Day of Win

12:30 pm Edinburgh
6:30 am St. Louis
5:30 am Spearfish

Yesterday was a fantastic day.  Everything worked out well.  I got so much accomplished and it was brilliant.

I have to get the single disaster of the day out of the way, though.  I was on a coffee hunt around 1:00, and I ran across a Starbucks and thought, ooooo Pumpkin Spice Latte.  Have to get one.  So I went in feeling not confident at all that they would actually have it, but hoping beyond all hope that they would.  (Pumpkin Spice Lattes, in case you don't know, are probably my single very most favorite thing about fall.  I'm really not exaggerating.  I love fall in general, but I am incredibly ridiculously hopelessly in love with those things.  I acknowledge that it's a little weird, but don't judge me.)  So I walked up to the counter like I knew what I was doing and said, "Do you have pumpkin spice lattes?"  And the lady gave me this very sweet but confused look and said, "Sorry, what?"  Stomach drops.  "Pumpkin spice lattes."  "No, sorry," she said, completely unaware that she had just thrown a little black raincloud over my parade.  I said "okay" and "thanks" and "sorry" in some order and walked out.  I probably should have ordered something, just walking out was a little awkward of me, but whatever.  I didn't want anything else.  So boo for that.

First win: grocery shopping.  I found a drugstore and bought all the things I was running out of, including contact solution (which is even more expensive than at home??? dislike...), so that was good.  But then I went to the grocery store carrying this massive list of ingredients that I couldn't find at Lidl (Lidl is my life.  It's this German grocery store chain where everything is massively cheap.  Like unbelievably so.  It's a little dodgy, but not enough to make me not go there.), and spent quite some time weaving in and out of every single aisle at least three times each, picking things up and staring at them trying desperately to determine whether or not they were what I thought they were.  Most of the time they weren't.  But I eventually emerged semi-victorious with all the ingredients on my list except ditalini pasta (which I had a suitable substitute for, aka elbow noodles, because all pasta is basically created equal as far as I'm concerned), garbanzo beans, curry powder, leeks (I bought spring onions on my last grocery trip thinking they were leeks.  I'm really bad with onion-like-thing varieties.), vegetable juice (which is incredibly hard to find even in the States), and pumpkin because I was hoping I could make my own lattes.  The beans, curry and leeks I found at this adorable little Indian grocery store, where the shopkeepers seemed really surprised to see a white girl.  I forgot to look for pumpkin there, but I remain doggedly hopeful that it will show up somewhere, sometime over the course of the season.  So I dragged myself and my weird groceries home and put them away with pride, fairly pleased with myself for that portion of the day.

Oh, except the dairy products were a problem as well.  The varieties of cheese here basically consist of the following: cheddar, aged cheddar, really aged cheddar, sharp cheddar, cheap cheddar, expensive cheddar, Scottish cheddar, and feta.  There are some other really random varieties, but at least where I was it was like someone had had a cheese catalog and just pointed randomly at a few different types and said, "Eh, those look like fancy cheeses that weird people might buy to cook with or something."  So I ended up buying some weird French type that I've never heard of and have no idea what it tastes like.  I should have just gotten mozzarella.  I think they had that.  And then the butter was weird too.  Although the Scottish are immensely fond of butter, they don't seem to be so fond of real butter.  Everything here is, at best, "Made with real butter!"; most of it is at least half vegetable oil.  And none of it comes in the handy little one-inch-equals-one-tablespoon sticks; it's either in a weird giant cube or in a tub for spreading.  I finally got the tub, and I guess I'll just scoop it out with my measuring spoons.  This semester is going to be a cooking adventure.  Even more so than usual.

Aaaaanyway.  Next win: found an adorable yarn shop and got some needles with which to make my hat out of my Irish tweed.  Woot woot.  And all the yarn in there was lusciously soft and also local, I think.  So I'll be in there rather a lot, I think.

Next win: one of my favorite people was in Edinburgh a few weeks before I was, and created this amazing scavenger hunt for me around the city.  I searched for the first clue when I was here before my trip, but it had been evilly stolen or something.  So she directed me to the next clue, and yesterday I found it!  (I mean, it wasn't hard because she told me exactly where it was.  But whatever.)  So now the hunt is on.  I am so freaking excited.

Final and favorite win.  (Can I have a favorite win?  Well, I do.)  Last night I did my first activity with the Christian Union!  It was sooooo much fun.  It was a "Grub Crawl", aka a progressive dinner, one of those where you have the first course at one person's house and then walk over to the second house for the second course, et cetera et cetera.  This was an incredible multiple win.  1) All the food was AWESOME.  2) I got to talk to a lot of AWESOME people.  3) Now I know some people in CU, and I'm going to definitely get involved (I mean, that was already the plan, but now I know them).  4) It was literally the most fun I've had since I've been here.  The last house was tea/coffee and biscuits, but then afterwards we played alll these games and just laughed hysterically the entire time.  5) My flatmate came with!  She's not Christian, but she came for the free food and met a lot of people as well and had a lot of fun and I think now I could convince her to come with in future?  It was really funny - we were talking beforehand, as we were waiting to set off for the first house, and I guess I'm the first serious Christian she's ever met.  Actually, now that I think about it, that's kind of really scary.  Pray that God helps me be a good ambassador - because now it really counts.  Either way, though, I'm very glad she came with.

Ha.  The fire alarm just went off here.  (It was not me this time.)  It only went off for about 30 seconds, though, and fortunately it's nothing like the ones at home (aka brain-disabling).  So none of us went outside or anything.  Hopefully the building isn't really on fire.  I feel like it is not.

Good news, there seem to be no hard feelings over the "devolution" fiasco the other day.  For clarification, I guess I didn't actually say this - devolution is when a higher level of government gives power to a lower level, so the mug was for the 10-year anniversary of when the British government gave some level of autonomy back to Scotland, and the Scottish Parliament was formed.  Definitely not a joke.

Heh.  Sorry for a bit of a novel today.  Haha oh speaking of books - thanks Ali, you're really sweet.  :)

Vocab for the day:
Biscuit = cookie
Scone = biscuit
Brilliant = awesome
Class = awesome