Address to a Haggis and Other Burns Festivities

On January 25, Scotland (along with Scots and Scots-loving people around the world) celebrates its most-loved poet, Robert Burns. Burns was a pretty important guy, preserving Scottish culture at a time when British rulers were outlawing many traditions. It’s thanks to Burns that many of my favourite folk tunes are still being played in Edinburgh’s pubs! So last night we rounded up a group of international folk to toast Burns and celebrate him through food, drink, song and lots of tartan!

I have to start off by saying that this year was a grand departure from Burns Nights of my past. My last year living in Scotland, the occasion somehow passed me by (to my great shame and disappointment). Last year, I dragged a bunch of my Californian friends – and thankfully one fellow Edinburgh alum – to Oakland’s tiny Commonwealth Pub and bullied them into eating haggis with me in a vague approximation of the real thing. I think I managed a few lines of the Address to a Haggis before their mortification shut me up, but they were good sports! 

This year, the party was organized by a Scottish friend who, as she said last night, “grew up on Burns.” We talked about his womanizing, his love of nature, and his politics. We toasted with whisky and had a spectacular time. Poems were read and songs were sung, haggis was eaten. Still, one of the best traditions of the night is the Toast to the Lassies and the ensuing Reply.

The basic premise is that one of the men in the group toasts the lassies, letting us know some of his views on the women present. There were plenty of jokes and our resident actor delivered the toast so of course it was very enthusiastic. Our hostess did the reply, enlightening us all on what makes a Scottish man – some great laughs and photos came out of this one as we of course had to wonder what the laddies were wearing under their kilts!

All in all, I continue to be struck by how lucky I am to have so many great and talented friends in my life. Between the cooking, poetry recitals, singing and photography (not to mention the laughs), the people are really what made the evening special. 

Thanksgiving in Budapest

Thanksgiving is one of my favourite holidays (right behind Christmas), and not just because my family has often been known to celebrate it twice in a year. Especially since I went to college, Thanksgiving has been a wonderful 5 day reprieve from end-of-semester stresses, a brief cheer-up with my family before tackling the last few big academic things of the year.

This is the second year I haven’t spent Thanksgiving with my family, and it is still hard. Thanksgiving weekend is when my mum and I get to spend whole days working together in our tiny kitchen, chatting over half-finished stuffing and pie. It’s when my brother breaks out some of his secret culinary skills and his weird “I don’t need to cut my food” skills. In the days after turkey, we put up our Christmas tree and spend hours in the garage untangling decades-old lights that only half work. It is always good.

But, living on another continent makes going home for Thanksgiving a pretty impossible thing. So instead, I headed out to Hungary to visit my friend and long-time roommate Emily. And I have to say that although it was not my typical Thanksgiving weekend, it was pretty great. I got to spend time with one of my favourite ladies on the planet, doing all the ridiculous things we love to do and even some sightseeing. We baked pumpkin cookies in a nod to the traditional holiday food and then bucked tradition by spending the rest of the weekend eating salami, goose pate, and matzo ball soup. We drank delicious $1 wine – I know you’re sceptical but I swear it’s true!

Although it wasn’t in the usual way, all my usual Thanksgiving expectations were fulfilled. Obviously there was delicious food. There was great company – someone who knows me inside out and with whom there is a pattern to life. And boy, was there relaxation! Not only did Emily and I sleep in every day of my five-day stay, but we spent a whole day visiting one of the city’s famous bath houses as an early birthday treat for me. We even braved the freezing trek to the outside pools so that we could watch the sunset. At the end of the day, Thanksgiving is all about appreciating what you’ve got in life, and I think my trip to Budapest was a good reminder of this. I’m so lucky to have a great friend like Emily, and the opportunities for us to keep visiting now that we don’t live within steps of one another. I’m also very lucky that she is so thoughtful. And I’m lucky to have wonderful people in my life all over the world, from my family in Nevada sending me pictures of their Thanksgiving turkey to my new uni friends who are fun and have pulled me out of my introverted shell. I have so much to be thankful for, and I hope I never lose sight of how lucky I really am.

