I miss Scotland already........

(this post has TONS of pictures, please let them all load because Scotland is beautiful enough for you to be a little patient!)


For Easter Break I went to Scotland! I have relatives there so I stayed with them. I also took the train to Edinburgh so I could take one of the tours that goes to the Isle of Skye and through the highlands. It was an amazing trip! I wish I could move there. But hey, they need accountants everywhere right? So you never know....

To get to Scotland I had to get up at 3:30am Wednesday morning, all I did was put some clothes on and brush my teeth. Mateo the doorman let me fill up a baggie of cereal the night before to take with me on the train. My plane left at 7:40 and I arrived in Scotland about 9am (there was a time change) and Ann came to pick me up! We went back to her and Jim's house in Paisley, just outside of Glasgow.


Later that afternoon Ann took to Loch Lomand where we had hot chocolates and beautiful views of the Loch and Ben Lomand.

The village of Luss. SO CUTE!



On my second day in Scotland I took the train to Edinburgh. I spend the afternoon exploring the town and visiting the castle. The next morning I was off on my tour of the highlands!


View of Edinburgh from the castle parking lot.


Entrance to Edinburgh Castle. Cost me 11 pounds to get in!! But I knew if I didn't do it I would regret it later, so I forked over the cash and saw the castle.


The mighty Edinburgh Castle.

At the castle I took the free guided tour and then spent about an hour and half exploring the different little museums and things to see there. I saw the crown jewels of Scotland, a really cool prison exhibit, the War Memorial, tons of cannons and and castle halls!

After I went for a walk down the Royal Mile, I found a wool mill and museum store. It had an exhibition with highland dress through the ages. It had about 10 different styles, here's 2 of them:


Highland dress 1500/1600s. Robertson tartan

Highland dress of the 1700s. Cameron tartan.

The Royal Mile in Edinburgh


I grabbed a sandwich and a magazine for dinner then went back to my hostel. For the evening I had a few options: ghost tour, hostel sponsored pub crawl, or sit and do nothing. Well, I was in the lounge at the hostel looking through the magazines and books when Andrew (the guy who checked me in) invited me on the pub crawl. I decided to go for it! I met some fun people that night that I will probably never see again. I didn't stay for the whole time though because I was getting up early the next morning to go on my tour, which conveniently left from across the street from my hostel.

The tour left at about 8:30, Russell the tour guide gave a talk about bus safety and all that junk then we were off! I took a three day tour through a company called Haggis Adventures. It was really really fun! I can't say enough good things about it. I met all sorts of fun people on the tour, it was just an amazing experience! I saw so much in those three days, I only wish there had been more time to slow down, take hikes, and explore.

William Wallace Monument in Stirling.


Hamish the highland cow.


Glencoe. One of the saddest stories I have ever heard. If your last name is Campbell people might hate you if you go to Scotland.


Loch Lochy.

Eilean Donan Castle. Probably the most photographed castle in all of Scotland. It's on the covers of everything! Magazines, cookie boxes, the BBC...



Faerie Falls on Skye. It was so cold! I wore my skiing long johns under my jeans all weekend! Plus the thermal top, tee shirt, light sweatshirt, and a jacket on top. I also bought some mittens at one of the stops, 3 pounds from a clearance bin. A good purchase I would say. Russell the crazy tour guide kept taking his jacket off and running around in just a tee shirt. His theory was it's not really cold, it's just windy so we think its cold. My theory: it was cold and windy.
Russell told us all to take a picture of this white house with the loch and the mountains. He kept stopping the bus whenever there was a good view for us to take pictures. He was like a tour guide/storyteller/historian/DJ/photo coach/joke maker/entertainer/restaurant picker/general-know-it-all rolled into one!




Kilt Rock on Skye.


Then Russell drove us up a cliff. Little scary but BEAUTIFUL view of Skye.
Russell then drove us to Kyleakin for lunch, our last stop on Skye. But time to see more lochs and bens on the mainland!

Loch Ness and the Urquhart Castle. (I had to steal this picture from someone else, my camera batter was completely dead. I was able to charge it that night at the hostel.)

