Edinburgh, here I come!

I always feel the Chinese translation of the name 'Edinburgh' is very romantic...爱丁堡...爱(ai) means LOVE, 丁 (ding) means small and 堡 (bao) means castle...perhaps the Chinese word 爱丁堡 together can mean 'to love the small castle'???!!! Am I too romantic to think in this way?

My journey to Edinburgh started on the evening of the 15th - the day after the mid-Autumn Festival:

13-hour flight from Hong Kong to London, followed by 1.5-hour flight to Edinburgh. I watched Made of Honour (quite boring...but some parts are set in Scotland!) and a British film called Summer on the plane...also been able to sleep for a few hours which never happened to me before and it was good. Heathrow is always very busy and crowded with travellers and never fails to disappoint them - not about overbooking or losing baggage this time, but I was told to go to another counter and undergo the health control process (simply filling in a form and answering a few questions like whether or not you have done a chest X-ray etc.) when I had only less than half an hour for my connecting flight. Oh well, another amazing race to the boarding gate before it closed! (Jenny: Remember the exciting race in the Tokyo airport?!)

Edinburgh was very cold and wet in the early morning on the day of my arrival (summertime here, mind you!), and I found it so depressing. Checking in my room in Churchill House, joining a uni tour and buying groceries in Tesco were all what I did before heading to bed for a 14-hour beauty sleep. :)

The weather was much, much better on the second day - warmer, better visibility and SUNSHINE!!! (Please bear with me about the frequent weather update as I am so strongly influenced by the British weather...) I went to Adam House and finished the matriculation (i.e. registration) process, so I am now one of the University of Edinburgh's students officially! I also met all of my 12 classmates in the orientation session in the afternoon - they are from all over the world (surprisingly enough, no one from the mainland China!): Greece, Poland, Spain, Japan, Taiwan, Macau, the US, the UK and Hong Kong (that is me!)! A very interesting cultural and linguistic mix indeed! My timetable is not very impressive though - 6 courses in all five weekdays in the first term, but thank God there are no 8 am or 5 pm lessons.

Other achievements of the day included wandering around and getting lost in the city centre while locating museums, galleries, theatres, pubs and most importantly, the shopping area in Princes Street, going to the Warden's welcome dinner in the students' common room to meet some new people from all over the world (including a HKU exchange student!) and have the Indian curry dinner for free, and also applying for a Clubcard in Tesco to earn points and save some pennies! :P

Still no Internet in my room yet...No newspaper, no TV, no Internet, no MSN...seems like I am losing touch with the real world...What I saw in the paper is Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch and more recently the Lloyds TSB and Halifax Bank of Scotland................