We meant to go Saturday, but various things occurred and it didn't work out, so we decided to go Sunday instead. Having gotten all mentally prepared (and dressed and made-up and everything) for doing something, though, we couldn't just sit around. Sooo we went shopping. And that was how on Saturday afternoon I went to Topshop for the first time. Topshop, if you don't know because you choose to fill your memory with more meaningful things than the names of women's clothing stores (*cough*weirdo*), is a highly fashionable but still relatively cheap women's store pretty much confined to the UK and New York City. So I was kind of excited. Just being in there made me feel really voguish. I think I spent less than £10 in the end. It was the experience that counted.
Our plans for Saturday night were foiled too, actually. We tried to go to a ceilidh (basically a Scottish dance party, pronounced 'kaylee'), but when they finally opened the doors there were only ten tickets left for sale - and we were numbers ten, eleven and twelve in line. Darn irony. So we went to a really cute pub instead and listened to some live music and talked. That was fun anyway.
Sunday: the palace!! It cost a rather exorbitant amount to get in, and then (of course) you couldn't take pictures inside. But it was really beautiful anyway. The Queen was in Edinburgh just last month, when the Pope visited, and they had a couple of pictures of the two together standing in the very rooms we were walking through. The decor was sumptuous but, somewhat surprisingly, tastefully sparse, relative to the small number of other castles I've seen. Maybe they put more stuff in the rooms when the Queen is actually there. It still made you think about how crazy it would be to be royal. The silverware there has three thousand pieces. What.
So after wandering around there for a while, taking some sweet pictures in the little guard booths outside, and obtaining the next clue in my ongoing scavenger hunt (yay!), we left. I had dinner and went to church. Church was unfortunately bad this time. I was sort of shocked. It was just a student thing - worship, prayer, a lesson, some free tea and biscuits; how wrong can it go? Everything was good until the actual lesson. We did an anonymous survey of our prayer/devotional lives, which was fun...and then the speaker proceeded to scorn our collective responses and generally tell us what worthless Christians we all were. Um. Excuse me? He was speaking truth about the need for prayer and Bible study in any Christian's life, but the way he presented it was, in my opinion, frankly unacceptable. He was borderline offensive and very patronizing. The worst part was he's the head pastor of that church. (And that he was American. Way to rep it, dude.) I was going to keep going there, but now I'm honestly thinking not.
Anyway. Enough whining. Finally we have come to our PUMPKIN EXTRAVAGANZA!! When I got home from church, Germany and I decided to carve our pumpkin. She wanted a vampire and I wanted something happy...and please forgive me if I think we came up with the cutest pumpkin ever.
He's better in real life.
So then we baked the pumpkin seeds and they were delicious and we put the innards in the fridge and then this morning I stuck them in the blender and made pumpkin puree and then made PUMPKIN SPICE LATTES. So. Good. Oh. My. Gosh. Not quite like Starbucks or even like Wash U, but it definitely has the right flavour. Even if it also has some funky pumpkin stringies at the bottom. I was ecstatic. Germany was tolerant. Whatever. The best part is there's some left over for tomorrow.
And then I spent the rest of the day in the library writing my essays/getting headaches from trying to figure out the philosophy of Conceptual Role Semantics and compositionality and the analytic/synthetic distinction and my stance on all of the above. And that is where I remain until it's time for small group in an hour. Goody.
Love,
Melody
I like the pumpkin a lot. Particularly the mismatched eyes. I also particularly like the juxtaposition of, "I was ecstatic. Germany was tolerant."
ReplyDelete