful buffet of food. Lots and lots of food!




















Me getting food...so yummy!




















My mushrooms!




















Lily's turkey!! It was so good!















Our plates of food.















The whole group!














Lily's pie!














The red velvet cake being iced. This process took a very long time. However, it turned out wonderful, so I can't really complain.














The peanut butter and jelly cookies!

Parents Visit!

It turns out I am very bad at routinely updating my blog. So now that I am procrastinating studying for my finals, I am going to give you a couple of updates!

As most of you know, my parents visited me about a month ago. It was a lot of fun! They took me out to dinner at several very good restaurants! We sent to a very good Indian place and several other yummy places. They also took me shopping and I got three new pairs of boots! That I wear all the time and are wonderful!

Now that I got food and shopping out of the way (the important things), I can talk about our other activities...cultural things. We went to Hollyrood palace, which is the palace that the Queen stays in when she is in Edinburgh. It is also the palace that Mary Queen of Scots lived in some of the time. It was absolutely beautiful. There is also an abbey...which is mostly in ruins that we visited. Unfortunately that day it was raining like crazy, so we spent as much time as we could indoors. So we spent a lot of time in the cafe at the palace.

Overall, it was a great visit. I am so glad they came (which of course is what I have to say since my parents read this blog too---haha). I'm sorry I don't have any pictures to show you, but those are all on my mothers computer.

Lots of Love,

Lizzie

Inverness

Hi Everyone,

So it has been AGES since I have last posted, and for that I am very sorry. My life has been completely crazy recently. Anyway, I thought I should let you all know about my trip (about a month ago, sorry guys) to Inverness. It was an absolutely amazing trip and I wanted to show you all my pictures.

We left early on Friday the 9th of October. We boarded a bus and drove about two hours to this nice little place, Hermitage, Dunkeld, where we got out and walked to this beautiful waterfall. There was an observation room build next to the waterfall. When you went into the observation room, you could go out to an observation deck and see the waterfall. Originally women were not allowed to see the waterfall in person: it was thought that the sheer magnificence of the waterfall would cause women to swoon. There was a mirror on the wall in the observation room that women had to view the waterfall through. However, fortunately this archaic mentality is no longer in practice, and I was able to view the waterfall and take pictures.




















This is a VERY tall Douglas Fir




















The observation room




















The waterfall!















Me next to the waterfall.















The beautiful bridge that you could stand on to look out at the waterfall.

After we made the short stop at the waterfall, we traveled to Pitlochry to have lunch. Pitlochry is a very cute town at the beginning of the highlands. I had lunch with a couple of friends at a little resturaunt where we had a very rude waitress who would not serve one of my friends alcohol because she "couldn't accept American driver licenses as a form of identification." While legally this may be true, she was just being rude because no where else in Scotland has ever refused us alcohol with our driver licenses. Anyway, after lunch we poked our heads into a few shops. Mostly the stores just sold very touristy things. I picked up a couple of post cards and a chocolate Nessie Monster.




















A hilarious shop in Pitlochry that I had to take a photo of.

After Pitlochry, we headed to my favorite part of the trip. We drove about two hours to the Glenfinnan Viaduct. At exactly three o'clock we watched the Jacobite Express, which is the train that is filmed as the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter movies, cross the Viaduct exactly as it does in the movies. It was soooo amazing!!!






























The Hogwarts Express!!!

After that exciting day of driving we eventually made it to the youth hostel in Inverness. It was pretty nice, not too creepy. I roomed with three of my friends: Alex, Lily, and Cora. On Friday night we went out with some of our guy friends first to Hootenany's. This cool pub that had live music. That was fairly expensive, and very
crowded, so we made our way to another pub, City Bar. After that we bar hopped just kind of finding out what the nightlife of Inverness was like. It was pretty cool, although I ended up going back to the hostel with two guys who have absolutely no sense of direction, so they were completely relying on me to get them back. Which could have been bad, but fortunately we met up with some other people who knew where they were going.

The next day after breakfast at the hostel, we made our way to the Culloden Battle Field. It felt very odd to be at a battle field without my father, but fortunately I had our guide, who was with us for the entire weekend, Alastair, to tell us about the battle field instead. He was very knowledgeable.















This is a view of the Culloden Battle Field from the top of the Culloden museum.




















Here is the memorial Cairn in the center of the battlefield. Cairns were originally created by each member of a clan when going into battle would put a rock in a pile, when the battle was over the living would claim there rocks and the rocks remaining would be a memorial for the deceased.















