Cheers!

I’m in Edinburgh! My first flight started off very well because I was seated next to an Italian woman, Maria, who speaks four languages. We chatted in Spanish for over two hours about traveling, culture and languages. The downside of the flight was that it was 10 hours and I couldn’t sleep at all and it was delayed causing us to almost miss our connection at Heathrow. Luckily, we are a group of about 45 people, so they held the plane for us. Prof. Kilstrom told us to look on the “bright side” when we found out that our luggage wasn’t on our last flight, because then we wouldn’t have to load in on the coach and someone would deliver it to us… but… it didn’t come all day… it actually didn’t come until the next morning at 10am. We all just slept in our clothes and learned how to deal without some basic things and we survived believe it or not!

Yesterday and today have been free days to wander around the city in the rain- Scotland is not exactly experiencing the same drought we are back home. The center of Edinburgh is quite picturesque with old buildings (the “new” part of town was built in the 1800’s) and pubs everywhere. The Fringe Festival is going on right now, so the streets are teeming with street performers and artists. The city doubles in size during the festival which means that there are one million people here right now. The Fringe Festival is so huge that there are 376 venues throughout the city with 10-30 performances per day of different productions. That’s a lot of theatre, comedy, music, dance, physical theatre and so on.

I’m continuing this blog a day later… now it’s Thursday in Scotland.

I’m enjoying seeing the name Robertson around town. I took a picture next to an alley named “Robertson’s Close” and also next to a bar by the name of Robertson. Last night we went to Plague! The Musical by Bubonic Productions. It was really well done with some talented actors and singers whose spit we could see and almost feel from our second row seats. It was almost two hours long and it started at 9:30pm… we were pretty tired by the end since we are still getting used to the time change. Yesterday we took full advantage of the bus system with our day pass for 2.5 pounds. Bus route 33 goes from near the University of Edinburgh to the center and is complete with double-decker buses.

We had our first classes this morning and were reminded, to our disappointment, that this trip is for school and we don’t get to play all day everyday… only some days. Now we are heading off to the center to get lunch and see about more productions in the Fringe.