So I sort of fell in Loch Ness. I was standing on a rock and I wanted to go stand on a different rock but that rock was slippery so my foot fell in the water.
Conversation with Russell:
me: Hey Russell!
R: yeah?
me? Can I get to my bag? My foot fell in the loch, I need a dry sock.
R: you need a dry sock!
me: yeah, can I get one...
R: (ponders a second) is your bag on the bottom?
me: probably
R: oh, well I have A sock, would that be ok?
me: sure! it was just my one foot
R: yeah, I was all packed this morning and then I saw this sock so I just stuck in the cubbie on the bus. I think it was fate someone would fall and need a sock.

So this is a picture of my foot in Russell's sock. I still have the sock too, I mean how do you give someone back a dirty sock? That's right, you don't. So thanks for the sock!!



The ladies from the tour all dressed up in our "Deep Scottish Love" shirts, ready for dinner and then a trek through a snowstorm to the pub! Most of the people I met on the tour from Australia and working on London. I also met some girls going to university in Glasgow and three German ladies working as au pairs in England.


The pub was about a mile walk from the castle hostel and they had these dresses hanging on the wall that anyone could just take and put on. When have I ever let an opportunity like that pass me by?


I got a pic with Russell. Doesn't he look cute in the kilt? That was the only night he wore it, for most of the trip he was just in jeans and tee shirts.


Carbisdale Castle. It's now a hostel and really fun place to stay the night. It takes a bit to get there, about a half hour through the wilderness from Inverness.


Culloden Battlefield. I went to the visitor's center and learned about the battle that happened there. I learned about a lot of battles this weekend actually. Thanks to Russell the history degreed tour guide! Culloden is this random patch of flat area in the Highlands so they decided to have a battle there.
Dunkeld Cathedral. This was the last stop on the tour before we went back to Edinburgh. On the bus ride on the last day I never wanted it to end. I wanted to stay on that little blue bus forever seeing and exploring everything in Scotland.


My Scottish relatives! Molly is my Nana's cousin and she lives in Auchterarder (I think that's about how you spell it). Ann is her daughter, she lives in Paisley and let me stay at her house. Molly turned 91 this week!


The next day I had to leave Scotland. Ann took me to the airport about 7am and I didn't get back to Florence until 4:15pm! Traveling takes forever when you don't live close to the airport!



Music I am now in love with: (Scottish music: its more than just bagpipes!)

1. Paolo Nutini (a 3rd generation Italian from Glasgow)



2. Amy MacDonald (from Dumbarton)



3. The Fratellis (from Glasgow)





If/when I move to Scotland everyone will be REQUIRED to come visit! Don't worry, I'll buy a comfy couch.

Is that...? LONDON CALLING!

My friend Caitlin is studying abroad in the London program so I had my very own tour guide and Tube expert for the weekend! (note to those not in the know: Tube = the subway.) It was so nice to see a familiar face in a new city. London is absolutely amazing. Everything you could ever want to buy/eat/drink/see/do is there. I only wish I was made of money and had more time to take advantage of it. I was sorry when it was time to go. This is was also my first English speaking country since I left America last September! But, since it's London people were speaking every language under the sun!


The guards out for morning inspection at the barracks down the street from Buckingham Palace. You just have to love those hats!


Buckingham Palace. See the flag on top? The queen is IN!


The London Eye ferris wheel. It costs an arm and a leg to ride it, but it's pretty cool just to go see it.


London is very windy! Rick Steeves told me to go to the Westminster Bridge, walk half way across and look at Parliament to get my "Oh my God, I'm in London!" feeling. So that's what I did.

Westminster Abbey. The only sight I paid to see. It was 7 pounds with a student discount to get inside. But I think it was worth it. So many people are buried in there! Mary Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I, Bloody Mary, Charles Dickens...


After Westminster I headed over to the National Gallery to see some amazing art! I sort of glossed over the Renaissance stuff since there's so much of that in Florence and I wanted to see something different for a change. The National Gallery had beautiful Monets, Manets, Degas, Suerat, even Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" is there. Since the Queen had her 50th Jubilee or something she made all the national museums free; which was great news for me, since London is a very expensive city and I am a poor student. Also at the National Gallery there were several groups of students on field trips and they all wear the cutest school uniforms I have ever seen. If only I had gone to elementary school in England, maybe I cold have been adorable too!


British Museum. This is me posing with an Egyptian artifact. The British Museum is like taking a stroll through the history of everything, it is huge and houses centuries of British plunder from all civilizations of the world. And it's completely free! There is so much to see there, it really is incredible.

The Rosetta Stone!!!!
After museums, Caitlin and I had Tex-Mex nachos and margaritas for dinner. It was delicious!

