Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Friends and Fun Times in Scotland

Over the last week we have had two very good friends from home, Sophia Sansone and Ashley Sloan, staying with us at our flat in Edinburgh. Though it has been a little bit tight (our place is very small to start with and extremely small with four people occupying it!) we have had a great time showing them around and in general hanging out. Moreover, we have had several days of really decent weather, which has been awsome.

Over the weekend we made a day trip to St. Andrews, and blessed with a bit of genuine sunshine, we had a really nice time walking around town and enjoying all the old ruins.

Other notable activities were a visit to Edinburgh Castle, which is actually a massive complex of buildings, including a jail where prisoners of war from the American Revolution were kept, to an exhibition on the Arts and Crafts period of Scottish design, which included a lot of great works by women artists and was really really good, and a fantastic show at the National Gallery of nude portraits, which looked at issues of bodily representation in art. We also took a somewhat cheesy but very enjoyable tour of a section of old town Edinburgh, known as Mary Kings Close, which was made underground when the City chambers were built right on top of it in the 1700s. Much of the old streets and buildings were fairly well preserved, and along the tour we got to learn about the actual people who lived there at the time the streets were covered over.

Another major highlight was having dinner with our friend (and former high school teacher) Eden and her husband at our local pub this last Sunday. Sophia, who hadn't seen her since graduation, was totally thrilled. From what we know, if looks like she went into labor with her first child on tuesday, so Sophia was just in time to see her beforehand!

Sophia and Ashley have now left for London and Italy, respectively, though in August Ashley will be returning for a few days before shipping back to the United States. Till then, its life back to normal, and to work, work, work! However, if the weather permits, we are hoping to go on a long bike ride somewhere interesting.


Ashley and I peering over the ramparts at the Edinburgh castle














Ruins at St. Andrews.











A bagpiper on the Royal Mile

Friday, July 06, 2007

better late than never

Well then, it has been ages since we've made a post. Bad, naughty bloggers. Oh well. I'd like to say we have been incredibly busy, but preoccupied would probably be a better description. Since our last update, the following things have happened:

I got the position as a researcher for Amnesty International in Edinburgh. Over the course of the summer I will be working independantly on researching violence against women in Scotland, looking at the problems of forced marriage and honor killings in particular. The issue of domestic violence is both close to my heart and an area that I have already done some work, so I think this will end up being a great fit for me. I am also very excited to be part of the shift Amnesty is currently making toward looking at broader social problems as well as issues of political repression, torture, etc. I'm hoping that over the summer I can make some contacts within the organisation that might help line up a similar position for me down in London, where Amnesty has its biggest offices.

In addition to this, I have taken on a organising a fundraiser for our 2006 Marshall Class project. This year we are raising funds to provide a comprenhensive aid package to the village of Kerkera in Darfur. Working with a London-based NGO that is well established providing aid in Darfur, the idea is to provide everything the village needs to get back on its feet and become self-sustainable. My fundraiser is going to be a charity concert in Edinburgh hosting a variety of bands with all the proceeds going to Kerkera. It will be held sometime in September, and looks like it is going to come together pretty well. I have been lucky to be able to enlist several friends in the project, including several who are well acquainted with the music scene in Scotland and one who is an entertainment writer for a local paper.

The weather has been really, really bad in Scotland (really). For the last month we have had torrential downpours almost every single days, and temperature-wise we had never made it out of the lower sixties. So far, all we have on the forecast is more rain and this is not helping my disposition. The bad weather has seriously made a dent in our level of activity. We haven't been running in what seems like ages, and except for the trip we recently took (detailed below, of course) haven't done much bike riding at all. boo!

As always, I am working away on my dissertation and making good progress. I have had to repeatedly cut down the size and scope of the project in order to fit within the word limit (unlike my undergrad thesis, this one is limited to just 50 pages!), but it looks like I finally have got it trimmed to where it will work quite well. Unfortunately this has meant that I will only be covering the first four years of the Bush Administration (2001-2004) and will not be doing a comparison between Clinton and Bush. However, I still have a lot of interesting things to talk about. If you're interested, let me know and when it is done I will email you a copy.

For our first anniversary, Ryan and I made a small cycle tour of the borders area of Scotland, starting in Berwick upon Tweed, riding along the Tweed river toward the West, and then turning north and going over the Moorfoot Hills and into Edinburgh. The trip took us three days, and through lots of lovely old towns with charming row houses, historic Abbeys, several castle ruins, and a very old manor estate that is still functioning and occupied by a lord and lady! The scenery was absolutely beautiful, with a mixture of dramatic river valleys, hills, farmland and forests. We carried camping gear on our bikes and stopped along the way to rest at several campgrounds, where we met a number of other cyclists, including a large group of American teenagers who were going on a guided mega-ride from Scotland to Nice, averaging 75 miles a day! Most of the ride was along lightly used country roads and so for that part it was pretty relaxing. Also, for the most part we avoided any really bad steep hills. The only downside was the weather, which despite bouts of lovely sun, left us absolutely drenched every day of the ride! One day we got caught right underneath a massive thunder storm which was both exciting and pretty scary. We couldn't decide whether to stay on the bikes (after all they have rubber tires) or to get off (the frames are steel!). Thankfully we survived safe and sound and made it to our destination without getting hit by lightning (though there was a hit pretty darn close that made us duck). Thankfully we had just purchased new waterproof panniers and happened to stay at campgrounds with laundrettes so that we could dry our cycling clothes out! After the trip, we decided we needed a new waterproof tent and some better waterproof jackets (as ours were not up to the task of standing up to Scottish weather). Anyway, despite the weather we had a very good time and are definitely geared up to do more cycle touring.

Ryan has begun looking for work in London, and so far has applied for a couple of neat jobs in the area of recycling. We are feeling very hopeful that this time around he will be able to get a position that he really likes, and hopefully one that pays better! Please send him your best wishes and luck.

For my part, I have been working pretty regularly on researching the housing situation in London, with the hope that we can get something really nice lined up in advance to move at the beginning of September. Right now we are looking at moving to the areas of Camden, Islington, Stoke Newington, or somewhere in East London.

For the fourth of July we went to visit Eden (Graisbery) Blair and her husband David in Dunbar. They threw a pretty awsome flag themed barbecue and in a sort of Scottish miracle the weather was actually beautiful and sunny most of the time (it only rained once for about an hour). They had some other American friends visiting from the Bay area, and so it was a pretty genuine American event, with hot dogs, potato salad and even flag printed paper plates. Except for an incident where I went into automatic barbecue zombie mode and squirted ketchup all over my veggie sausage and put barbecue sauce (which is made from a tomato base) all over my veggies, resulting in a two-day migraine that I am just now getting over, a good time was had by all.

Next week we will be getting some visitors from home, on the 10th Sophia Sansone will be arriving, and then on the 12th we will have Ashley Sloan. We are sooooo excited to see them and will definitely have a great time. I'm sure there will be lots to post about it once they arrive.