Monday, 4-8-96
7:55 PM En Route Back to London
1:55 PM E-Town
OKAY, WITHOUT FURTHER A DEW…
THE REST O’ SCOTLAND:
So Saturday morning (3-30-96) we went on this great, though very long, tour of Edinburgh! Our tour guide was a real character! He was very proud to be Scottish to say the least… 🙂 At one point, after saying anything important in our world was most likely made by someone Scottish…, he said something was actually done by an Englishman. He said, “He was from England, you may have heard of it… a little peninsula to the South of Scotland!” Our tour included more than we ever needed to know about Edinburgh, but we really enjoyed learning all the random fun facts along the way from the New Town, the Old town, the Castle, & down the Royal Mile to the Palace! Our guide even demonstrated w/ a straw how a reed works for bagpipes which was amusing! He blew through it as he cut it up w/ scissors!
Towards the end of our tour we met up w/ Mel who had been in Glasgow meeting some of her family. Mel had taken the train to meet us & a friend of hers from college who is studying in Glasgow joined her.
We planned to meet her at the Castle when it closed at 5 PM. After the tour we all decided to pretty much do our own things & meet at the Castle at 5 PM. Nick, Lori, & I chose to have a relaxing sit down lunch at the “Royal Mile Pub.” Though our waitress wasn’t the most competent server ever, our meals were enjoyable & after walking for 3 hrs. it was great to take a load off… I think I had a cheeseburger & chips.
It was also nice, as always, to chat w/ Nick & Lori who are such fun & great friends. We noticed the music at the pub to be sorta random & not completely fit w/ the atmosphere! Ironically or bizarrely this happened in many of the eating establishments we went to this weekend!
After lunch we met up w/ Mark from Pembridge who had taken the train up to meet up for the day & to stay till Sunday as well. He agreed to meet us at 5 PM at the Castle too. Note, I really enjoyed the time we spent w/ Mark, he was cool & didn’t seem like he was trying to impress anyone like he usually does! I even had some interesting convos with him.
Well, almost back to Victoria Coach Station from a lovely & wonderful Easter/Bank Holiday in Southampton w/ Ron Weasley & his silly/fun/sweet family! I will tell of that & attempt to finish the long winded account of Scotland ASAP!
CHEERS! 🙂
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Note from Present Day Kathy: So much about revisiting these journal entries is surreal for me and the synchronicity of this week lining up with when I wrote them 30 years ago adds to that. The end of this one cracks me up, as I am pretty sure I never finished telling about Scotland and didn’t even try after this entry! I did a quick skim through the rest of my second London Semester Journal and didn’t see any more references to Scotland. As I mentioned in my previous entry, time was really flying at this point and it was all I could do to try to keep up with more recent experiences. The further away I got from my friends and my awesome weekend road trip to Scotland, the lower it apparently became on my list of priorities to write about.
That said, I do have some photos that capture our time in Scotland (beyond what I recounted in my journal), which helps to jog my memory a bit. So, to the best of my ability, I will fill in some blanks along with sharing those photos.
Interestingly, the third photo I shared in this post shows me in front of Edinburgh Castle and my entry ticket. However, oddly, I didn’t mention going there directly in this journal entry and I don’t recall much of anything related to visiting. The ticket makes it seem like we might’ve gone there in the afternoon and/or referring to meeting (not here real name) Mel there at 5:00 p.m., makes me think we may have gone there after lunch? Hmmm… I know I have some random receipts and things somewhere from my time abroad that could have more clues. I suppose if/when I come across them again, if they yield more clues, I can update this post with additional information.
As I have mentioned in previous London Semester Journal entry posts and I know will come up again later, one of the many cool and bizarre experiences I had several times while studying abroad was running into friends from home who were also living and learning across the pond in Spring 1996! If I recall correctly, when we were checking in to High Street Hostel, where we stayed in Edinburgh, the first night or some other time when we were in the main area of the hostel coming or going, I noticed a familiar face. It was a friend from high school, who I had actually gone to a formal holiday dance with in December of 11th grade/our junior year! He was also studying abroad (I don’t recall where now, but I think it was in England). We invited him to come out with us that night, which he did! He is in the photo below with the koala sticker over his face, along with my friends and me.
In previous London Semester Journal posts I used smiley face emojis to cover people’s faces. However, recently when I was looking to do that again I initially couldn’t figure out how to do it, as I had before, and ended up trying these animal “stickers.” Then I kinda liked being able to choose different animal stickers over the same people’s faces when sharing more than one photo from the same time/experience with them.