Here are stones marking the mass graves for each clan.















This is Alastair standing in front of the only building remaining from the time of the battle.

After Culloden, we drove to Kingussie for a sheepdog display. We visited a farm where this guy trains sheep dogs. He has close to 15 dogs that he competes in various sheep hearding tournaments. The dogs were amazing. Each one responded to a different whistle. He signalled the dogs to go find the sheep and then bring them to him. He could also have the dogs lie in a line and have one dog heard the sheep between the other dogs. It was pretty incredible! We also got a sheep shearing demonstration, and I got to sheer a sheep (well part of one, with the herder helping me)!















The sheep herder holding his favorite puppy.















The dogs in action!















Weaving the sheep in and out of the other dogs!















The herder with his wife (who incendentally is from Denver. She asked him for a job at a sheep herding show and then when her visa ran out, they got married!) and a sheep who is about the be sheared.















Me shearing a sheep!















One of the cutest puppies in the world!















Me holding a puppy!!! I was in love!

After we disentangled ourselves from the puppies, we headed to the Glenlivet Distillery. We got a tour of the distillery (it was very smelly, at times I thought I was going to get drunk off of the fumes alone) and then had a whiskey tasting. Let me tell you that I am not the biggest fan, or indeed a fan at all, of whiskey. But it was a very neat experience.

After that very full day, we headed back to the hostel in time to get ready for a group dinner at a nearby restaurant. After dinner, instead of going out again, I crashed very early with my roommates. All of us were way to tired to do anything but sleep!

The next day we went for a cruise on Loch Ness, which took us to the Urquhart Castle. The cruise was beautiful! Urquhart castle was a ruin on the Loch. It was pretty well preserved and there were quite a few towers you could go up in and look around.































The beautiful Loch Ness from our cruise.















Urquhart Castle from the Loch Ness.















Urquhart Castle















Me in one of the castle towers.

The ride back to Edinburgh was fairly uneventful. We did stop at Glencoe, which is one of the most spectacular sights I have ever seen. I am posting pictures, but these pictures cannot even begin to explain the beauty of the place.































The beautiful Glencoe.

Well that is all for now folks. This post has taken me much more time than intended and I still have to finish a thermodynamics problem for tomorrow (I know it sounds like so much fun, I bet you can guess why I opted from writing this post first).

Love Always,

Lizzie

My Flat

Hi Everyone!

So I'm sure that you are all wondering about where I live and such (and if your not, I'm going to tell you about it anyway). I live in a six bedroom flat with mostly visiting students. Two of my flat mates are from Canada, one is from France, one is from the US also, and one is from Scotland. The girl from Scotland, Nicola, is the only Fresher (Freshman) in our flat, which must be kind of hard for her although she hangs out with all of us a lot. The other girl from the US, Brianna, is starting her second degree in veterinary studies so she will be here for five years. The rest of us are all visiting students for a year. Fortunately, we have two bathrooms and a fairly large kitchen with two fridges!! I live on a main street, South Clerk Street, and unfortunately my bedroom faces the street, so it is a little loud sometimes (especially when drunk people are walking past at three in the morning).
















This is the outside of my flat...although I got it from the internet so it is a little out dated and the stores in the bottom have changed. One is now a dance store, it's so cute!!! I am on Level 4 (the fifth floor) on the right hand side. My window is the first window on the right after the center windows.















Here is my beautiful room!!! The curtains were AWFUL looking, so I covered them up with pretty pink and purple fabric.



















This is the view out of my window!















Here is the rest of my room.















This is our (very messy) kitchen. Usually it isn't this bad. Notice how small the stove is!















This is our eating/common room where one of my flatmates, Anastasia, making breakfast.















The common room again, this time looking at the wall that separates it from the kitchen.

Well that's all for now.

Love Always,
Lizzie

Shopping Crazyness

I had the most insane shopping experience of my life. My friend Alex and I decided to go shopping at Top Shop (for those who don't know Top Shop is just like an up scale H&M that is mainly based in Europe) today around 5:30. Little did we know that there was a sale going on so the store was closing at 6 (so that it could reopen at 6:30 for the sale because British stores are weird). We had just gotten everything we wanted and went to the dressing room where they told us we couldn't go in because they were getting ready for the sale which was SUPER frustrating. So we decided to have dinner and go back. So we went back around 7:30 and it was the craziest thing ever!!!! I had to wait like 30 min to get into the dressing room and then another 10 to pay for my clothes. And I only saved like 9 pounds on a 50 pound purchase, which I guess is pretty good. I actually enjoyed the experience but have no desire to ever repeat it again (I guess no after thanksgiving day sales for me).