 

End-of-Semester Escapism

Things are starting to wind down here in Edinburgh as my last few lectures of the term are tomorrow and next week. Of course, the fact that lectures are finishing only means devoting myself full time to essay writing for the next few weeks, and although I love my course the idea of 10,500 words to be written (thankfully across 3 papers!) is not appealing. This is where the escapism comes in, because my personal coping strategy is a terrible one is a lot of daydreaming and pretending the overwhelming responsibility of writing doesn’t need to be fulfilled until the last possible moment.

So instead, I’ve been thinking a lot about other places I would like to be – places where essays are not looming over my head. This has brought a lot of smiles to my face, as usual, so I thought maybe I’d share some of the things that have been on my mind lately.

One of the places I would most love to be is in Oakland, enjoying the mild weather and the still-green trees! Even better, I would love to be back in the Bay Area summertime, since last spring and early summer are the setting for some really great memories. There’s not much that beats lying on the front lawn in the sunshine and drinking wine with friends, or celebrating a best friend’s birthday together after months apart by making your own lemonade and wandering around snacking on samples from the Lake Merritt farmer’s market. I miss the smell of wisteria and eucalyptus that was always present in my Mills life.

I’ve also been thinking about Denver and the first couple of weeks I was there, when my brother was coming over to cook dinner with me or taking me out for pho. Although the summer was hot and I spent a lot of it trying to get the most out of my office air conditioner, it was also quiet and calm, with lots of swimming and walking and just enjoying a new city. Plus, time to hang out with my brother is always one of my favourite things.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about my parents’ house in the mountains, where I am always happy to be (even that time when Mum and I arrived home in the middle of the night to find that the thermostat had broken and we had to round up all the blankets and sweatshirts in the house to avoid freezing). I’m daydreaming of sitting on the window seat with a novel, or sitting on the deck chatting with my dad. There are always lots of home-baked goodies in the kitchen in these daydreams.

Edinburgh is still one of my very favourite places to be, even if I’m not out enjoying the city much these days. I have lots of great memories here, too. And I’m lucky to have a whole lot of really great people filling up my life! Essay-induced daydreaming just makes me think of all the relaxed and sunshine-y times in my life, I think. And it’s awfully nice to think about them!

Next week I am very excited to make my escapist daydreams reality, as I am taking a (sadly short) trip to visit my dear friend Emily in Hungary. I’m very much looking forward to our post-Thanksgiving cookie baking, hummus eating, tea drinking, sightseeing weekend together, and I have a hunch it will be just the boost I need to come back to Edinburgh and finish off those essays before Christmas!

What to Do when your University Staff Go on Strike

Yesterday, staff at the University of Edinburgh organized a strike in protest of what are essentially 13% pay cuts since 2008. If you want more information on the reasoning behind the strike, you can click here, but I want to focus on what my day was like yesterday, since the professor in my Thursday morning lecture was striking.

First off, I’ve never been in a situation where my teachers/lecturers/professors were on strike before! (Why this doesn’t happen in the States isn’t completely clear to me, but I guess it has something to do with a general distaste for union activism. If anyone has any theories, I’d love to hear them!) So when the news came that most of our department wouldn’t be in yesterday, I wondered what the contingency plan would be. We’re currently in the seventh week of the semester and with the way the schedule is organized, it didn’t seem like it would be easy to reschedule lectures. I wondered if things would be cancelled outright.

Then a brilliant email came through from my Thursday morning lecturer. He confirmed that he was participating in the strike, but said he didn’t want us to go without meeting since he’d already prepared the lecture and there was a student presentation planned. Plus the week’s topic was blood diamonds – of all the topics to be potentially skipped, who would choose that one!? The lecturer offered another solution based on his experiences as a student in Germany: Why not have an unofficial class at his house?

The basic idea was that this would allow us to meet without crossing picket lines, providing a solution that met everyone’s needs as staff and students. He wasn’t being paid for the day since he was striking, but he still offered to teach us and on top of that, invited 20 students to crowd into his living room! This blew my mind (and continues to do so) as I never expected such a generous offer to come up in this situation. It’s honestly a testament to how awesome my professors are and how deserving of fair pay they are, too! Inviting your students to your home at 9am when you’ve also got a wife and small baby is a real commitment to teaching.

