My friends and I decided to celebrate Thanksgiving a different way this year. The last time I was away for Thanksgiving was two years ago when I was studying abroad in Alicante. CIEE and the wonderful professors put on a gorgeous Thanksgiving dinner for all of the American’s in the program to celebrate together. It was a really great gesture, but it made me miss home terribly. This time around, I decided that the best way for me to cope with not being home would be to distract myself by traveling somewhere new….Scotland! The “trip” part of it was absolutely amazing but getting stranded in Scotland for an extra week due to snow was absolutely miserable. More on that later. I won’t reminisce too much on that because I want to remember the amazing times I had in Scotland.
Thanksgiving Day I did my last two Thanksgiving lessons, skyped with my family, and then packed for the exciting weekend ahead! Kelly, Jessica, and I left that night, so excited we could hardly contain ourselves. We arrived at Royal Mile Backpackers Hostel, which I would highly recommend to anyone. It was your typical, fun, colorful, loud youth hostel; people running in and out with backpacks; bright colored bunk beds and painted walls; and even a cozy fireplace in the lounge. We met two really cool Canadian girls who were staying in our room and hung out with them our last night. My favorite part about hostels is meeting people from around the world!
The weekend was filled with pub crawls, palaces, Christmas markets (my favorite was the German...mmm), fish and chips, sausages (how i LOVE the sausages), dancing, stag parties, new friends, whiskey tours (we were in barrels, by the way :)), gorgeous landscapes, and of course, snow. Scotland is unlike any place I have ever seen. I know that I say that about every place I go (Rome, Ireland, Capri, etc) but it's really true. There is so much history in Edinburgh it's incredible. One minute you are in a somewhat modern part of town and the next minute there is a gorgeous, gothic, probably about 1080280218 years old, building.
It didn't start snowing until our last night in Edinburgh and we were actually quite excited. As much as I love Virginia, we don't see a ton of snow in the winter time, especially not at Christmas. It was wonderful to walk around the German Christmas market with hot cocco and snow flurries. It was even fun on our pub crawl when it started to blizzard and we had snow ball flights on the way to each new pub. However, we had no idea that this beautiful snow would delay us from getting home until a week later. Short on money and with limited means of transportation, we ended up staying most of the time in airport constantly thinking that the next day we would be able to leave. It definitely was an adventure but I'm ok with never being stranded again :). Lets just say I was very THANKFUL to finally return to beautiful Costa del Sol.
I'll leave you with a few good memories :). Missing each of you!
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