Family Visit

Hi Everyone,

I went on a family visit this past weekend. It is a part of the IFSA-Butler program. About twenty of us went and stayed with different families in Cumbria, near Penrith. I stayed with a woman named Anne Longbone, who lived in a little village called Maulds Meaburn (pronounced Maulds Meebin). She has two daughters, Sarah who is 15 and Charlotte who is 18. They were all very nice. The village was very cute. Only a couple hundred people lived in this village.















This is Anne, Charlotte, and Sarah's house. It's actually two houses smushed together, so their house is the one on the right.


















This is the view out the front of the Longbone's house. Notice all the sheep...it was very weird to wake up in the morning and see sheep out the front window.















This is the view out the back of the Longbone's house. More sheep!














This is the village green. One of the farmers has the rights to just let his sheep out in the middle of the village.














The sheep walk around in the village...even going over the bridges and such. If you can't tell by these pictures, there are WAY more sheep than people the live in the village.

The area in England we were staying is near the lake district, so on Saturday we went to Keswick and took a walk around the lake with Anne, Charlotte and their dog, Gigha (pronounced Gia) who is a black lab and made me miss having Jesse and Ginger around. Here are some pictures from the walk around the lake.















The beautiful lake. Anne told me that sometimes she would take her Brownie group to that island and camp out for a night or two.















Here is Gigha swimming in the lake. She loved to get wet and then would rub her self around me and get me wet too!!!














Here are some sheep (more sheep) that were around the lake.

After walking around the lake we went to Keswick and had lunch--fish and chips. All the food here is fried!!! I keep trying to go for a couple days without eating fried food and I can't. The block around my building has about four chipies (shops that sell chips-as in fried-and other fried foods as well including deep fried pizza, deep fried haggis, deep fried mars bars, etc). I'm gaining SO much weight because of it. Anyway, back to the home stay. There was a little market in Keswick as well, although I didn't buy anything. But there was a Peter Rabbit store. So of course I had to take a picture.














The Peter Rabbit Store!!

We also went to Anne's brother-in-laws, Martin, house for afternoon tea. It was her nephew's birthday the day before so she wanted to wish him happy birthday and give him a birthday present. Martin and his wife, Ros, had an awesome house. They had just bought it a year before and were doing a lot of work on it. Their backyard was huge and tiered. When you first walked out the door there was a little yard with a high wall and they had a trampoline that took up about half of the yard. Then you went up some steps to the garden. They had apple trees, and b
erry bushes, and lots of vegetables. They also had a lot of animals: two dogs (one neurotic one named Molly, who constantly had to be petted or she would butt her head into you until you fell over), two guinea pigs (which they let roam around freely and usually hid under their plants), a rabbit named Christopher (who Gigha was very intent on trying to eat, Charlotte had to hold him very tightly when Christoper was around), a black cat named Charlie, and four chickens!! Martin said he never had to buy any eggs because the chickens would each lay one a day. He had made an apple cake and lemon pound cake for us, both with his own eggs.

After tea we quickly hurried home because some friends of Anne's were coming over for a barbeque. Their old neighbors, Judy and Mel came over. Mel loved to use Anne's barbeque (apparently he has one of his own, but will only cook on Anne's). He made TONS of food. We ate outside even though it was very cold. Fortunately they had a fire chimney thing that we sat in front of to keep warm. After dinner, one of their friends was having a party were they had all this beer that they had made themselves. It was very very good! And I tried a few different kinds.

While I was in Cumbria, Anne also took me to see a stone circle. Like stonehenge, but not as impressive. Here is a photo from that.















We left on Sunday after Anne made us (I was staying with one other girl from the IFSA program) a wonderful lunch of Cumbria sausage, potatoes, vegetables, and applesauce. She also took us to a Jersey dairy farm, where they made all their own ice cream, on the way to the train station.




























The Jersey cows. They were grazing right out in front of the place where the ice cream was served.















They had calves at the farm. Aren't they so cute? They almost look like deer!

Overall the weekend was so much fun! Well I have to run off to class now!!!

Love Always,
Lizzie