And the lecture was great! I think all of us students wished that we could do the same every week – not that blood diamonds aren’t interesting on their own, but any lecture is enhanced by the opportunity to simultaneously play cars with a sweet little kid! Alas, it will be back to the classroom next week.

The rest of the day caused some internal conflict. Our afternoon lecture was going ahead as planned, on campus and on schedule. The lecturer only acknowledged at the last minute that perhaps some of us didn’t want to come in support of the strike, and even then made it sound like we should be coming to class anyway. Most of us turned up, since it didn’t seem like we really had a choice, but it was uncomfortable. Obviously not every lecturer can arrange to fill his living room with students, but I wished that some alternative had been brainstormed. Maybe we could have crowded into a cafe instead? It was really strange to see no support from a staff member who I otherwise like quite a lot.

In any case, as I said above, things are back to normal in the upcoming week. The strike was planned as a single-day action, so it’ll be back to the classroom come Monday! Only time will tell if anything changed as a result of the strike, but I certainly hope a fair wage is guaranteed for university staff. They’re really all great people, and they deserve a salary that reflects that! Plus, as someone who pays one of the highest tuition rates, I want to know that my money is going to the super dedicated folks on the university’s frontline.

 

All that’s to say, here’s to creative solutions for boring life problems!

Do What You Love and You’ll Never Work a Day in Your Life

That’s what they say, anyway. I guess I tend to believe it, too!  I’ll come back to this later, but first…

Somehow, I have found myself already 2 and a half weeks into this new degree program. I have three lectures a week, each two hours long. Then there are all the interesting seminars and workshops in between, not to mention spending time with friends! But really, I spend the majority of my time reading – about 80-100 pages per class per week. In fact, I’m taking a quick break from those readings to write this out. But let’s get back to that business of doing what you love…

I’m currently in the middle of some readings for my class about mineral extraction in Africa, and if you have spent any amount of time in my presence since about February last year, you know how much I care about this topic. It seems like everyone else on my course chose Displacement and Development for their elective, but I’ll take miners over refugees just about any day (sorry, Syria!). I’m sure it says a lot that I show up for this 9AM lecture every week beaming and ready to go – but anyways. The article I’m reading right now is about conflict resources, and specifically about tanzanite (a gem that is only found in one 12 sq. km area near Mt. Kilimanjaro).

It’s a very pretty and very rare gem, and not one most people would automatically associate with conflict. But here’s the deal – although it was proven not to be funding Al Qaeda (long story!), there are a whole host of human rights abuses that occur around its extraction. The corporation that controls the area has been known to lock trespassers inside shipping containers and even to kill them on sight. Meanwhile, small scale miners are relying on child labor and other dangerous illegal behaviours. And all within the last 20 years, when we sort of expect this type of action to be on the decline.

Reading this makes my blood boil. I spent three months working in a mining multinational trying to ensure that these sorts of abuses don’t occur around their properties. Other companies are making strides in the same direction. There is no reason a resource needs to have the “conflict” label attached to it before steps are taken to mine ethically!

But the fact that this topic has already come up reminds me that I am studying exactly what I love. It may make me angry on a pretty regular basis, but that’s just a sign that there’s a job for me to do on the other end of this degree. Here’s hoping it doesn’t feel like work when I get there.

Everything is a-okay, because I’m strong as an o-a-k!

Just something I like to listen to when I’m feeling more freaked out by student loan debt than usual.

Growing Up and Self-Awareness

Tonight I hurried home from walking around town with friends, scarfed down dinner, and put on nice trousers so that I could go to the School of Social and Political Science’s ceilidh for new postgrad students. I was warring with myself all day about going, knowing that it would be good for me to be social and engage with my new classmates. There were bound to at least be a few people there I recognised! So I grabbed my keys, put on my favourite sparkly shoes, and walked the few blocks to the venue. Then I walked around the block. Then I stared at the front door for a while. And then I turned around and went home.

