The first day's always the hardest....

And it's the truth. I'm going to try and keep this short since I can barely stay awake to write it, but I know that if I don't I'll forget to write it all down later.

After I finished my Guinness at the hotel we left to roam the city for a few hours. As tired and nasty as the three of us were (Hailey, Abby, and myself) we were not allowed to check into our rooms until later that afternoon (we arrived at the hotel around 11 am and room check in wasn't until 2 pm. The first place we hit was the castle. It's enormous, write smack in the middle of town and up on a giant rock so when you're crossing the bridge you can see the entire city. It was magnificent. Everything is just as grey as I was told it would be. The combination of cobblestone streets, thousands of double-decker buses streaking down the narrow streets, and endless overcast weather sure do drive it home that I'm not...home...anymore. Well, maybe not the endless overcast skies, because I'm pretty used to that. In all seriousness, I actually find myself enjoying the grey skies with little patches of cold sun streaming through every so often. It isn't all that cold, and when the water is coming down, it gets really nice. I was pleasantly surprised by the wind, however. Almost knocked me over a couple of times, it was very cool. As we were walking up a set of stairs in an alleyway from our hotel up to the castle, I stopped and looked behind me, out over the west side of the city with a particularly strong gust of wind bellowing in my face and nearly pulling my jacket off. I just started laughing and put my arms out, and I think that's when it finally hit me that I was really in Scotland, and I knew everything would be alright.

So we got a good chunk of time in roaming around the city, following our noses to the pubs and the bistros, finding the pointing arches of historic land marks and churches renovated into cafe's. We found the Greyfriars Church and it absolutely blew me away. I loved the interior architecture of the church, it looked like it had seen a lot, but it was beautiful. It had a fun side too because the church was surrounded by a graveyard. Wait...did I say it was fun BECAUSE of the graveyard? Actually I meant it, because they have a lot of halloween-type celebrations, "haunted" tours, and other festivities at that abbey and in the graveyard. There's actually a little cabin right by the gate into the abbey that is called "The Wee Creepy Shop in The Graveyard". How can you read that and not laugh?

Finding a place to eat dinner turned out to be a challenging task, especially since we had no idea what we were doing, what the customs were of eating out, and we were dead tired to top it off. We ended up at this Italian place in New Town that was sit-down and looked nice from the outside and was reasonably-priced (by the way everything you buy here is highway robbery. Stupid inflation....) I got some spaghetti bolognese which was decent. There were some cute waitresses there, but of course we had a balding waiter who looked at me like I was Forrest Gump trying to sit next to him on the bus. I wish you could have seen the fiasco that was we three Americans trying to figure out how to pay a Scottish-Italian waiter with three different checks using a combination of pound cash and credit cards. We must have spent ten minutes just digging up the right change for the tip.

All in all though, I think today was good for us three, and definately good for me. We had our day to scope out the city, and now we're a little more secure with our knowledge of the surrounding area than some of the kids coming in tomorrow. Orientation also starts tomorrow and we will be loaded with questions to pound into the IFSA-Butler staff about culture, shopping, eating, and especially eating out!

It's only about 8:30 pm, but I'm crashing. I'm very much looking foward to tomorrow. We'll be well rested and already semi-well acquainted with the city in time for Orientation, and I'm very hopeful that everything will run a lot smoother from here on out.