live. move. be.

After the concert, we went back to campus to attend a Ceilidh. This is a traditional Scottish dance, much like contra dancing in America, done with male-female pairs. We had live music and a huge crowd of students all joining in on every new dance. It was marvelous fun, and we all had to laugh at ourselves as we attempted to quickly learn the steps (and often failed)!

I attended my first church service here today, and the denomonation was Free Church of Scotland. I'm still not sure exactly what the denomonation entails, but judging by the service, the worship is quite simple. There were no instruments, no hymns, no contemporary worship songs.....the congregations simply sings psalms that are rhymed and set to a tune by the Scottish Psalter. Though it's certainly not what I'm used to, it's a lovely service in it's own way. Since their voices are not supported or masked by instrumental accompaniment, the congregation has apparently learned to sing with a strong, beautiful, vibrant sound that I rarely hear in churches back home. Of course I believe that the use of instruments is absolutely biblical (and biblically encouraged), but I'm not necessarily opposed to the lack of them, either....and it doesn't seem to be a central theological tenant of the church itself, so I feel okay about it.

The service also involved a song in Swahili by a Kenyan fellowship that sometimes has their own separate worship services at the church. Their voices were so clear and powerful and resonant. I told their leader afterwards that their song made me want to dance (there was quite a lot of rhythmic swaying involved by the Kenyans themselves), and she told me that I should come to one of their services and just jump right in moving to the songs. I hope to take her up on the invite during my time here!

After the service, we were invited to lunch at a family's home, along with any other Scottish college students. It was great to finally get to talk to some Scottish people, and the hospitality was incredible....we were served an extravagant lunch, after which was dessert (rhubarb crisp and banana toffee cream pie) after which was two separate services of coffee & tea (it is the UK, after all) along with some delicious chocolates. We talked at length about the quality of UK chocolate compared to the States....well, there simply is no comparison. The very cheapest stuff you buy here (Galaxy and Dairy Milk brands, for those of you who have travelled here) is infinitely more delicious than a Hershey's or a Kit Kat.

The funniest part of the afternoon was that a couple of guys who had travelled to America this summer were absolutely enamoured with Krispy Kreme doughnuts.....but there isn't one in Scotland, so they were planning to make a six hour drive tonight to England to the closest Krispy Kreme for hot doughnuts. And a single doughnut here is about a pound, meaning close to two dollars!! I suddenly felt very proud and thankful to live five minutes from a Krispy Kreme at my American college. We also had a really hilarious conversation about Wal-Mart....they couldn't believe that they were able to buy guns and ammo at Wal-Mart in America, but not a single beer. In fact, the whole group of them was pretty stunned and dismayed when I tried to explain American gun laws (things like conceal-carry permits). Our hostess said, "Why on earth does Glasgow have such a dangerous reputation when you Americans can simply carry around guns wherever you like?!" I felt a little embarrassed, as I had clearly horrified them all without meaning to do so. There probably won't be too many people planning holidays to the States any time soon....

We stayed so long socializing that we ended up attending the church's evening service as well, and then we were invited to another large gathering of Scottish college students at the pastor's house, where we were also greeted with piles of cookies, strawberry spongecake, pizza, and chocolate dessert bars. How does one even begin to resist gluttony here, that's what I'd like to know....Anyway, it was a wonderful blessing to worship and fellowship with this new group of kind, welcoming people, and I look forward to doing it again in the future.

I am hiking to one of the Lochs tomorrow....yay for getting out of the city for a day!

While attending an international student meeting on Wednesday, my American flatmate and I were seated beside four Polish architecture students from Warsaw. We were thrilled when they invited us to their flat for dinner. After a trip to our local grocery store for supplies, we all piled into their small university kitchen, where their French roommate was already cooking a Scottish meat pie, complete with beef, peas, onions, and mysterious spices. I was quite impressed to see him rolling out handmade pastry dough in his checkered apron, looking like a seasoned Parisian chef (it put the Americans to culinary shame, considering that we have barely touched a frying pan since arrival, much less a rolling pen and flour ). The Polish students proceeded to cook some delicious carbonara pasta with lots of bacon, and we rounded out the meal by making Greek salad and setting out a plate of tiramisu truffles. It was truly more food than a human being should consume in one sitting, but so incredibly delicious.

