A Return Stateside

The first thing I noticed when I finally (after a very long ordeal of being stuck in Toronto for a night) was driving eastwards from Philadelphia aside from how little sleep I'd gotten in the past 48 hours, how weird traffic was on the right side of the road, how everything was flat and big, was how much corn is in Pennsylvania. That's how I knew I was back in the United States. How I knew that after a trip from Glasgow, to Reykjavik, Iceland, to Toronto, Canada... stuck in Toronto, Canada... and then finally to Pennsylvania, that I knew I had returned to a country I had not step foot in for an entire year. It has been a little over two weeks since my return and already I want to plot my way back to Scotland. Along with wanting to go back simply because the country felt like home, there are other reasons to plan a return.

On the 18th of September, Scotland voted, at last, on the question of independence. With baited breath, I on one side of the Atlantic, and Scotland on the other, stayed up as late as possible to see the results come in county by county. I've long held my own opinions back from the Independence Referendum topic; as a foreigner when I was living in Glasgow I did not feel as though I had a place to say what my own opinions were. When asked, I'd likely respond with: "It's not my place to say" - but in the last two months, I felt as though I had a small right to an opinion, having witnessed specific issues play out firsthand and having lived in the country itself for an entire year. I decided to support the Yes campaign, despite the fact that I could not vote, even if I had still been living there at the time of the vote. I won't get into the particulars of why, but I still hold onto the idea that my friends, and Scotland as a whole, deserve the chance to have a brighter future, and I respect everyone's right to vote no matter what they vote for. So as the results came in and they were overwhelmingly No, I was a little disappointed. However, I do hope that the result will cause Scotland to surge forward and build the future it deserves.

I wanted to be in Scotland during the Referendum; however, the night after the vote it became increasingly clear that I was glad I was not living in Glasgow at the time. From media coverage and friends still in the area, the backlash of the vote was raging quite disconcertingly in Glasgow's George Square in particular. So it seems as though the aftermath of the vote will be just as interesting as the lead up to the vote. Nevertheless, I do still wish to return to see the Hebrides again and all that I have not gotten to see before.

Until then, I'm enjoying some startling bits of reverse culture shock. A few days after my return, I bumped into someone accidentally in the store, and when the employee had apologized in the southern-Pennsylvanian, almost actual backwoods kind of southern, accent - I was taken by surprise immediately. I'm still not particularly used to people I don't know in public speaking in American accents. For an entire week, I added and subtracted five hours from my watch whenever I glanced at it for the time and fell asleep at early hours and woke up way earlier than I had to wake up. The first time I went into a grocery store I had to stop and remember that this much food even existed and, hey wait a minute, why were there more than three aisles? Surely a grocery store doesn't need that many aisles when the Sainsbury's on the corner dealt just fine with only three! I got annoyed when I had to drive for 10 minutes to pick up milk when we were out instead of walking for 10 to Tesco's. Handling cash felt like handling bits of cloth and plastic instead of weighty coins and paper (and I'm still not used to the notes being the same size again). I found food I forgot existed and when I drank soda for the first time since I was home it tasted like a gulp of sweet sugar (way too much sugar) instead of the soda I was accustomed to drinking. Just this morning, I had Lucky Charms for the first time in over a year...

But the best part is, I forgot small charming bits of my area that were entirely different from Scotland and that I enjoy taking pictures of now to send to my friends (looking at you Màiri and Lottie) and I think about the stories I'd tell about my home if they were to ever visit, just like they did for me when I was there.

I miss Scotland incredibly much and I'm determined to find my way back. But until then, it's digging (starting the end of this month!), books, and good ol' reverse culture shock. As for the blog? Well, one chapter has closed temporarily, and the next one will open. Hopefully, I will be able to write about the things I do in archaeology and experience out in the field. So - until next time...

Gettysburg Battlefield, Gettysburg, PA: from the top of the Pennsylvania Monument

Finalities.

I'm up at 2:30 am.

I'm not working on my dissertation.

Because it's done. It's written. It'll be handed in with a shiny "I didn't cheat" form Monday morning.

A Grad Student Schedule (with bonus island photos)

As some of you may know, I'm currently writing my dissertation on early medieval monasticism on Scottish islands, which involves a lot of hair-pulling, book-copying, note-taking, island-hopping, and did I mention hair-pulling? It's been over a month since I've written a blog post, but to be honest aside from the occasional trip to the islands for field research (which will be written about; though actually it'll be easier to show you lovely photos instead of rambling about the archaeological remains of a questionable 8th century priory), my daily routine as a graduate student remains fairly consistent.

A usual day is as follows:

Wake up. This could be anytime between 8 or 10, or sometimes 11. It all depends on how late you've stayed up the previous night frantically wondering if you even know what you're talking about anymore.

Do the usual human things, including shower, eat food, attempt to brush hair, and then immediately leave your room, or else you'll never get anything done.

Read.  If it's a good day and you have a sizable hunk of unread sources to get through, you could be reading anywhere between 4-6 journal articles or a book or two in one day! If it's not a good day, it could take hours to get through just one article and take sufficient notes before your brain goes mushy.

Write. I usually try and set a goal of somewhere between 500-1000 words per day, but if it's a good day, you can go way beyond that amount. If it's a bad day, you generally end up making ceaseless edits to chapters you've already written, writing maybe 20 more words, and questioning your mental capacity.

Read and write and repeat. Seriously, this is a never ending process. And by the time your brain has run out of juice and you're not sure if it's safe to inhale another cup of tea or soda or coffee, and you aren't sure if you remembered to eat at all, it's better just to proceed to the next step.

Go home. It depends on what kind of progress you've made as to what time you go home, and what state your mind is in. You could go home early at 5:00 feeling quite satisfied with yourself and your progress. You could be in the office until late that night, distracted by cat videos but very firmly not letting yourself leave until you reach that word count. Or you could leave at 8:00, having done nothing significant and feeling rather defeated. Please note that all three of these examples generally occur all within the same week.

Job search. Or if you're staying on for a PhD - panic about funding. For me, it's panic about jobs. I try to make it a goal to apply to at least one or two jobs a day, or scope out potential applications. Usually afterwards I end up wanting to rip out what little hair I have left and my brain has turned into a ball of highly flammable and destructible paper with a lighter posed nearby. Self-depreciating thoughts are prone to infiltrate your brain during this mental state. Believe me, that specific thought process is beyond fun. Self-doubt is a hungry emotion, and will eat all of your confidence in the blink of an eye.

Numb the brain. As a result, you want to turn on some addictive television show (at the moment it's Gilmore Girls) and watch a few episodes all in a row before claiming you're going to go to bed, but really you'll shut off the computer and either think into the sleepless night for a few more hours about your progress or lack-there-of, or play some senseless game to keep self-doubt at bay long enough to fall asleep.

And then wake up and do it all over again.

The results of this? Hopefully some half-decent, original, Masters-level research on Scottish monasticism and the Hebrides and a nice little job lined up. But in the short term side of things, results include forgetting what day it is on a daily basis, forgetting to eat a full meal and running to Sainsbury's at 10:30 pm or making a sandwich if it's not a weekend and you aren't going out to a pub to decompress and enjoy some well-made food, getting increasingly annoyed with the foot traffic and closed roads during Commonwealth Games season which impair your ability to reach campus via a decent route, and some half-formed thoughts about theory that'll hopefully merge all together in the end.

Okay, so I might be exaggerating a little bit; but I do, and I'm sure some of my colleagues will also testify on their own work if asked, a lot of work every day (that I have motivation) and though it seems like we're online all the time and not doing anything, it's because we constantly keep lines of communication open so someone can come save us and be a welcome distraction in the middle of typing up theory or measurements for landmass of a Hebridean island. On good days, we love talking about what we're researching - because there's a reason we're reading and devoting time to it, even if we don't have all the answers. A Masters dissertation is a lot of original research and a lot of hard work, that'll hopefully be worth it all in the end.

It's definitely a mental strain, in my own personal experience, but at least I get to do some fun things, like visit islands (thank god, I hear you cheer out, at last she's stopped talking about how miserable - and yet she somehow likes it? - graduate life sounds). So far, not including my trips to Iona and Inchmahome that I have previously written about this past year, I have visited Lismore, Bute, Barra, Vatersay, and Mingulay, with plans to visit Inchcolm in the east/Firth of Forth this week. Enjoy the photos! Until next time...

A Nine Year Hiatus

The first place many people think of when the UK is mentioned is London, the capital city filled with businessmen in suits, the UK's top cinema stars, the iconic skyline, street signs, gardens, and monuments, all surrounding the Thames and Big Ben/Westminster. My very first visit to London was nine years ago; I was fourteen, surrounded by 43 other kids my age and herded from place to place by four teachers like a flock of sheep. Don't get me wrong, it was an amazing experience, and quite an eye-opener for a young teenager's first steps abroad.

But after nine years, things change. A lot of things change.

On Language Education

Despite the fact that bilingual schooling is starting to crop up in certain regions of the United States, language education is something that's horrifically underdeveloped in public schooling. In my own high school, I had the choice between French, or Spanish. In second grade, I was taught bits of Spanish (I vaguely remember putting on a play at the end where animals kept coming into a restaurant and I was a gray seal) and in sixth grade I had the opportunity to take special time out of classes to learn Spanish again. Naturally, I picked Spanish.

But there should be more options. There are over 6,000 languages being spoken today. Over six thousand languages! How many do I fluently speak?

One.

On Living Abroad

This post is going to step away from the usual travelling updates, culture, geography, and archaeology lessons. Instead, it's going to focus on something I rarely post and share about to those that still continue to read this little, tiny, blog. Instead, we're going to step back for a moment, and look at some key themes and issues that during my eight months living in Scotland thus far, plus the four months spent in Egypt many moons (okay, not many moons - three years) ago, and touch on some issues that some people, including myself, face when they move abroad whether it be for four months, a year, or five. Now I promise this post won't be full of doom and gloom, things you will never see or do or hear again, but there are some simple truths to living abroad, and some of them are not so pleasant. Others will make your heart sing and pride burst because let's face it, you moved to a different country.

On Islands and Travelling

"It is become customary in those of quality to travel young into foreign countries, whilst they are absolute strangers at home; and many of them when they return are only loaded with superficial knowledge, as the bare names of famous libraries, stately edifices, fine statues, curious paintings, late fashions, new dishes, new tunes, new dances, painted beauties and the like. The places here mentioned afford no such entertainment" - Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland, c. 1695, p. 62

Martin Martin's book on the Western Isles might be extremely dated and not very useful beyond comments on the wildlife (namely the sheep, cows, and other croft animals) and the locals (particularly their drinking habits), but after giving a dissertation presentation two days ago which centered primarily upon the Western Isles of Scotland, I think in some ways he proves a point (the same point to which I will later disagree with). I've been to many different places the past three years: Egypt, Greece, Scotland, England, Ireland; the majority of things and tidbits of knowledge I have come back with from these places has largely been included in Martin's list in the quote above.

Ì Chaluim Chille

Ì Chaluim Chille, Ioua insula, Ì. Eo... all are names for a beautiful island just one mile off the coast of Fionnphort on the Isle of Mull, in the Hebridean islands of Scotland. The Isle of Iona is a place I began to read about and discover in an undergraduate course on Medieval Christianity at Gettysburg. It was somewhere I never thought I'd get to see or visit, and was struggling at finding resources to read about back in the States. Upon my arrival in Scotland, I realized just how big an influence the island had over not only the region of Argyll and Bute, but the whole of the country. A new world of books, articles, and knowledge was accessible to me now. It was now possible, more so than ever before, to visit Iona and get a taste for why the Vikings attacked several times in the 9th century, or why St Columba began his monastery in 563 after leaving Ireland, or see how the prehistoric peoples of the Hebrides lived their lives all the while separated from the mainland. Iona became a huge factor into a piqued interest for the Western Isles/Hebrides in general, and continued to build off this weird fascination for monasteries and why these people: monks, friars, nuns, would choose to live their lives in a community dedicated to solitude, poverty, and chastity out in the middle of, quite literally, nowhere. 

A myriad of academic adventures

The very weekend after my visitors departed, I myself departed with six others in my program down to York. I don't mean York, Pennsylvania, where I come from, settled and established formally in 1741. I mean the original York, England. Most of the Celtic and Viking troupe made the 3.5 hour train ride south for the first World of the Vikings Conference, held in honour of Richard Hall. It was a long weekend of learning, tiredness, and attempting to fit in the things we wanted to see within York while we were there/while we could.

York is a pretty fantastic city, with some pretty fantastic archaeology, most notably in my opinion, from the Roman period upwards. Upon our arrival on Friday, we had some time to go through the excellent Yorkshire Museum as well as the York Minster, a very famous and very beautiful Cathedral.

First visitors!

Six months on the nose from the very day I arrived in Scotland I found myself back in Glasgow International Airport for the first time since. For this occasion however, I was on the other side of the glass doors and customs, waiting anxiously for their arrival. It had been over six months since I last saw them both; in fact I could trace back to the very date I last saw them (23 August 2013). The minute I saw Leah and Alex come down the escalator and frantically almost forget to pick up their luggage, I started to tremble with excitement. Honest to goodness, it felt like that scene in the airport in Love, Actually where people are meeting up with each other and grinning stupidly and jumping up and down and hugging.

That's exactly what had happened.

Wanderlust

Image: Google

I suppose the whole moving countries thing has spoiled me a bit in terms of acting on my urge to travel. I've always had a sorry case of wanderlust; if you've ever read The Magic Tree House series, you'll know why. The series was written by Mary Pope Osbourne for kids. It was about a brother and a sister - Jack and Annie - who live in Frog Creek, Pennsylvania and on one stormy afternoon they decide to wander in the woods behind their house for an adventure (as little kids do). When it starts to rain, they take shelter in a tree house they find in the woods. Turns out, the tree house is filled with books on every topic imaginable and they encounter the librarian/keeper of the books, the mysterious Morgan le Fay, who gives them a series of riddles they must solve to help her and complete various tasks. These things are accomplished by going into the books and travelling back in time to periods like the Middle Ages, the American Revolution, and the Titanic and also all over the world to the Amazon, to the North Pole, and to swim with dolphins.

So you can see where I got it from.

Ireland, Liverpool, and more!

The last two weeks of break were, quite frankly, exhausting. I had a new adventure pretty much every single day! So let's start from the beginning, shall we? (Cheers to Ramona, Lottie, and Lou - who are all mentioned in this lovely update!)

On the 4th of January, I got myself up, caught a train to Glasgow Prestwick Airport and boarded a flight set for Dublin! I was going to be staying with a friend Ramona and her wonderful family. Ramona and I had never met before, and before anyone winces and exclaims how ridiculous and dangerous such adventures would be, let's go back to 2005-2007, when I was in a phase of my life where everything was Harry Potter and nothing else (little has changed). In 2005, I wandered onto a wonderful website called HPFF.com, which was an archive for fanfiction of Harry Potter. Unashamedly I will admit that, yes, I did write Harry Potter fanfiction. And if I do say so, I did quite well. It was through the forums that I developed friendships with people I would've never met or had the opportunity to talk to otherwise. They were helpful, they were kind and funny, and some of them I kept in contact with via the internet consistently even when I left and came back to the site several times. Others, I lost contact with for many years.

Ramona and I reconnected via happenstance Facebook encounters last Spring and when it became apparent that I was going to be in Scotland for my graduate program, we both contemplated the idea of finally meeting up. And so we did! I'm very glad that we did so, too. So before I delve into our shenanigans in Ireland, I just want to toss a great big thank you out to Ramona and her family (including the wee ones) for their hospitality, and to say that Harry Potter is truly very magical!

Holiday adventures

Christmas away from home is hard. I won't lie about that.

No, hang on, let me correct that statement. Christmas away from my family is hard. If I had had the opportunity to spend Christmas in Scotland with my family and my dog I would've been the happiest on the planet; the fact that usual routines with family members was taking place without me being there was startling - seeing as that hadn't ever happened (as far as I know) in my short 22 years. But what needed to be done, needed to be done, and cherishing new experiences and saving money were top priorities. So myself, and a few other friends, bought train tickets and booked a hostel up North to Inverness...