The next photo captures what we witnessed in the streets of Edinburgh as we were packing up our rental car to leave/drive back to London (on Sunday, 3-31-96). It happened to be Palm Sunday, which felt meaningful and serendipitous for me — to see a procession of people with palms walking around nearby, especially as I didn’t prioritize trying to get to church/mass that day since we had a long return road trip ahead of us. I also Googled the sign in the second picture below, which reads “Paisley Close,” as I don’t recall why I took it. This is what I found. I wonder if our tour guide took us by it on Saturday and/or if there was an entry in one of our tourist guidebooks that mentioned it and I wanted to a get a closer look. It’s also possible I just thought it looked interesting.
The next photos include (not their real names) Nick, Ruth and Lori (clockwise after me) with our rental car, which as I previously shared we nicknamed the “Black Sheep,” before we hit the road back to London, along with a few snapshots of what an absolutely gorgeous day we had for our trip!
I vaguely recall that we stopped in a small town on our way home for a bite to eat and being such a beautiful day, hung out for bit, including by a body of water there (which Dr. Google tells me is/was the River Tweed). Thanks to the postcard (see below) I picked up back then, I gather it was called Berwick or Berwick-upon-Tweed. You can see from the photos how sunny it was and I love how relaxed, as well as happy, my friends and I appear. Though you can’t see the third photo below well, I love how Ruth, Lori, Nick and I ended up posing for it in such a cozy way. It has almost a Breakfast Club or another John Hughes movie vibe to me.
According to Wikipedia, where there is a lot more about the town of Berwick:
“Berwick-upon-Tweed (/ˈbɛrɪk/ BEH-rik), sometimes known as Berwick-on-Tweed or simply Berwick, is a town and civil parish in Northumberland, England, 2.5 mi (4 km) south of the Anglo-Scottish border, and the northernmost town in England. The 2011 United Kingdom census recorded Berwick’s population as 12,043.
The town is at the mouth of the River Tweed on the east coast, 56 mi (90 km) south east of Edinburgh, 65 mi (105 km) north of Newcastle upon Tyne, and 345 mi (555 km) north of London. Uniquely for England, the town is slightly further north than Denmark’s capital Copenhagen and the southern tip of Sweden, further east of the North Sea, which Berwick borders.”
For the next three photos, that I took of my friends in Berwick, I was channeling my ammetuer high school photography skills and took artsy/cool ones of each of my friends — Ruth sitting on the grass by the riverside, Lori dangling her feet over the river bank and Nick walking along the river.
Lastly, I am not exactly sure where the next three photos were taken. However, I vaguely recall that we stopped to see part of Hadrian’s Wall up close. The photos being overcast, it’s hard to tell forsure, but I think that is was at least the top one below is of. I also think the one of Lori and me is sweet. I apparently climbed into the tree and posed hugging her from behind. Revisiting these photos, though I don’t recall much about the details of that day/our road trip home from Scotland, it is still clear to me what a strong and authentic bond I had formed with my friends/housemates from Pembridge Gardens after three months spending lots of time together.
Interestingly, out of nowhere as I was typing this, a memory popped into my brain about there being a little notebook that I kept during my semester abroad where I tried to track the photos I took and matched them to numbered roles of film. On some level I knew it would help me make sense of them all later. I shared this tonight with Bob and the kids at dinner, which caused us to reflect on and discuss how different photography is now because of smartphones. Skylar and Gail cannot even fathom a world where you couldn’t take a ton of photos at once (not having to worry about using up film) and then see how they turned out immediately! Which reminds me that one of my college friends used to always encourage us to take two photos (with film) when doing a group shot, “in case someone blinked.”
I continue to be incredibly grateful for my London Semester Journals, as well as the many nostalgic photos I have from this very special time in my life 30 years ago. I am determined to wrap this one up and post it tonight, so it will happen on the same date as when I wrote it three decades later. What a gift to be able to do this. Writing begets writing and I am enjoying doing this again more often lately. I have so much love for 21 year old Kathy, as well as 51 year old me, and appreciate getting to see how far I have come since April 8, 1996.
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Reminder: Unless I’ve been given permission to use people’s actual names, in most cases I’ve removed or replaced the names of the real people who were part of my journey/experience there, in effort to protect and respect their identities/privacy in my London Semester Journal entries. I will also not share details that I think and feel are too personal for anyone I interacted with, my loved ones, and me.
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Here’s the back story of My London Semester Journals from 1996, including what prompted me to revisit and decide to share them here in 2018. And here’s a list a list of the entries, which I will update as I share them.
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