The Second week was predominantly ruled by the weekend. For the weekend we went to Edinburgh, it was quite a bit of fun. In Scotland I climbed a volcano and saw 2 castles, one at Edinburgh and the other at Sterling. The volcano was actually an accident, I had intended to climb it at the break of dawn to see the sunrise from the top but, a friend and I went to go climb a little to see possibly how long it would take to get to the top. When we get there we asked around and found that for us it shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes, we decided it would be best to still attempt to climb a little and see how difficult it is as a climb. We started hiking up this path of stairs which is quite easy and we began to wonder why everyone told us it was a very difficult climb, we reached this fork in the path right was a little valley that you pull yourself up through and then on the left was a lot of pulling yourself up, but it looked easier. We began to go left and my friend continued to go unimpeded but I hit a wall in which I started freaking out because I’m afraid of heights and have no experience climbing so I went back down to the fork and chose the right option. I started freaking out again but with encouragement from my friend I push through it and got up over the valley it was a very easy hike up to the top from there. We made it all the way to the top stayed a couple of hours and met a really cool guy named Nigel, who showed us a very easy path down in the dark.

This first week has been interesting. I’d be lying if I said that I had any particular idea what this trip would be like, I had hopes and wishes of what the trip might be like but those hopes and wishes were a bit exuberant. The thought now after having been here a week that I once thought the trip could ever amount to my original hopes is truly ludicrous. The orientation people at my school called it culture shock but I have to say it wasn’t really the culture that shocked me, but more a disillusionment. I had thought that people wouldn’t be people and I wouldn’t be me. To the contrary of how morbid this sounds I’ve actually had quite a bit of fun, I just had to accept this for what it is and treat it as such. The First couple days of structured tours and then sightseeing around London with people I barely knew were great. The classes were interesting, (but they were still class) the field trips were the better parts. I also enjoyed the food quite a bit especially the experimenting with new foods. This trip is going to be focused quite a bit on me getting out of my ordinary and learning to relax. More recently in this week I had begun to think that I was being an obligatory tourist, going to places because people said that they were cool places not because I had any real interest in seeing them. I was beginning to get really frustrated about the trip because certain people were becoming tiresome and I really hadn’t had fun the last couple days with the trying to follow the groups seeing what everyone else wanted to see even though I really wasn’t all that interested. After one especially bad afternoon I was beginning to feel ready to go home but that night I had a lot of fun with friends, completely stepping out of who I generally am.