Hello friends and family! Now that I have had a day to reflect on my first trip out of England and sort through all of the many pictures, I can finally tell you all about it. *Bare with me this will be a long post*
First, a little background on why I chose Scotland: I have been intrigued by Scotland ever since my Dad visited Edinburgh last year. He raved about the beauty, the castles, the people, and how much he loved his time there. I knew I wanted to visit but had no real urgency to do so quite yet... until I started watching Outlander. Yes, a TV is what really pushed to visit Scotland sooner rather than later. So I started on my research and found an overnight train from London that was a fairly good price and I would arrive in Edinburgh at 7am the next day. To me this was a steal because you get your transportation covered and have one less night of accommodation to pay for (Technically two because I also was planning to take the overnight train back to London as well). I convinced my friend Sebastian from Pennsylvania to join me and we booked our tickets. On the night of our departure, we decided to get an earlier train into the city and explore around a little, which turned into us grabbing a few drinks so that we could sleep a little easier on the train. If you read my blog about London, you saw the picture that had the pretty lights hanging in the alleyway. Well, we were trying to find that street and got lost and ended up in an area that Seb and I discovered was a row of gay bars. Not knowing at first that we were in a gay bar, we found a table and ordered some beers. We met this hilarious couple that I found to be quite nice but they wanted to take us to a bunch of local clubs and I could tell by Sebastian's face he was way out of his comfort zone. We politely declined the bar hopping extravaganza, downed our beers, strapped our backpacks back on and made our way to tiny pizza shop a few streets down. Here we decided we'd better ditch the beers and start drinking some real liquor if we planned on sleeping 7 hours through the night on a train. A few jack and cokes later, we made our way back to the tube station to get to the train station and start our journey... I have been asked quite a few times how I handled being on a train for 7 hours. Honestly, it wasn't that bad. Think of it like flying from west coast to east coast direct flight. Totally doable, but not always the greatest trip. Anyways, the only negative to the night train, other than sitting still for so long, was how cold it got. I hadn't thought about that when was getting dressed for the trip. I only wore a thin long sleeve shirt under my jacket, which I had planned to use as my pillow on the train. Thankfully Sebastian wasn't as cold as me and lent me his jacket for the trip to wrap myself in. *It was during this moment that I made a mental note to bundle up for the trip home*. On the train, me met a nice gentleman from Glasgow, who gave us some recommendations of what we had to do while in Scotland. He also of course bashed us for not going to Glasgow instead. (These two cities are like rival cities, they make fun of each other often.) After making some mental notes about his suggestions, I finally fell asleep in an uncomfortable but bearable position. CLICK READ MORE
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MadeleineMy name is Madeleine Sarner, and I am an American student living in Britain's oldest recorded town, Colchester. After many months of saving, extensive planning, and a few break downs along the way, I have finally started my journey of living abroad. On this blog you can keep up with my adventures, my culture shock, and my new and exciting experiences! Archives
December 2017
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