Gilbert and Sullivan

So, a friend of mine has joined the Gilbert and Sullivan society here and at dinner one night leaned over and asked me. "Can you sing alto?" To which I replied, "um, sure?" Kind of a random question for dinner conversation. Apparently, the G & S society is rather short on altos and since I didn't really have anything to do last night, I decided to tag along. Well, short on altos is a little bit of an understatement. There are about 15 sopranos, and about 3 altos. So, off I went to sing with the altos and sight-read my part (which is hard because I didn't really know the music and couldn't really hear the alto part because of all the sopranos). It was fun though, I really enjoyed myself and I think I was pretty much making up my own part (half way through the other two altos had to leave and so one of the girls who runs the society came to sing the alto part with me but she is normally a soprano and so didn't know all the parts either).

I had a good time, it was just really weird. This was my life back in high school when I spent all my time at community theater rehersals, music practices, singing lessons, musical theater competions... It's just been so long that I've been away from this that I felt like I was going back in time to when I was 16. I was in the foreign world that I once felt very comfortable in, but now feel like more of an outsider. The weird thing is that you get the same types of personalities that you would find anywhere in this sort of group. I was meeting people and after talking with them for a bit, would be able to connect them with someone I had once known in my own music days! But all in all, it was a good time and I really did enjoy myself.

So, I guess I know what I'll be doing on Tuesday night for the next little while...

No adventures this week

Well, another week done and unfortunately I haven't really done anything that exciting. School work is now in full swing and so I've been spending most of my time living in the Classics library reading. Definitely not something worth writing about. My next couple of weeks are going to be a little crazy since I have way too much work to do and not enough time to do it. However, I am looking forward to reading break. I'm hoping to go down to York for a couple days to meet up with some friends from CasHen as well as heading down to Manchester for a Classics postgrad conference. Should be a good time and I'm really looking forward to seeing some of the British countryside.

Sorry my life has become a little dull. I'm pretty much settled into my little routine and will just continue working away. The fall here is beautiful but the days are rapidly getting shorter (sun rise about 8ish, sun set about 6ish, and they get shorter by about 5 minutes every day). I can't believe I have been here for over a month. Time sure flies when you're having fun!

PS: You know there's nothing exciting to talk about when you start writing about the weather.

Fife Coastal Path

The reason why I haven't written anything this week is because I have actually been really busy doing readings and working on a paper. I didn't think that anyone really wanted to hear about all that so...

However, after doing all this work, I realized that I really needed to get away and do something fun this weekend, so a friend of mine and I decided to walk the Fife Coastal Path. We decided that, because I had to be home for a dinner party, we would just walk for about 4 or 5 hours, then turn around and come home. So off we went. It was suppose to be cloudy today but it turned out to be a spectacularly gorgeous day with the sun shining brightly and not a cloud in the sky. Absolutely amazing considering this is Scotland. Two other friends from my residence decided to join us for the first couple hours and we had a great time just wandering around the beaches outside of my town.

The trail itself is amazing. In many places you have a choice of walking around on the beach or on the path so we pretty much stayed to the beaches on the way there and on the path on the way back. On our way we found lots of cool shells, a variety of beaches (including rock beaches, shell beaches, sand beaches, and grass? beaches). Who knew that there would be such variety in the types of shore there would be in a fairly small geographical area.

There is one point where the trail goes inland and you end up walking around past farmer's fields. As we walked through the forest we came across this fantastic old building. Turns out it's an old water mill (according to my friend) and we had a great time exploring around it and other such great things. I just love it here and the fact that as you are travelling around the countryside you can just come across these incredible abandoned old buildings!

We finally reached the first sign of civilization at about 2:00 and decided that it was a good time to starting thinking about heading back. By this time we had walked about 7.5 miles (sorry guys but the signs are in miles here, I have no idea what that is in Kilometers). Heading back took less time since we pretty much stuck to the trail but at one point we saw a pretty cool looking cave just up the hill from the path and decided to take a look. Unfortunately, in between us and the cave was this great field full of a lovely plant called stinging nettle. Now, for all those Canadians out there that don't know what this lovely plant is, it's a plant that has these leaves that can sting you through your clothes. They give you this sort of tingly, itchy, sensation to whatever touches it. If it gets you through your clothes it only tingles for a hour or so, but if you touch it directly, your skin gets all red and itchy and can hurt for a couple of days (if you fall directly into a patch like I did when I was in Wales). Anyways, we decided we wouldn't let this stuff get in the way of our exploration and made our way up the slope only to find a fairly shallow cave that had been completely taken over by birds. Feathers and stuff everywhere. Actually quite gross and a little bit of a disappointment. And then we had to go back through the stinging nettle to get back to the path. However, I guess that's what adventures are all about!