Considering that our hosts were European, it was assumed that bottles of wine must be bought with the meal. As we ate, my flatmate and I attempted to explain why it's not always customary for Americans to drink alcohol with every meal (after they questioned us about it).The concept seemed pretty strange to our international friends. When they asked us why it was not as common as in Europe, we listed a few reasons, including the fact that some people consider it a moral issue. “Moral?” the French student exclaimed in disbelief. “In France you are considered an immoral person if you do not drink!” We all got a pretty big laugh out of that.

Yesterday, my flatmate Kelsey and I walked past the Glasgow Cathedral and up the hill to the Necropolis, a enormous graveyard filled with gigantic monuments, tombs, and gravestones. Combined with the whipping wind and dark, cloudy sky, it made an eerily beautiful scene, and gave us a good vantage point from which to look out over the city.

This weekend is the Merchant City Festival---Merchant City is the district about a block from where I live. I walked down there this morning to find a French and an Italian market, set up in booths along the streets. There were really interesting booths....filled with handmade soap, cookies (or “biscuits” as they are called here), candy, crepes, sausage, cheese, and a booth entirely devoted to different varieties of olives. On one of the streets with less classy, “unofficial” vendors, there was a booth selling really poorly-made Native American crafts like windcatchers and feathered headdresses. It struck me as really hilarious to see in the middle of Scotland, particularly since the booth's Scottish manager was wearing a large, gaudy headdress himself.

I also met my first actual Scottish friend last night, an incredibly friendly gal from the Isle of Skye who is going to take me to visit her church this Sunday. I'm really excited about finally knowing a real Scot and beginning a search for a good church community here in Glasgow.

And tonight, I finally a catching my breath a bit. I've gone out with people every night since I arrived and it's beginning to wear me a bit thin. Though the fluorescent lights in my room are pretty dismal, it feels good to just be resting and be alone for a brief moment in the midst of a hectic, social week.

I know the last post was somewhat depressing, so let me give you a more cheery update. Life here has gotten dramatically better every day. Still not easy, but so much better than that tough first day. I've discovered that you really have to make things happen in so many different ways.....make yourself explore the city and be okay getting lost, make yourself bold in finding friends, make yourself assertive and resilient to navigate the insane university bureaucracy.

As for friends, I have met so many people simply by being an international student. I don't have a single Scottish friend yet, but I have been going out the past three nights with large mobs of people from Germany, France, Poland, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, Finland, Russia, Slovakia, and India. We are all so different, but we immediately banded together through our shared feelings of foreignness and confusion. On second night here I went out with fifteen people, and I was the only American....which was pretty exciting! By last night, I helped to start a crowd of around 40 international students, walking in a massive clump down the streets of Glasgow. We didn't know where we were headed, but people were willing to follow us! At the moment we all spend most of our time talking about the differences between our various cultures in terms of language, food, educational systems, and common customs. Most sentances begin with, "Well, in America we do this..." or "That expression in French means..." or "Where I come from in Germany...." I think we're all quite excited to represent our different parts of the world to each other.

Now, the not so good news.....my living quarters. I am affectionately refering to my dorm as "the Scottish gulag." I wish I knew how to describe it, but the best I can say is that it looks like a mental hospital decorated in 1980's Florida. Six people live in a flat together, sharing one toilet, one shower, and one tiny kitchen. Our shower is approximately the size of your body, so you can't ever turn around once you get in (but you can look up at the dirt and mold growing directly above your head). We have garrish aqua colored walls and harsh florescent lights in our rooms.

The very best part is when you are trying to sleep. Let me give you a rundown of a typical night thus far (this was Monday evening):
12:00-1:00 AM-- loud, raccous, inscesent screaming across campus. A loudspeaker is set up by some kids in the courtyard between the dorms, and various American radio tunes are loudly sung by a crowd outside my window.
2:00 AM-- a mob of drunken Scottish students starts ringing the buzzer outside for our flat.....it sounds like a blaring fire alarm for five minutes straight. They finally get let in and storm the dorm, crowding the stairways and yelling outside our doors at the top of their lungs until they are finally persuaded to leave.
2:30 AM--the sound of beer bottles being thrown against my building. more inscesent screaming.
3:00 AM--BAGPIPES. I am not joking. A band of bagpipers, marching across campus at three in the morning.
4:00 AM--BAGPIPE ENCORE. This is where I was tempted to curse the Scots.

