Europe

  • My Family Visits Edinburgh (Christmas and Hogmanay)

    January 7, 2019 /

    Long before I actually arrived in Scotland, my family planned to come and visit me. Along with them came a family friend, Kim! It was decided that they would come for Christmas and New Years, or Hogmanay, as it is called here. Not only is this so that they can see Scotland, but because Edinburgh is one of the worlds Festival capitals, and it is known for having a great New Years Eve party. The family landed on Dec 24th. We spent that day, Christmas, and the next day relaxing and exploring the city. I took them up Arthur’s seat (ofc), to a classic Christmas lunch (this took 20 hrs),…

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  • Milan. Where Wine Pairs Nicely with Great Friends.

    December 4, 2018 /

    This past weekend I went to Milan with Eleanor and Alessandra. Both are freshmen at Edinburgh from the states. Additionally, Alessandra has family in Italy, and she speaks a little bit of Italian, so this trip was for her. The trip was from Saturday-Monday afternoon, and honestly, everything went super well. Actually even better than expected, with us seeing more sites than we planned on seeing, and people going out of their way to help us. It was also more organized than some of my other trips because we had created a google doc that we had been editing for the past 6 weeks which had all the places in…

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  • Edinburgh’s Samhuinn Fire Festival

    November 5, 2018 /

    For Halloween in Scotland, instead of trick-or-treating, we went to the Samhuinn fire festival! The Samhuinn Fire Festival is celebrated here twice a year, once at the beginning of summer and again at the beginning of winter. This festival marked the beginning of winter. It was one giant show where there was a “winter” army and a “summer” army. Since this marked the beginning of winter, the winter army “won” the battle of the night. Overall it was just super cool. There was a lot of fire spinning and throwing and I have some really cool videos of the night. On a side note, sometimes we could not see the…

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  • The Isle of Skye – Edinburgh Bus Tour

    October 9, 2018 /

    For those who do not know, Isle of Skye is an island on the northwestern part of Scotland, voted as the 4th prettiest island in the world by National Geographic. So of course my roommate and I, plus two of our new friends, all signed up for the International and Exchange Student Trip to the Isle of Skye. Starting off the Trip We hopped on a bus Saturday morning and headed there (it is a 5 hr non-stop drive from Edinburgh to the Isle of Skye). However, along the way we made multiple stops at places such as Loch Lomond, Loch Tulla, Glencoe (some of these are similar to my…

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