So the semester is over and now it's thesis time until August. Well...sorta over. Our reading groups are going to continue intermittently throughout most of May and we still have a class trip to the Glasgow special collections library in a couple weeks.
April was super busy with assignments and final assessments, but I did manage to squeeze in a lot of fun stuff.
Recap.
So after the canoeing we had our last big band cooler (26 March) which was in the middle of an exam week for Dundee University. Understandably we had a much smaller crowd, but still managed to pull close to 200 people in for a bit of swing dancing.
That weekend I went hillwalking on a couple Munroes (Mayar and Driesh) with some friends from Big Band which was awesome. We had every kind of weather on that short (6 hour) walk, from sunshine to blizzard and everything in between. There were some snowy patches on the tops of the Munroes that you could skate down which was really fun. I even built a mini Inukshuk over a pool of water in a rock on the summit of Driesh.
We went back to classes the next day and I spent that week writing an essay and playing the most dangerous April Fool's Day prank of all time. I hid our only tea kettle from my English roommates. I barely survived that encounter. On Easter weekend my flatmates and I took a break from papers to explore Dundee a little more and found a nice park down by the river Tay.
And the rest of the time until the end of April was spent frantically completing assignments and finals. Including my last online article of the year, a drastic shift in focus from medieval studies to Soviet-era Ukraine and the systematic persecution of
Ukrainian Kobzari (The website unfortunately can't format cyrillic properly so the spacing is all messed up in the Ukrainian quotations). It wasn't all bad because, since I was comparing documented history and collective memory, I got to watch a movie for research :)
And just this past weekend I went down to Glasgow to visit my friend who is going to school there. In addition to touring Glasgow, we also explored Balloch (on Loch Lomond), Edinburgh, and Falkirk.
Photos.
(There are a lot of them)
The Cooler (Round 2)
 |
| Look at that expertly synchronised hand-muting! |
Mayar and Driesh
What do you get when you stuff a Czech, a Slovak, an Italian, a German, and a Canadian into one tiny Yaris?
Well for starters, very little leg room. But mostly just a whole lot of fun!
 |
| Jo doing yoga on a boulder |
 |
| A look at the ascent |
 |
| Us guys took a steeper detour to check out the waterfall |
 |
| You gotta sprint ahead for those dramatic angles |
 |
| Pitr tries to make a snow angel in ice |
 |
| Looking back toward the valley |
 |
| What looked like the summit was actually about 800m of a false crest on a very steep incline. |
 |
| Actually at the top |
 |
| My little Inukshuk |
Glasgow Weekend
On the streets of Glasgow, the Necropolis, and the People's Palace
 |
| Does anyone knows what kind of tree this is? It blooms before it buds like a magnolia and the clours are similar, but the flowers don't really look or smell like a magnolia |
 |
| They were filming something on the right there where these people kept dying dramatically. It was pretty funny to watch. |
Balloch (on the shores of Loch Lomond) and the House of Darrach teahouse
Edinburgh: the National Museum and the Botanical Gardens
 |
| St Andrew with an early map of the town of St Andrews in the background |
 |
| Crazy puzzle box chest with 18 secret keyholes on the top |
 |
| Curling |
Falkirk: The Kelpies and the Falkirk Wheel
