losing my shit

Guys. Yesterday while sitting in a lecture, it hit me that it's basically the end of February. I've been tripping balls ever since. I have no idea how it is that time can seem to be crawling along at a snail's pace and then BAM! it smacks you in the ovaries, looks you straight in the eye, and whispers without breaking its gaze "Wake up, motherfucker. You only have three months left and you haven't done jack shit."
Unfortunately, the weather is positively paralyzing most days. It's not bitterly cold, but it's bad enough that, when the heating in your flat barely works, it's nigh impossible to get anything done in your room. There hasn't been a single day when I haven't snoozed my alarm for at least half an hour because my bed was so deliciously warm and comfortable and the sliver of sky through the curtains was such a dismal shade of grey. One of my Danish flatmates assures me that this is a common affliction and is far worse when one lives in Scandinavia. This makes me feel slightly better but no less anxious about the fact that  I need to be taking advantage of my situation more fully.
Therefore, I'm making it a goal to do at least one thing every day that involves either exploring/adventuring or socializing with people my age. Part of me thinks that posting this on the internet will make me feel more obligated to follow through with this resolution. The other part is chortling to itself, but just to prove that asshole wrong, I've been doing pretty well so far. Yesterday I saw some live funk at The Jazz Bar with some lovely people whom I'm trying to trick into being my friends, poor things. Today...well, I also have a lot of school work and internship applications to catch up on too.
Details on my recent (second) trip to London, along with a few photographs, are possibly imminent...but I make no promises. Sorry, Kate.

not a real person

In yet another brilliant demonstration of maturity and competency, I started planning my trip to England (specifically Newcastle, York, and Manchester) on Thursday with the intention of leaving on Saturday. After having written down an entire bus schedule, my flatmate and I then discovered that hostels in these cities are expensive as fuck (if you'd like to take that literally, know that they were probably cheaper than a prostitute, but more expensive than we would have liked). Almost no deliberation was necessary to come to the conclusion that while, in theory, we'd like to explore England, we weren't willing to pay through the nose to see some quaint cities that we knew very little about. So now I'm going to be in London until Thursday because sleeping on your friend's dorm room floor in the capital is better than sleeping in an expensive-ass bed in a place that you've gotten mixed reviews on anyway. Upon purchasing my bus ticket, I felt vaguely guilty but nevertheless thrilled that my irresponsibility had led to a plan that I didn't know I was more excited about until a last-minute decision had to be made. What's less thrilling is that I've managed to stay up until 1:30am and the taxi to the bus station is arriving at 5am and my only excuse is that I've been packing, looking up things to do in London, and writing this blog post because procrastination is a skill I've been consciously honing since the age of 13.

one month in

Because I so rarely think something is interesting enough to other people as to merit writing a lengthy description, I might take to writing slightly-longer-than-twitter-length posts (might). By way of giving an update on my life: it's getting warmer but is still grey enough to be depressing most of the time. Also I need to figure out how to revitalize my social life because, well, let's put it this way: I've made my way through all of Girls and the first season of Louie in the last two weeks. I'll let you know how that goes... In the mean time, please enjoy a sampling of pictures I've taken in the city of everything-looks-like-a-fucking-castle so far:

war museum at the castle

somewhere on the Royal Mile

my giant and way-too-comfortable bed
soon to follow: a not-awful picture of the view of Arthur's Seat from my window

somewhere on my street

 In other news, I wrote an article about weird animal sex for the oldest student newspaper in the UK. Given that it's the first thing I've published since high school, I'm obligated to say that it was probably shit, but the concept alone is kind of great and definitely worth mentioning. Last thing: I got way too excited in the grocery store yesterday when I realized for the first time that the nutrition information on packages here gives energy in kJ's and kcal's. (Yeah, I've been here for a month. Obviously I'm not a calorie counter...)

x

food review: haggis

Approximately two weeks into studying abroad in Edinburgh, I tried haggis for the first time. Haggis is a savory "pudding" of various parts of a sheep traditionally encased in its stomach and, as far as I know, the most quintessential Scottish cuisine (fish and chips being more broadly British and deep fried Mars bars being more specific to Edinburgh). My flatmates and I, being the economical international students that we are, decided to buy it at the grocery store and cook it for Burns' Night, a holiday on which everyone celebrates the poet Robert Burns with a traditional Scottish meal and poetry readings. One of these readings is an address to the haggis. I'm sure some cultures do stranger things than talk to their food so we'll not question that for now.

Anyway, enough context, the point here is really the taste of the haggis. I can only describe it as “what you would expect.” Which is to say, I feel like I could have approximated its composition had I not already known what was in it. So I’m afraid, in this situation, the phrase “ignorance is bliss” does not hold true. After I tried it, my Danish flatmate's English friend asked "Don't you feel like you understand Scottish culture now?" Well, if that taste was supposed to tell me something about Scottish culture, I'd rather have nothing to do with it. Not that it tasted bad, see. It just...it tasted the way one would imagine random body parts of a sheep wrapped up in its stomach to taste (though of course in this case it was wrapped in plastic). Words like "musty” and "questionable" come to mind. Therefore, in my defense, hopefully one would understand that the idea of immersing myself in a culture that tastes like lungs, heart, and liver all ground up and homogenized is less than appealing.

[Tangent: another thing I experienced that was later described to me as "quintessentially Scottish" was a fight that broke out between a Scotsman and a Pole (with what I thought was a waffle but my friend swears was a cheeseburger in his mouth, and who I can only assume was Polish because of the Scotsman yelling unintelligible things interspersed with “ya Polish cunt”) outside of a McDonald's at 1:00 am.]

The other issue was one of texture. Haggis is mostly a paste, like patte, but peppered with little squishy white round things that I prayed were made of flour and not bits of animal fat. Upon further research, I found that it might have been oatmeal but at the time I just tried not to think about it. Also important: haggis is truly one of the least attractive foods you will ever eat:

In any case (no pun intended), I don't think my grasp of Scottish culture is any better, but perhaps my feelings towards it can be summed up by my haggis experience: it was okay but I wouldn't go out of my way to consume it again. Which would bring me to the next question, "What the fuck am I doing in Scotland anyway?" but that's a story for another time.