Here's a picture of my friend looking not too pleased about these lovely plants with the cave in the background.

Adventures in the Scottish Countryside

A friend from the department and I decided to go on a bike adventure today. We were going to go to the Secret Bunker (where the Scottish parliament would have gone had there been full out Nuclear War during the Cold War) but after finding out that it would cost us over 6 pounds to get in we decided to go on a different adventure instead. There are all these "standing stones" throughout the British and Scottish countryside and so we decided to go visit one. I borrowed the bike of someone from my residence and off we went. It was great fun but since the borrowed bike belonged to someone slightly shorter than me, biking uphill was a little bit of a challenge.

We biked out on the "B road" because the "A road" is much busier and since people here drive like maniacs, we figured it would be safer. We found the turnoff and biked up this little random road through farms and such. It got to a point where the road got pretty sketchy so we decided it would be best to leave our bikes behind and just walk. Apparently we missed the "standing stone" because we ended up in this little wooded area with a bee farm.


After exploring a bit, we headed back to the road and wandered back to try and find this "standing stone". We finally found it, right smack dab in the middle of this farmer's field and so off we went, treking through this field to get to the stone. Very cool, and definitely strange because you would never be able to do anything like that in Canada. However, here in the UK, you can basically walk through anyone's property to get to an archaeological site.

I'm glad I was able to get out of the town today. I don't think we'll be able to go biking for much longer. The weather is starting to change and it's starting to get dark around 6:30-7. I guess I should really think about buying a bike in the spring so I can do more of this. There are so many neat places to go around here.

Haggis

One of my housemates and I were invited by another friend of ours to go down to the leisure centre yesterday to go swimming. It feels so great to get back into exercising. I do a ton of walking here but haven't been doing nearly enough physical exercise in the last two weeks. We had a great time, except for some random kids who thought it would be a good idea to jump off the side of the pool into the lanes. Needless to say, I was nearly jumped on three or four times since they weren't really looking at who was around them. Also, here they don't have separate change rooms. It's one big room with lockers and then little changing cubicals on the sides. Weird. That will definitely take some getting use to.

Last night, Pirates of the Carribean II was showing at the movie theater (the late night show) so I finally got to see it. The special effects were amazing but the story was kind of lame. A little disappointing actually. O well, I got to see the love of my life (Johnny Depp) so that's all that really matters.

After getting to bed by about 2, I figured it would be a great idea to get up this morning at 6:30 to go swimming again. It was definitely a better experience (no kids around) but I'm definitely not 100% today. I need my sleep. I think I may go to bed tonight right after dinner.

The best part of my day was lunch! We had Haggis! As long as you don't think about what it is (kind of the same as sausages and hotdogs) it's actually quite good. Kind of tastes like Tortiere or Meatloaf. So now I've had the complete scottish experience.

BBQs and Bonfires

Some americans in my residence decided to have a Southern style cookout yesterday. John (the one BBQing) has been to culinary school and so decided to treat us all to his fabulous cooking. It was amazing. He made ribs that were so tender they fell right off the bone, and chicken that was like nothing I have ever tasted. There ended up being about 50 of us there with so much food I think everyone thought they were going to explode. We ended up having a bunch of tourists come by (since our house is right by the ancient ruins, we always have tourists coming by) to see what we were up to. But all in all, it was an enjoyable time.

Today ended up being much more low key. I decided that since we live in such an amazing place, we should go down to the beach and have a bonfire. This was something I use to do a lot when I lived in Victoria and really missed it. So, off we went to the store to buy some wood (since they don't have any drift wood here) and went down the beach and roasted marshmallows and made smores. Ended up being a fantastic, relaxing night of just hanging out around the fire and watching the sun set and the moon rise. What a great way to end the weekend.

Oh, and I did some reading as well.