All this is to say that I have a problem with social anxiety that I am very aware of and constantly trying to get over. This is one part of growing up that I haven’t come to a “good or bad” verdict on yet – being aware of my own limitations and flaws and how frustratingly inexplicable they can sometimes be. This particular problem is that I get very nervous and self-conscious in big groups, no matter how much I can explain to myself that it’s going to be okay. Tonight for example, I knew there would be people there who I had already met this week and liked. I knew dancing would probably be fun, even though I don’t really know how to ceilidh. I knew that I didn’t have to stay very long if I didn’t feel comfortable. But still, I couldn’t make myself go in. These are the types of situations in which I would normally have a dear friend at my side to fall back on if I got too nervous (aka someone who can convince me to go along because there will at least be someone there who knows me very well and is capable of handling my anxiety and understanding that I’m not totally aloof and obnoxious when I hang back and don’t talk to anyone). Yeah, that aside is a mouthful. But those are the kind of internal worrywarts that I think we all have and that I have an annoyingly difficult time ignoring.

Anyway, I’m at home now sort of wishing I had gone but also knowing that it wasn’t that crucial for me to be there. I’m still working on ignoring that anxious and self-conscious inner self in the wider world, but I know there are other places where I am more comfortable and then I will have a better chance to get to know my new classmates. The type of socials put on during induction week really just aren’t my thing. And maybe this is the good part of being self-aware. Because I can at least recognise where the line is for me on a given day and say “that’s okay. there will be other opportunities.” without spiralling into feeling bad about myself for skipping big social events. I know I can make up for it somewhere else, in smaller groups further on.

All other things considered, it hasn’t been a bad week. I’ve met some very nice fellow postgrads, from my program and my school. And I’ve gotten to spend some much-appreciated time with old friends whose company always buoys me up. Here’s hoping that things will continue to go relatively smoothly once classes and homework start next week! It’s hard to believe, but there are only ten weeks between now and the Christmas holidays. Ready, set, go!

Mechanics of Flat-Sharing

So if you’ve ever been a college student (or known one) you are most likely familiar with the way universities like to throw four or five random people into an apartment together and hope that it turns out for the best. In the past, I’ve had some really great flatmates and some less than stellar ones, but everything has generally worked out for the best so far. I can only hope this year will continue that streak of okay-ness.

I have only met three of my four flatmates so far, after having moved in on Saturday. They’re all nice, one Canadian and two Chinese girls (rumor has it the missing one is also Chinese). I can only hope that we all continue to get along and work together as a team once we get settled in. Because there are things that come up in a shared flat that are not usually concerns in any other type of living situation, such as:

• Who keeps leaving the front door open and/or unlocked when she leaves the flat? Does she want people to steal all of our things?
• Are three rice cookers really necessary for one kitchen?
• How can we organise cupboard and fridge space to make sure that everyone’s things will fit and be distinguishable/safe from others (aka your pork ribs, rice, and four litres of milk are taking up too much room and the yogurts keep falling out of the door)?
• How do we make sure that everyone is putting waste in the right bins (garbage, recycling, compost) (aka all those milk jugs don’t belong in the trash)?

These are things I don’t like to have to dwell on, so hopefully we can get them sorted soon! Because it’s also true that these are issues I cannot put up with longterm either. Here’s to escaping to friends’ flats if it gets too crazy!

“There are so many Americans and Canadians here! I might as well have stayed at home!”

A thing I have heard too many times in the last two days since moving into my uni flat.

Safe and Sound

I’ve been back in Edinburgh for just over 24 hours now. Although I have to admit I’ve spent a lot of that time sleeping, I did take a walk down to the shopping centre to get my phone switched over to a UK number and grab some groceries. 

As I walked the couple of blocks from my friends’ flat to the shops, I kept looking up at the big sandstone houses on either side of the street, glancing back down whenever a bus rumbled by. Even though this has felt like a homecoming almost since before it was a reality, part of me expected to feel out of place or different or nervous. And although I’m still a bit nervous about all the university excitement, that’s more than a week off. Really, as I walked back home with my shopping bags, it just felt like falling back into a normal routine. It was comfortable. It still is.

Maybe that’s always been my favourite thing about Edinburgh, though. I’ve rarely felt uncomfortable here. It’s always a new adventure, yet happily familiar! I’m looking forward to wandering around the Old Town this week and seeing the familiar sites – maybe even keeping my eye out for things that have changed. I’m happy to be home.