St. Andrews, Fife

Most of the trips I’ve done have been organized by the International Students Centre at the university, which is run by other international students! These trips are great for the value (prices are often less than just one entry ticket into the tourist destination), hassle-free transportation, and plethora of international students for you to meet!

The next few posts play catch-up and highlight some photos from these trips.

St Andrews, Fife (map)
September 20, 2008

My first trip out of Edinburgh was a daytrip to St Andrews - home of golf, former ecclesiastical capital of Scotland, and a town famous for giving Prince William a university degree.

Our first stop was at the ruins of St Andrews Castle. Seeing the remains of what must have been a majestic building makes you wonder at what point people decided it's okay to stop taking care of it.






















Next up were the ruins of St Andrews Cathedral.





























Christophe, from Belgium also on exchange at Edinburgh, and I decided to climb up the very narrow 157 stairs up St Rule’s Tower. (Christophe has this photo on his blog, minus the crazy hair!)




















From this view, you can see the site of the castle ruin behind the tips of the spires.


























After a delicious lunch at a little sandwich shop, we wandered around town and past the Old Course. I decided that bringing two barely charged camera batteries would be the perfect way to not get many photos of the afternoon, but managed to snap this one of a fantastic street sign loaded with meaning...



















...and this one proving that people in St. Andrews really like St. Andrews! (That blob you can see way in the distance is the castle.)

The full album at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2169716&l=54c0c&id=90402206 has many more photos from this trip. Once again, they're on Facebook but you don't need to be a member of Facebook to see them!

And so it begins...

Hello there! Thanks for stumbling onto my little blog. This will be a way to keep track of my year studying at the University of Edinburgh and the (mis)adventures that come with it. The posts will not be pages of stories but more photo highlights (with links to various galleries) and little tidbits of information or thoughts.

I've named the blog siubhal (apparently pronounced "shu-al"), which is means "travel" or "journey" in Gaelic. I thought it fitting because this isn't only a physical journey of going to see new places and sights but also a mental and emotional journey of experiencing things that are foreign to me. By "foreign," I don't mean eating haggis or seeing lots of people in kilts (which actually isn't that common here since kilts are a highland thing and Edinburgh is in the lowlands). I use "foreign" in the sense that I've been forced to step out of my comfort zone. When I first decided to come to Scotland, lots of people (myself included) thought, "Scotland? Well, that won't be nearly as difficult/scary/unfamiliar as going to Ghana." In fact, it has been an equally, if not more, challenging adjustment here but for very different reasons. I don't want to get too deep on you here so I'll leave it at that for now.

I'll be making posts for each little trip and may throw in a random post here and there. There will be links to photo albums and many of these albums are on Facebook. You do not need to be signed in to view the albums and this is definitely not an endorsement asking you to join Facebook - it is simply a convenient place to post photos.

Map
I've put together a Google Map for all you visual learners and because I like maps. All of my trips and other points of interest in Edinburgh are (or will be) placemarked with little icons. Click the icon for more information and/or a link to a photo album (if there is one).

Email Updates
I've set up something similar to what I did for my Ghana blog so you can be notified when the blog is updated. To get an email when a new post is made, join the group at http://groups.google.com/group/siubhal. I think you can join the group no matter what email service you use (although I recommend gmail if you haven't tried it yet) but if you have any problems, please let me know.

Looking forward to sharing this year with you...

Evonne :)