Parliament and Big Ben at night.

Hanging out on the Westminster Bridge. If we faced the other direction Parliament would have been in the background.
The next morning I went to for a walk on the south side of the Thames before meeting Caitlin at noon at the British Library.

A recreation of Shakespeare's Globe Theater.

St. Paul's Cathedral from across the Thames and the Millennium foot bridge. St. Paul's is the second largest cathedral in the world, but I didn't pay to go inside since I went to St. Peter's in Rome (the biggest) for free.

London Bride is falling down, falling down, falling down. Actually it was sold to Arizona. But here's a new and hopefully more stable London Bridge.

Tower of London from across the Thames.

The Tower of London! I didn't pay to go inside. I wanted to, but it was ridiculously overpriced. ($33 - 16.50 pounds)


After wandering around by the tower I took the Tube to the British Library. There is a room called "Treasures" that houses (among others) The Magna Carta, Galileo's notes, Beatles lyrics scrawled on envelopes, music written by Bach, Beethoven and Mozart, illuminated manuscripts, and Shakespeare's first Folio. I love old books!

The Tate Modern. Yes, that crack in the ground IS art, modern art.
After the Tate Modern we went to the Victoria & Albert Museum of Art and Design. That museum was really neat to see because it had all sorts of stuff. There were paintings, sculptures, fashions, dishes, benches, iron fences, stained glass windows, rugs, jewelry, weapons, and more from all time periods and parts of the world. We wandered through there for a while and then went to Caitlin's host family's house out in a suburb. Her family is really nice and the daughters are funny. Caitlin and I made dinner and then we decided to make a lemon meringue pie. Whipping meringue by hand took us about 45 minutes. I will not take my electric appliances for granted again!

Kensington Gardens. London has really nice parks. I loved the parks there. In Florence we have very few green spaces or parks. And a lot of them charge you money to get into. And the few scattered free ones are very tiny.

The Peter Pan statue! Special prize to whoever can correctly guess my happy thought!

Harrods!! Life goal complete! Although I didn't buy anything and it was really crowded! But you really can buy anything there. It was pretty sweet! There was a fur protest going on outside while we were there. Harrods was my last landmark in London. After this Caitlin and I were completely exhausted so we ended up sitting in Starbucks for about 4 hours because we didn't want to walk around anymore.

London is now one of my favorite cities (which is becoming quiet a long list).

On Wednesday I am leaving for Scotland, I can hardly believe it! I can't wait to go and see "the motherland." It's going to be great!!

Clear the Runway

My Dad found this game. It's pretty fun, go play and post your score!

You Can Afford to Lose a Day or Two

First of all, everyone should be planning a trip to Vienna right now! Vienna is one of my favorite places for sure and I want to go back soon (soon as in a few to several years). A lot of the places I’ve been to I feel like I don’t need to go again, but not Vienna. There were so many things I didn’t get to do there, mostly because I didn’t have enough time or I was dinking around wasting time. You have to have a game plan to see everything you want to see in these cities! I also want to come back and see Salzburg too, since I don’t have the time/money for three trips to Austria this year.

click for:

Vienna Pictures

The Vienna adventure began on Thursday afternoon when about 100 students piled onto two cramped buses and departed for a 12 hour ride to Vienna. Getting from Florence to Vienna by bus means driving through over a third Italy and almost all of Austria, it was a long drive.

We arrived at the hostel in Vienna at 4am! We had to check in and all that before going to bed. I did not get very much sleep before I had to get up again at 9 to start the tour of Vienna. I took some pictures during the tour. Pictures are on Shutterfly. Sorry this post doesn’t have any with in, next time! The tour took us along the Ring of Vienna’s old town and we saw a lot of buildings from the Hapsburg era. The weather was pretty icky. It rained almost the whole time. Being a true Oregonian I refused to carry an umbrella.

The last place on our tour was St. Stephen’s Cathedral. Only a few of us decided to continue on to the amusement park at Prater. We rode this really awesome Ferris Wheel. The Ferris Wheel was built in the 1890s, survived WWI, but was destroyed during WII. In 1947 it was completely rebuilt exactly the same. Riding it was really cool. It was a lot different than a normal Ferris Wheel, you ride inside like a train box car thing, so you aren’t outside. (I took pictures, go look at them!!)

