It Followed Me Home

Snow still on the ground here in MD, and ice is still on the roads. Well, only in parts. The road leading to my parents' house is traditionally one of the bad ones during 'weather' because it's just out of the town limits. That means that it's on the very bottom of the plow lists to get cleared, but still widely traveled. It makes for interesting drives during snow. Much better just to hunker down and stay indoors.

Now US airports and pictures and snow-tastrophies are on the news back across the pond and I get messages from flatmates and friends back in Scotland. The gist of all of them? "The snow followed you home -- don't bring it back with you!"

I'll try, y'all. Even if St Andrews is really pretty with the snowfall. I'm just as over it as the next person.



St Andrews Harbour under snow just before I left. Even wrecking travel plans, it was pretty.

I'm not a doctor and I don't know the technical terminology, but I do know that sunshine activates our happiness glands. -- Jessi Lane Adams

I woke up today to it still snowing hard, with alternates of sleet, and having picked up what I assume is the tail end of my flatmate's cold. All coupled together means that the only time I left the flat today was to go to get tissues and orange juice.

I'd hope to share pictures of St Andrews in snow, but seeing as how standing made me dizzy? I'll leave you with something sunny from a few days ago instead.


St Andrews Harbor at Sunset

Breakaway: Gairloch (Day 1)

So, over the weekend I headed up with Breakaway to the highlands, staying in Gairloch. Totally a last minute thing, as I was the person going 'please, please if you have an extra spot I'll totally keep it warm'. Cheers for one extra seatbelt. Friday through Monday hiking and generally enjoying the outdoors. As it's Reading Week this week, I needed to get out of town and this was just what I needed.

We stayed at Carn Dearg in Gairloch and it was absolutely gorgeous. The views from the front porch of the hostel were out of this world. And on a clear day, like we were lucky enough to have for the majority of our visit, you can see the Isle of Skye across the loch.


Sunrise from the front of the hostel.

The group tends to split and offer 3-4 walks of varying difficulty and length so that everyone can enjoy a day outside at their skill level. Me? I'm a low-medium. A good walk, a bit of height for the views.

So Saturday, those in my group headed out to Beinn Eighe and Loch Maree at the National Nature Reserve to do our walk. Gorgeous, stunning... and way more high steps and vertical movement than I thought I was signing up for. By the end of the walk I am exhausted and sore... and still thrilled for the view.



On our way up, overlooking more of Beinn Eighe and Loch Maree.


The desperately beautiful landscape as we get further up the range as it evens out for a bit.


The peaks got snow overnight, and the part of our group that wanted to make it up the munro got to play in the snow. I was fine just taking a picture.


Victorious as we get to our cairn at 550m (which is in another picture, but I like standing on the rock better) and decide that it's time for lunch before beginning our descent. Which, like the ascent, was steeper than I was anticipating.


And with it being steeper both up and down my legs are exhausted by the time we make it back down to Loch Maree. But, since we finished a bit earlier than anticipated, we decided to go check out part of the beach at Loch Gairloch that the low walking group did that day.



Sunset as we walk down to the beach. This has to be one of my favorite pictures I took all weekend.


The beach and the waves and the sunset -- couldn't get better.


Oh wait, climbing up to the cliffs to overlook the crashing waves does make it even better.


Stunning -- and the best part was that there were two more days of it!

And with it getting dark at 5pm, we head back to the hostel for dinner, which consisted of a really good curry that had actual spice to it. Shocker! Most of the food I've had in the UK has been pretty spice-less. Of course, the curry was also made by our Luxembourgish club president, so perhaps that made a difference? Regardless, delicious.

End of the World

Days with class are always interesting -- I wonder if the other groups in International Relations feel exhausted when they leave class or if they feel like they've learned something and built upon new idea. We yell. And argue. And most classes I leave feeling exhausted and wondering if anything was actually gained that I didn't have beforehand. Hmm.

But it was Augustine, and I'm familiar with Augustine, and at least can join in with some of the yelling, even if I hate that it had to be yelling. And next class is Aquinas, so we're good with that as well.

It is classes like this that make me miss the Religion classes from my undergrad. It was a big debate in my mind if I wanted to go back to grad school, would it be for Religion or Politics. Politics, or at least Political Theory, won out because all of the Religion programs are housed within Divinity programs who are looking for people who want to become pastors. As I have absolutely no desire to become a pastor and whose interest is in the academic study of religions and their impact on societies, there's doesn't seem to be any encouragement of that in Divinity programs. So IPT seemed to be the best fit.

Alas, each time I tried to bring up his gnostic heritage, or the importance of his theories of grace and predestination and the elect, and the fact that the City of Man can't be Rome because neither of the Cities are earthly cities and are ideals and consequences, I get shot down.

Victory in class is the victory of the loudest, or victory of the most bullheaded. I'm not sure that's a victory I can attain.

It's the after class that's most interesting -- usually a most of us go for a drink, but with the main coordinator of that out, three of us went to get a bite and some tea after class and again end up talking about the victory of the loudest. All philosophical discussion should take place over food and drink, I think. It helps people lower inhibitions and maybe not be so uptight about being 'right'.

In the food and drink and discussion we learn that one of the girls hasn't actually seen the sea here yet. Which is boggling for me to believe because I go down there most evenings, and am only a couple streets over. But then, I guess that's what you get when you don't actually live in town. Which meant that I got to show off the sea. And the most beautiful part about water is that if you go a bit into it -- down a pier, out in a boat, in the right spot at a cliff -- it feels like you're standing at the end of the world.





I think it's one of the things that people who grow up someplace other than near water have a hard time understanding. Standing out on a pier, or sailing out in the sea/ocean/whatever, that's freedom. That's feeling that you could just keep going. It's much more than just an open road. An open road has an end, a destination. There may be another shore, but that's not the sea's destination -- that's just where a few waves crash up when they get too close.

And that makes up for a hard class any time. At least I think I got a few points across, even if they were drowned out and quickly forgotten. At least I got a few.