Needless to say, I am slightly sleep deprived.

I finally have internet, and so I'm going to post this, which is what I wrote on my first night in Glasgow. I should note that things are much better now, a few days later, but this is my honest first impression:
*..............................................*
I don't know quite how to begin this except to say that I have a lot to say. Well, first off, I am in Glasgow, at my university, semi-moved into my dorm room. The good news is that I am safe and all my luggage made it here safely.

Today has been rough, though (I am writing on Saturday night, but since I don't have Internet yet i know it will be posted later). It's been a day of so many tears --mostly tears I didn't even expect.. I cried after I said goodbye to Joanna at 7:30 at the Prague airport. I cried from exhaustion after lugging my many bags through the airport, all over the Strathclyde campus, and up several flights of stairs to my room. But most of my tears have been of a different kind....perhaps its the cumulative effect of leaving friends and not knowing my way around the city/school, but right now, I feel absurdly and deeply sad. I know I should be happy and excited for a new place and a new adventure, but I just feel lonely and isolated. I know I stand out like a sore thumb and it makes me more self-conscious than I have been in a long, long time. I feel oddly homesick, and I've never been homesick....I struggled to keep my voice from breaking as I called my parents to let them know I was safe. There is a new sense of aloneness that I have not felt before, and I am praying to push through it quickly.

After discovering that my room and kitchen were completely empty (no sheets to sleep on, nothing to cook/eat with, etc.) I wondered around the city for two hours looking for supermarkets and cheap stores to find enough supplies to get through the next couple of days, then trudged back to campus laden with many bags. I felt stupid in so many stores as I had trouble communicating with some of the Scottish employees. I was continually repeating to myself, “We are speaking the same language.” In a way, that sense of sameness makes it all the more frustrating. I was in a store asking an employee for dish soap, and he made me repeat it three times before he finally said he couldn't understand what I was talking about. Then I resorted to hand motions as I described it, filled with embarrassment I felt myself looking like a condescending American jerk. He finally said, “Oh, you mean washing-up liquid? We don't carry that.” (sure enough, it is actually labeled as "Washing-Up Liquid")

It's mostly freshmen who live on campus, so there are all these kids who look to be my youngest brother's age walking around being big shots with alcohol and cigarettes in their hands, being loud and crazy outside my window. I knew I was in a different culture the minute my bus pulled up and there, surrounding the residence check-in, were tables filled with students drinking pints of beer. Upon arrival, we were all encouraged to pretty much stay roaring drunk for the rest of the week—not by just anyone, mind you, but primarily by what seems to be the student government. There are university guides in our dorm rooms that extol the virtues of the student union as the best place to have great nights you'll never remember. As college experience goes, this atmosphere is certainly a new one for me, to say the least.

I hope that soon all this will seem like a funny “first day in Glasgow story.” Right now the whole day feels so heavy on my heart. I keep having to remind myself that my first day in Prague last year felt really overwhelming, too, and now I would give my right arm to instantly be back there. Things will get so much better, I truly believe they will.

Here's some bright points:
1)I am in Scotland and I am grateful to be here, much as I sound frustrated and whiny.

2)I am living with five other people in our suite style dorm (they call it a flat so I suppose I should begin calling it that too). I have yet to meet a couple of them, but the two I have met are just great. They are both from China and extremely enthusiastic about everything, especially the fact that I am an American. They have been so sweet to me tonight. They offered me some of their dinner, which was rice with stirfried eggs, mushrooms, and some sort of asian greens. They promised to teach me some Chinese recipies and showed me the asian market on my map. I am really excited to hopefully learn more about their culture this semester.

