So apparently when you start having a life again, it means you have so much less time to do blog things. Oops.

Last weekend was my homestay, in this tiny little town called Kirkoswald (literally, the church of Oswald), population, like, 200. It was the best of everything British: lots of sheep, rainy mornings and rainier days, more tea than I've had in the last 20 years, breakfasts of toast and jam, saying "ta, love" instead of thank you, and talk of hunting as an elite sport. The town and area were so perfectly English that I almost kept expecting Mr Darcy to come striding up out of the mist, black cloak billowing behind (sadly, no such thing happened).

[[Side note: I manged to forget my camera in my flat, so all pictures are stolen from my friend's facebook.]]

The family that I stayed with was hosting another Butler girl from my program, also named Emily, so we were called "the two Emilys" all weekend, and although I'm pretty sure I haven't met her before, we clicked so well it wasn't even funny.

But the homestay was incredible, despite all the rain. Our family (Judith and Paul, their two daughters Libby and Ella, and black lab Midge) host students frequently and had this knack of making you feel like a part of their family instead of a house guest. We compared odd sayings and food habits (apparently they had never heard of peanut butter and jelly sandwhiches and thought they sounded gross. Our immediate response was "what kind of children are you???").

They kept us busy constantly, with rock climbing lessons Saturday morning (and yes, I conquered my fear of heights enough to do it too), then a trip to Carlisle for the youngest to go shopping and us to see Carlisle Castle:

although of course it was rainy when we saw it. That night we had a casino night fundraiser for the girl's cricket club, where Emily and I discovered that we should never gamble for real and they gave raffle prizes of wine to twelve year olds. Back at the house the kids went to bed and the adults (so weird, being an adult now) sat around with - you guessed it - tea and more food talking about the big things in life. The next morning we took the girls to cricket practice and then sat in a tiny little cafe with the best Italian hot chocolate and appetizers probably on the whole island, talking more and laughing until we couldn't breathe. It was very sad leaving them, but they invited us back and gave us all their contact information so we could get in touch if we had any questions about anything at all (like what "rocket" is - turns out to be arugala). I'd like to think that they weren't just being nice, because I liked them a LOT, and Penrith station is only two hours from Edinburgh by train. It was so nice eating home food and feeling like part of a family, even for a few days.

In other news, we discovered that the fantastic bakery we visited in St Andrews also has a store in Edinburgh, so five of us are venturing there tomorrow, and then the reunion dinner for the Butler students is tomorrow as well. Strange to think that we've been here for a month now, long enough to have a reunion. Life here is moving so fast, it seems. Then Friday I'm off to Glasgow for the weekend.

And I promise not to forget the camera this time.

London was amazing too.

Meesh and I in front of Buckingham