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| See. Just look how much fun everyone's having! |
I've been back in school for 1 month now and most of that has been spent adjusting to new classes. This semester I'm doing mostly the same courses as last semester, except for my directed reading, which is now Old Norse instead (I go 3 times a week now which is 5 hours of actual Old Norse and 4 hours of travel time—at least I can read on the bus). Our core class has switched focus from the Nibelungenlied to the cult of Mary, which in theory would be really interesting but because every prof except for 2 this semester are focusing on the cult of Mary in England, it's actually kind of boring. Latin and Palaeography are about the same.
Last week was my first real fully-settled-in week and it was pretty awesome. Monday was class as normal. I didn't go to the weekly mediaeval history seminar, and instead came home and finished over half my reading for the week.
Tuesday our core class went to Edinburgh to look at books of hours which was really cool and interesting. The library and its special collections are really impressive. We also got free lunch at some fancy sandwich place, which I certainly appreciated, but if your sandwich is on a single piece of bread, and made of exotic ingredients piled so high you can't even fold it to eat it like a sandwich, maybe your restaurant is a little too fancy. On our way back down from the special collections, a few of us decided to take the stairs rather than wait for the elevator and an American classmate and myself were temporarily lost before recalling that the ground floor is not the 1st floor in this country :p On the bus trip back to St Andrews, our prof invited us all to a Spring barbeque later in the year at her house, so we're all looking forward to that.
When we got back to Dundee I was taught how to celebrate Shrove Tuesday the English way. What a fortunate life I've lived in Canada with my pancake-loving parents. Back home we always had pancakes (and or other breakfast food) for supper. Here, you only have pancakes after supper :(
Also, their pancakes are like smaller, thicker crepes. My flatmates decided they'd prepare my first pancake in the traditional English way: lemon juice, sugar, and popcorn. I was half finished the pancake before they couldn't hold back from laughing anymore and revealed that the addition of popcorn was actually a joke. Well, joke's on them, because I actually really liked it.
On Wednesday I took a walk partway down the Fife Coastal path from St Andrews (sadly I didn't have my camera, as I went straight after Old Norse). I saw some pretty sweet rock formations, some nice temporary beaches with all sorts of odd stuff left ashore when the tide retreated, and I built a pretty sweet inukshuk on what I thought was a rock above the high-water-mark (nope. Missed it by nearly 5 metres—that tide is huge!) sadly, Nanook of the Scottish North is no longer with us.
Thursday, Friday, and Saturday were pretty low key, I spent them finishing up my readings and working on Old Norse and Latin. I also wrote my first article of the semester for the Historical Journal, so that'll be coming out in a few weeks.
Sunday I went into St Andrews for the first meeting of Team 1 of the canoe Scotland trip I'll be doing March 15-18. It's a 3-day trip down the Caledonian Canal in open ('Canadian' canoes, none of that kayak nonsense).
This week's classes were pretty average. The Monday mediaeval seminar was a really interesting take on line-by-line translations of some medieval Byzantine texts which proved really convincingly that this particular text was reproduced specifically for an imperial audience (ie that of the emperor or those he kept company with).
My reading load is pretty heavy this week, and we have our first Latin assignment of the semester, so I don't think I'll get up to too much other than homework. In my spare time I'm trying to learn the board game 'Go', so I'll probably do that with my free time.
I have no new pics other than a few taken when my dad was visiting and we went to Edinburgh, so I've included a few of those below.
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