3)Just as I considered hiding in my room and never coming out, I decided to go into our little living room to type this and turned on the TV. We only get five channels, but lo and behold, one of them just happened to be playing Lord of the Rings. This might seem like a small thing, but that movie means a great deal to me and is the source of so many meaningful memories with my friends. The seemingly trivial of activity of watching this movie is reminding me that the world has not changed simply because I feel so small and strange in it right now. My friends and family are the same, God is the same, and I am loved just as much as I was the day before. This movie is a small grace that is bringing me great joy on a rough night.

One of the best things about Prague is THE FOOD. Not really Czech food per say (though some of that is good too), but rather, my friend Joanna's cooking. Totally worth a plane ticket just to eat one of these meals. We've had black squid ink noodles with tomatoes and goat cheese, baked brie with brown sugar on top, molten lava cakes, Sicilian Chicken, sausage gravy & biscuits, chocolate chip pancakes, an Indian feast, pumpkin muffins, and a delicious chocolate birthday cake....the list goes on and on and it is all SO YUMMY

I have not been writing that much this week, because there is SO much to enjoy in this city. I've spent a lot of time wondering around the city, going to cafes and such. I took an interesting walking tour a few days ago, and yesterday I went to the Franz Kafka museum for the first time (see the giant K to the left?). More than anything, I am spending most of my time with the Stewarts, the wonderful missionary family that I worked with last summer. They are truly kindred spirits, and I am so thankful for this time of sweet fellowship with them. I am also totally in love with their sweet sons Sasha and Izaak, who keep me continually entertained.

Today is my birthday (finally 21!) I was worried that I might feel lonely or sad to be celebrating without my family or friends in the States, but I feel so wonderfully happy and at home here. It feels absolutely magical to have my birthday in such a breathtaking city, and I know it's one I will always remember. I am VERY excited about an Indian birthday dinner and rich chocolate cake tonight!

A few firsts for my trip here: I went to my first spin class in the city with one of my Czech friends, and nearly died...cardio exercise is just not my thing. If you've never been to a spin class, it's essentially a room filled with stationary bikes, with an instructor yelling directions at you to peddle faster or in a higher gear....for a straight hour. The room was semi-dark with black-glow-lighting, and our instructor yelled all his prompts in Czech. It was quite the experience, and my leg muscles are still burning.

I am also knitting my first fancy hat (with pearl stitches and cables and four needles and all that exciting stuff) thanks to my friend Joanna's extensive knitting skills. I have botched it up more times than I can count, but it's so much fun to watch it steadily grow ( it is much larger than when this picture was taken). I have good motivation to finish it too, since I can't take the needles with me!

I am having a truly wonderful time (to be honest, it's hard to think about moving on in a few days). On my first day back here, I sat on the edge of the Charles Bridge as the sun sank in the sky, listening to a jazz band play on the bridge and looking out over the Vltava River. Even with streams of tourists pouring past me, it felt so peaceful. I could have stayed there forever.

Here are a few more pictures:

some random glimpses. click on any to enlarge.

PRAGUE. It feels like family and home and beauty and everything wonderful. My heart nearly leaped out when I woke up this morning and realized it wasn't a dream. I literally almost cried when we flew in and I could see all the red rooftops, and when my little friend Sasha gave me a huge snuggle and even remembered my name. This morning, he has been using his magic flute to call all his sabertooth tiger friends....we are having a good, good time!

Spent quite an eventful day in London. I landed at 6:20 London-time yesterday morning (meaning it was about 1:20 back home, meaning CRAZY jetlag). Thankfully for most of the day my excitement outweighed my tiredness, and I was able to enjoy myself (guzzling the coffee served with breakfast on the plane helped,too). By about 3:30 in Westminster Abbey, I started having to drag myself along and pinch myself to keep going. I checked into my hostel around 5:30 and met a girl from Chicago, so we went out to dinner together and hung out for the rest of the night together in the hostel, so we were able to keep each other awake until about 11:00 for the sake of syncing ourselves with UK time.

Finally....I'm packed! I expect major back problems after this trip due to the weight of my luggage.

I'm flying out of Greensboro tomorrow, through Chicago, and on to London. I'll spend a day and a half in London, then fly to Prague for a little over a week, then finally to Glasgow for the semester. I feel dizzy just writing it all.

I am equally excited, nervous, and sleepy right now. And I would greatly appreciate your prayers for safe travels!