Things To Be Doing Lately

1. Go to the Edinburgh Zoo and spend a terrific day in the rain checking out Hyraxes and baby Wallabies and Zebras and fulfilling your ambition of the last five months and (finally!) seeing the Penguin Parade.

2. Eat your first deep-fried Mars Bar. It is something of a Scottish specialty, for some unknown reason, and isn't actually worth trying ... but if you really have to, make sure that you split it with four or five people, because one bite of that sucker will have you feeling about ready to die from a heart attack or clogged arteries or system failure, or something equally as disgusting / pathetic.

3. Go see the Harry Potter toilet in the Elephant House, where J.K. Rowling wrote the first HP book. There are three stalls, each with quotes and dedications and love notes to Harry freaking Potter, and also Severus Snape. However, although it is quite a lot of fun to stand inside the stall and laugh at all the awesome things written inside, you should probably limit your time in there, otherwise a poor old lady waiting to use the toilet will be slightly mad at you when you come out grinning with your camera in hand and she has been standing there doing the pee dance for about five minutes.

4. Obligatory tourist-y picture inside a telephone booth.

5. Go to the playground by the Uni at night. For some reason, this is an important part of study abroad, as almost all of the Butler kids have done it.

6. Go on a ghost tour of the underground vaults of Edinburgh (a place which apparently is actually haunted and you have no interest in being but your friends make you go anyway because they are so sweet like that). You will probably hold your friends' hands the entire time and jump at every changing shadow or gust of air, especially since the guide tells you that there are no drafts in the vaults.

7. Travel to North Berwick for a very windy, very cold day on the beach. Actually, it is only about an hour on the beach and two hours in a tea room trying to get warm again, but who's counting?

it's been pretty busy around here lately.