So last Monday, I had to go to a First Aid Training Course taught by the infamous Tom. This guy is a giant, ex-army Glaswegian man with one of those inscrutable accents. I really can't even describe the hilarity of having him around, slagging off the university, first aid techniques ("aye, 'tis better en thae militairy") and such. He also warned us at the beginning that he'll "bee callen thae gar-rils [girls] 'swee'art' far 'tis a ganheratiun-ul thang an' if ye dunnae like it, I'll call ye 'sir'" because apparently a girl tried to file a sexual harrassment suit one time against him. He was completely harmless though and very nice. Lots of bizarre stories. He had one that took place on a remote roadway up in the Highlands that is supposedly nicknamed "yankee road". Now, I don't know if you know this, because I certainly didn't when I first moved here, but calling an American a "yank" is extremely derogatory. He was kind enough to apologise to me for saying it, though it doesn't really bother me too much. It just helps me know if people are being particularly unkind to me. The other great thing about him was that he constantly repeated that if you come upon a scene make sure you "look up for danger". He repeated this so many times, that some of my friends, after they took this course, later started a band called Look Up for Danger. That's how much of a legend he is. Oh and another thing, and this was really weird as I keep finding words that don't mean the same in American English: so Tom was talking about a car crash, for example, and would say "you come across the scene and there are 4 casualties" so I'm like, "great! call the mortuary and walk away". Thankfully I didn't say that out loud, but it took me half the day to realise that "casualty" here means the same thing as "victim" in America and vice-versa. So weird. Later, when I was relaying this to people at the pub their response was "is it possible that ER is a lot more grim than we previously thought?" for they didn't know the difference either. So funny.
The next day was our friend's birthday and he, unfortunately, came down with a nasty cold (the same one I've got now, I believe) and we were supposed to go out for his birthday. He canceled our nice reservations at last minute, so there was a scrambled effort for curry instead, since we had spent the day preparing for a big meal. Mmmm Lamb Saag. I also had my first Gravitational Waves SUPA course. So the Scottish University Physics Alliance offers courses around Scotland through Video Conferencing for PhD students to learn more in a certain topic they feel they should know more about. It was really nice and relaxed. Since Glasgow is the university for Gravy Waves, the lecture is held in person there, by my professors.
Wednesday was a particularly busy day. I spent the morning preparing for my presentations I had to give that evening at the TeleCon then in the afternoon went off to the Observatory to prepare the labs for this Friday. I hadn't been to the observatory before and it was a bit further than I previously had imagined. We drove, of course, myself, the professor and three guys (two PhD students and one postdoc) all went down to make sure everything was ready to go. It was a really cute observatory, pretty standard actually. Lot of classrooms, labs, offices and a few telescopes. Oh, and a little makeshift planetarium in the back. I came back from that and gave almost an hour long update to our LIGO working group at our weekly telecon. I was updating on a new code, presenting a proposal for a new project I'm going to be doing and presenting a full known pulsar list I had put together. All were well received by everyone, though it was very exhausting.
On Thursday I had to go to a Communication Workshop. Yes. Enough said. Though the one thing that was interesting/funny was that the guy running it was a lot like Mr Weasley from the Harry Potter films. He talked for a while about learning how to give and receive compliments. The receiving bit was interesting because he was talking about how the British culture is wired to bat off compliments in a defensive mode. Such as "That's a nice tie you're wearing today." "Oh this is really old." It was very much geared toward teaching us how to teach others and ask good questions and communicate to different audiences. But yeah, pretty painful.
Friday we went out for the usual pub-go and I had a lovely lovely veggie burger. A few people dribbled in and out of the pub and I left relatively early to go home and talk to a friend but also because I got a text message that evening asking if I wanted to climb Ben Lomond the next day. Ben Lomond is another munro (higher than 900 metres) and looks over Loch Lomond, the largest loch in Scotland about an hour outside of Glasgow. I was super psyched about this because we had been having fantastic weather that week and I wanted to climb a proper peak in good weather. Also, when I first moved here, my dad and I went to Loch Lomond and the Trossachs with a little tour bus. I remember seeing Ben Lomond and thinking about how I would get to climb it one day. This was also a perfect opportunity because I love the feeling of nature in the autumn and Scotland has some gorgeous season change. We met up bright and early, just three of us and drove out through the back roads into the highlands. It was some great winding roads with so many colours and the sun rising over the hills. I've said this before, but it does feel like Colorado a lot of the time, just a bit more rolly. Kind of like driving through the foothills. Anyway, it was absolutely spectacular and the mist hovering over the fields definitely added to that ambiance. We went through Drymen, which is a cute little town on the edge of the loch where apparently a lot of people get married, then up the west side of the water. We decided to take the "tourist" way up the mountain as it had been a while since I had gone hiking. This was a long, easy walk up the back of the mountain. It had it's steep bits but would then flatten for a while, repeating this the entire way. The way up the mountain took a little less than 3 hours and felt so good when we finally made it. One of the women had to turn back due to a stitch in her side, but she was a good sport about it since she's basically grown up on these mountains. But the other woman and myself sat on the top of the mountain and nibbled on the obligatory sandwiches and tea as we looked over the hills of the highlands.
We took the non-tourist side down, which especially at the beginning was a near-vertical descent, but gave some much more spectacular views of the loch. It was particularly gorgeous near the end when it went down into the trees. Looking back on the mountain, you could see a steady stream of people going up the tourist way as it was later in the day, so thankfully we didn't do that. It was super cute though, hearing all the families, as we got closer to the bottom, with the little Glaswegian kids moaning about the hike and the parents shouting "look around! you should be so lucky to see this!" ... total flashback to my childhood of hiking in the Rockies. There was a beautiful meadow area just over the trees that looked over the loch and I think it would be worth doing if there wasn't enough time/energy to hike the whole mountain, to go this way up to the meadow and have a picnic. Anyway, it was a gorgeous day.
That night we were going out again to the Butterfly and the Pig restaurant (look at the link, it's the cutest website) in the city centre to make up for the missed birthday from before. One of our friends came down from Edinburgh for it as well. After the fantastic meal (ending with Sticky Toffee Pudding, of course) we went to St George's Square which is beautiful at night and went to the old Counting House for a night-cap. Being absolutely knackered from the hike earlier (though thankfully those of us who went didn't feel as guilty about stuffing our faces) we called it an early night, but it was super fun. So that's the end of another week! Ta for now!
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