**13/09/2009
THE BEGINNING: PART 2**
Hello!
I just got back from a great time at three events. I climbed Arthur’s Seat and made a friend (Greek) who’s about to start studying Bachelors of Computer science and met a Londoner who studies Geology. It was nice to get to start knowing new people.
The walk was initially tiring mainly because I was trying to catch up with the rest after starting out late. Then it was more relaxed. What beautiful views! The other day, a few fellow Indians and I had been on a 13 km walk from which we came back at around 8 in the night through the same area of Hollyrood Park. On our way back, we saw the most beautiful skyline silhouetted against a red tinged sun-set sky. As I climbed Arthurs Seat in the daylight today, l saw the same and more skylines from higher up. I could even see across part of the sea. On our way down we heard the bagpipes live for the first time! It was beautiful music and with the cool fresh air, bright sun and lovely scenery it really added to the experience.
I walked from there to George Square where there was an orientation event to introduce us to the building layout. There I met a German who had started his Masters in comp science (as opposed to all the others I talked to who were undergrads) and we joined the third event, a ‘Coffee crawl’, together where we sat with a Chinese math student and an Aussie computational linguist. Over the noise in the coffee shop I could understand the Australian’s accent the best and only later did I realise it was because he was from Sydney. (I spend a few years there as a child). Apparently he had studied Sanskrit in high school and knows the language format of Kannada, Bengali, Marathi and some other north Indian languages! We were joined by two talkative and chirpy undergrad volunteer girls who were in their final year. We stayed there chatting till around 5:40pm and finally dispersed.
The second coffee shop we went to was the ‘Birth place of Harry Potter…’ J.K. Rowling wrote there at first! The place is called Elephant House and it has lots and lots of elephant themed things- chairs, vase stands, wall hangings, little elephants made of all sorts of materials of various colours. It was a very lovely place and it has a great view of the castle to. It actually reminded me of Hogwarts. I walked back with one of the volunteers and she guided me back to more familiar places from where I could find my way.
I must’ve said this many times already but the people are so really so very unexpectedly pleasant and friendly. I can’t help but smile at practically everyone! A girl who was headed for the gym actually walked me to George Square from a point near Old College in the other direction!
So now I’m home alone (because all the refugees and my housemates have gone for an evening event called ‘Ghost and Ghouls’ which I was too tired to attend after all my walking! I call them ‘refugees’ because three of the six people at this house right now have crashed here because they don’t have a home yet. It tends to get noisy with so many people so I’m very grateful for the quiet alone time.
So that is it for now. I hope you are all well and happy 🙂