bonny bonny scotland

I apologize once again for the absolute blogging fail on my part.  As you might guess, life has been a bit of a whirlwind.

But if you’ll rewind with me all the way back to Thursday, July 7 (!!!), adventures in Scotland await…

PKP (Pembroke-King’s Programme, aka my summer gig, if I haven’t mentioned that already) took all 340 (ish?) students to Edinburgh (pronounced ed-in-burr-oh as in burrow, not ed-in-burg as in burger), Scotland for our first weekend.  Of course, with that many people, we were divided into several different coaches.  We also had a short sightseeing stop along the way – it was arranged so that half of the group would stop at one location and the other half at another.  Then, on the way home, the groups would switch, thus allowing everyone to see both locations.

On the way up my coach stopped at Fountains Abbey, a ruined Cistercian monastery in Yorkshire.  The Abbey was founded in 1132 and lies adjacent to the beautiful Studley Royal Water Garden.

This will sound really strange/random, but I think I might have visited this place with my host family when I was in England with an exchange program in 2006.  Those arches just seemed really familiar.  I need to check my photo albums from that program and see if it’s the same place or not…

…Anyway.  It was a nice break from the confines of the coach, and a lovely place to visit in any case.

Not too long afterward, we crossed over into Scottish territory:

Scotland and England. We heart both places mucho.

Later, we finally arrived in Edinburgh.  We stayed in the dorms of a university (which makes sense – where else would they have fit all of us?).  We scrambled to the cafeteria to eat dinner.  Being Americans, we were quite excited for the all-you-can-eat buffet – we had to buy food a la carte at Cambridge.

The evening was ours, so a big group of us, lured by the beautiful green hills looming literally in the backyard, decided to hike up Arthur’s Seat at sunset.  Best. Decision. Ever.

From left to right: climbing up; at the tippy top; enjoying the view!

We wandered across the hills, sat and soaked in the scenery, and even recited some poetry.  Basically, we never wanted to leave.  But then it got dark.  And cold.  So we made our way down and back to the university and called it a night.  Needless to say, we were already in love with Scotland.