Edinburgh Exchanges

So the majority of this week would be incredibly boring to describe, it mostly involved classes and reading so I'm going to spare you all the details! I'm beginning to find my feet with classes and I'm noticing the same literary vocab coming up again and again which is reassuring for exams and for dissertation writing next year - I always find the right vocabulary is half the battle when it comes to writing literature essays, even in English.

This week, I've also made a decision regarding what I want to do when I graduate, since my degree is single honours German I've always been drawn to the translation side of things and was hoping to do a Masters in Translation Studies after I graduate but since I've been here I've realised how difficult it would be making a living from freelance translation and how competitive it is - I only really have three languages; English, German and French - and I realise that many people out there not only have more but also have more obscure languages and that's where the money is - I could always pick up a fourth language, Dutch perhaps since I could speak it fluently as a child and it would be easier to relearn. However, this week I have realised that my interest really does lie far more in literature and so I've decided to go back to a previous plan of teaching English at high school level. So I realise this is all slightly off-topic but it has been quite a major decision for me and so I've also decided to take an extra English literature course here to take that interest further and also to make my application to PGCE English a little bit more attractive, since I don't have a full English Lit degree.

Anyway, enough of that, what I really want to write about is the weekend! This weekend, Sarah and I travelled to Salzburg and it was amazing! I think it's always true of capital cities that they never fully represent their country - Edinburgh is very little like the rest of Scotland and Vienna is very little like the 'real' Austria but here we were trundling through genuine Austrian countryside with mountains and those really cute wooden houses. Salzburg itself was so pretty and it was really easy to get to. We spent 20 Euros on a Vorteilskarte which gets you about 50% off train tickets and so our return to Salzburg cost us just 44,80. We decided to go early saturday morning and come back on sunday evening so that we only had to pay for one night's accommodation. We stayed in the nicest hostel I've ever stayed in! It was 17 Euros for a bed in a dorm and the hostel had a really good party atmosphere, good food and everyone there was so friendly (although entirely english-speaking!) We bought a 24 hour Salzburg card which gives you access to all of the museums and sights as well as free public transport so we visited the fortress, Schloss Hellbrunn, Mozarts Wohnhaus, the toy museum and Mirabell Gardens at which point a combination of too many museums and too much beer the night before caused us to collapse on the train journey home! It was a really awesome trip and I definitely think I'll go back but maybe take an extra night just to be able to do everything at an easier pace - I was so tired when I got back last night!

My favourite part of the trip was definitely the trick fountains in Schloss Hellbrunn. Basically an eccentric, old, rich man designed a garden to amuse himself; it involves a variety of fountains spraying you with water as you pass by. There's even a table where he would entertain his guests by spraying water from their seats, they of course were not allowed to stand up until he did and so he would just sit and watch them wince. It's definitely the kind of thing I would do if I had ridiculous amounts of money!

Speaking of which, with the very welcome arrival of erasmus grants I'm really having to restrain myself from buying more things than I'll ever be able to ship home! I did buy a really warm winter coat today since my old one is both too big for me and has holes and tomorrow I'm going boot shopping - I did have to seriously restrain myself from buying a dress today which was both not in my size and out of my price range! I have to keep reminding myself that I want to be able to afford to travel more and so I'm trying to budget on little, every day things so I'll have the means to see more of Europe before I have to go back home to reality!

Ok, so this was the week that I was away exploring Washington, D.C and New York. So, this is actually last week’s entry that I didn’t have time to post as I was shuttling between cities on crazy buses.

Shopping in America is ridiculous. Firstly, because it is mainly done inside. To me, hailing from Manchester (rain, wind, rain, hail, rain – a typical summer) and Edinburgh (repeat Manchester’s weather, but ten times more extreme and ten degrees colder), shopping isn’t shopping without the added frisson of excitement that comes from pelting between shops whilst trying to avoid a soaking. And as I live in two cities, I’ve never really had the need to go to shopping malls, preferring walking down roads and braving the weather to pumped-out muzak and air-conditioning.

The mall is the quintessential American experience. The staple of every teen movie and most horror movies (a coincidence? I think not), they have always held a sort of fascination for me – I think it’s something to do with how they are both entirely artificial and yet at the same time try to emulate the outside world with their trees and fountains.

And why not plunge in at the deep end? On Saturday, I decided to brave the largest mall in the United States – the King of Prussia mall just outside of Philadelphia. The name, even though it’s actually named after a nearby town, says it all – the ostentation, the sheer size, the never-ending shops.

In order to get to the KoP from Haverford, it’s easiest to take the R100 shuttle train and then a bus. The R100 seems to be exclusively populated by homeless people and alcoholics, and catching it is always an interesting experience. It zips through the suburbs, and deposits its passengers at 69th Street Terminal – an exciting place where half of the adverts are in Korean, most things are broken, and the streets are eerily deserted for a transportation hub. As I’m still relatively new here, and don’t know how much things cost, I am perfectly ok with asking and people generally are perfectly ok with responding politely. Or, at least, all people other than Philadelphia-area transport workers who have so far been uniformly grumpy and seem to enjoy belittling anyone who doesn’t know exactly how much a ticket costs, or whether to pay at the beginning or end of the journey (it seems to vary with no rhyme nor reason).

Once at the mall, the shops and salespeople assail you. There are also food courts everywhere, with restaurants and fast-food joints, and it would be entirely possible to never need to leave. I could have gone a bit crazy and bought everything that I saw (yay for the weak dollar!), especially since the appalling state of the economy means that there are sales left, right and centre, and as someone with no property, no credit card, and no stocks or shares, I, like many students, am in a pretty safe place until job-finding time comes around.

And with that cheery thought, I’m going to leave you – sleep well.