We continued around the rest of the amusement park, but we were basically the only people there so there weren’t a lot of rides open. We only found two others to ride. Go Karts and one called the “Extasy.” I rode the latter and it was so fun! One of the best rides I have been on, ever. We spun around completely upside down!

After the rides we eventually made it back to our hostel and I had time for a nap before heading to dinner. We had a group dinner with Austrian food. It was not as good as the food in Innsbruck. This was more like food from Poland on Opening Tour where everything is fried and/or pickled. But it was ok for one meal. The dinner took a really long time and we didn’t get back to the hostel until after 11, I was so tired, I just went right to bed!

Saturday morning I got up early and went on the tour with Peter to the Naschmarkt, it’s a food and flee market. It wasn’t as cool as it sounds, but I still enjoyed it. After the market people started splitting off in different directions to see what they wanted and get to the meeting place at 2pm for the Schonbrunn Palace with the big group. I decided to go to the Leopold Museum to see some Austrian artists. But first I stopped at Starbucks, and thank goodness too because it was starting to pour, a serious, the-world-is-ending-head-for-cover down pour! I knew at that the moment the Starbucks across the street was a gift from God. The Leopold was a really good museum, I was very happy with my choice. But there are so many museums in Vienna, it was hard to pick just one to go see. A lot of people went to the modern art museum and said it was very strange.

Met back up with the group to take the bus to the Schnonbrunn Palace, but when we got to the palace I decided it was too expensive and didn’t go inside. About the time some friends and I were getting to the metro station to go back into downtown, the storm started up again. Apparently there was a hurricane somewhere and really strong winds came to Vienna, or so I was told. But the storm actually uprooted some trees (there’s a picture of on my Shutterfly Vienna album).

That night I decided to head over to the Opera House and try to get a standing ticket for the night’s performance. The opera started at 8:15pm and standing tickets would be available starting at 7. I left the hostel at 5 because I wanted to buy a skirt since I didn’t have anything nice to wear. I found a cute and inexpensive skirt by 5:45 and I wanted some tights because it was freezing, but all the stores were closing at 6, so I didn’t get any. But it was ok. (I changed into the skirt in a metro bathroom. It was called the opera bathroom and it played this really weird music.) I got in line for standing tickets by about 6:40, so I guess I didn’t really have time to buy tights after all. The line started moving at 7, by 7:15 I got to the window, gave the man 2 euros and I had my ticket. Then I went to stand in another line on the stairs before we were allowed to the standing spots.

The standing tickets basically put you behind a rail behind the seats five balconies up on the far side, so you can’t really see anything at all. But it’s the Vienna Opera House for 2 flipping euro! It was worth the 2 euro just to be inside! The Opera House is breathtaking! And all the people were dressed up in tuxes and ball gowns (except the standing room people of course, though most did try).

That night was the premiere of “La Forza del Destino” an Italian opera. That does not mean I understood one word of the thing. Opera is hard enough to understand when it’s in English! Also, I ended up leaving at intermission because my feet were killing me from walking around all day and then standing for all the opera. Before getting on the metro to go back to the hostel, I went to Starbucks one more time (before the next time I go to a country with Starbucks). I changed back into my jeans too.

The next morning we got up and spend about 12 hours on a bus back to Florence. This time we drove through Austria in the daylight. Such a beautiful country! I just wanted to bust out some Sound of Music around those mountains!

This weekend I am kicking it in Florence. Next weekend: London. Then: Scotland for Easter. Then: Munich, Southern France, Finals, Mom and Dad, home! What a whirlwind!

As for school, I just had midterms about a week ago. I did okay on my tests. I have a finance test this Monday and its pretty complicated stuff (how to value capital and whatnot). I don’t really like finance that much. I mean accounting isn’t fun and games but I find so much more satisfying. Yes, I know I’m weird like that, that’s how I know I can be an accountant.

I have been scouring the internet looking for internships and jobs for this summer. Being abroad it’s really hard to find something because I am missing the on campus recruiters and almost any chance for a face-to-face interview so I have gotten the snub from several companies. So anyone know of any job I should try for this summer? One of my fellow accounting major friends told me to look for bookkeeping if I get really desperate. Dad wants to put me back in the factory (YUCK). You would think after three years of college I could something other than make parts packs for $9/hour!

Final Note:

Thank you Billy Joel; Vienna did wait for me.

(lyrics to "Vienna" are in the previous post, go read them!!)