I have survived many things in the past couple of days, including but not limited to: a wildly sparking outlet adapter in the middle of the night, a kitchen that continues to be horribly inhospitable and smell strongly of old sausages (my fault, I know) and the Holiday Inn, many lectures reminding us, once again, that we are not related to Neaderthals, and an Irish pub while a Hurling match was on.
The last was by far the most harrowing, since there are very many irish people in Edinburgh and they are all feeling VERY patriotic now that they are an hours flight from home. Silly Europeans. I learned much that day, namely that a) Irish people talk at absolutely inhuman speeds, and b) if I spend more than an hour listening to the lilting twitter of many Irish people all talking about Irish regionalism, I start that ridiculous and unconscious habit of parroting their word choice and inflection. Which is to say I sound like an idiot american who over-pronounces her T's and talks so fast no one has time to notice I've talked at all.
Classes are in too early a stage to judge (we are not related to Neanderthals!), because the first week is dominated by vague introductory lectures spanning all of human history that the professors clearly never want to do again. My Stats (shudder) prof is an absolutely terrifying little american woman who assured us that "Number phobias do not exist. There are no such thing as people who are 'not numbers people'. If you think you have a phobia, take some prozac, deal with it, or run away". I guess she has not seen how melodramatically I can sob when faced with any sort of digit. She followed this speech by outing herself as a former medievalist, who changed career paths because she wanted to do something "more concrete". How one goes from analyzing the symbolism of the gendered medieval body in The Book of Margerey Kempe to spending all day with numbers and graphs, I do not know.
Slightly more hopefully, I have in my department Geoffery Pullum, who is, apparently, a legend. He is wonderfully sarcastic, and contributes to this blog , which I at least think is full of completely fascinating stuff. Oh, and he has invented a word usage that made it into the OED. And has a wonderful habit of bashing Dan Brown.
I haven't taken very many pictures, mostly because once it was sunny so I went in to get my camera and then it was monsooning, but here is my street:
And here is why, even at its worst, Scotland is worth it:
