Wednesday, July 20, 2011

CASTLE and the QUEEN

The plan for my first weekend is going to Edinburgh. I have heard so much about it, and I was really looking forward to see the Edinburgh castle.
We took a six-hour train to get there, which is kind of far but the beautiful view along the way made this trip much more fun. I saw hundreds of sheep standing under the sun; some horses ran on the grass. All the mountains and grasslands are so green.
When we actually got to Edinburgh, we are even more amazed by the city. The whole city has even a little bit more cool and older buildings than Oxford has, and it’s also bigger than Oxford. The guest house that we stayed in was really nice. They served traditional English breakfast which includes bacon, egg, boiled tomato, beans, toasted bread and tea with fancy china.
On the first night, we went out try to search for some good Scottish food, we asked some random Scottish people and they led us to a small yet cozy Scottish restaurant. For the first time, I tried Scottish whisky, which is too strong to me. The Scottish food was okay.
The next day we went to the Edinburgh Castle. The castle itself is so beautiful! From the audio guide, I learned the background and importance of this great castle. The funny thing is, when we saw a Scottish soldier wearing traditional Scottish skirt, almost every tourist asked for taking a picture with him.
We didn’t spend much time visiting castle, because according to the news, the Queen of great Britain is in Edinburgh and will give a speech in the Palace. Excited we went there; so many people were already there ready to see the Queen. After two hours of waiting, the Queen finally arrived, but we can only see her from a very far distance, still, we saw her in her pretty pink suit. It is such a once in a life time opportunity, which made us so happy.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Hello Oxford

I have been in Oxford for about 12 days. The past 12 days were totally a blast. I am so thankful that I joined this program. Okay, here comes my first blog in Oxford.
Because of the rarely bad weather in Beijing, my flights delayed. So it took me almost 30 hours to get to Oxford. Stuck in the airport was not fun at all. Finally I got to Oxford, and had a lovely meeting with everyone.
Days in Oxford are really interesting. The old buildings totally blew my mind. I have seen lots of pictures of these famous buildings, but when I actually in one of them, everything seemed so unreal. The whole city is so unique, parks are neat.
Kevin, Han and I found a really lovely store in city centre, it’s called Oxfam. We found it really interesting because it sells some cool used stuff, like used stamps, used CDs and Videos, used accessories, it even has used post cards that you can see what people actually wrote on it in back days. Later I accidentally noticed that this store is actually a very big charity-store. People donate their used stuff here, and all the money goes to charity.
On Wednesday night, we went to pubs. The pubs here are very different than pubs in China, ( I don’t know about American pubs, never been to one.) Chinese pubs are usually very loud and crowded, here, people are pretty chill about drinking, seems like they just wanna have some fun, enjoy some wine, no need to be super wasted.
I don’t remember if I had any real British meal, ( don’t know if the dinners we had at the EF center count as British food.) but I really enjoyed KFC hot wings in Oxford. It’s totally odd that I don’t usually have that much KFC in Seattle or in my hometown. But the hot wings here are awesome! Cannot live without them. I also really like British tea, probably because the coffee here is not as good as in the US; tea is now my favorite drink.
After almost seven days in Oxford, everyday I feel like I live in history. I even forgot to call my family till my mom went super worried and kept calling Kevin’s parents to see if I am fine. I felt bad, but they really don’t need to worry. I like how every morning I wake up, I am excited to see what new cook things I am going to experience today.