Thanks to my wonderful family, I’ve survived my first full day in Scotland! I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t homesick or that I felt fully acclimatized to my new environment, but it’s been nice to stay with family and get over the jet lag in a familiar house.<\/p>\n
I arrived yesterday after a long (long!) day of travel; an eight and a half hour flight to Heathrow followed by a four hour layover, then an hour and a half to Edinburgh,\u00a0getting lost in the airport and trying to find my aunt, and finally driving the hour to Hawick, where my dad’s family is based.<\/p>\n
Today I slept in (thanks, jet lag) and eventually wandered around, taking advantage of the lack of rain. It’s been nice to visit with the family – we don’t make it over here very often, so even just sitting down for coffee and a chat feels like a luxury! Part of me wishes we lived here, but there are so many things about my life in Vancouver that I miss when I’m away for too long, and although I’m unsure of where I will end up living as an adult, I know that Vancouver will always have my heart.<\/p>\n
I’m here in Hawick until next weekend and don’t have extensive plans; I’d love to see\u00a0as many relatives as possible and make it to my grandparents’ graves at some point this week. Aside from that, I am hoping to kick the jet lag in the butt before I have to be in school mode, getting up for 9am classes and such.<\/p>\n
I’m still left with a lot of questions about my impending exchange; the situation in Edinburgh is not anything like what I’m used to at UBC! I feel like the communication is lacking, particularly since UBC sometimes sends me multiple emails a day, and I don’t know what to expect really. This feels kind of ramble-y, but essentially there is so much about university life over here that’s not the norm in Canada, so even though I’m a fourth year (how did this happen) I still feel like a newbie in terms of re-learning a new system.<\/p>\n
I’m excited about moving into residence and meeting new roommates and other friends, but as with any unknown situation, there are a lot of different emotions, and sometimes the excitement is taken over by worry and uncertainty about what things will be like over here. I am not really a bag of nerves, but I have mixed feelings about\u00a0jumping in at the deep end over here!<\/p>\n
If anyone has encouraging words about exchange or moving away from home, they’re always appreciated! More updates later, hopefully with pictures included \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thanks to my wonderful family, I’ve survived my first full day in Scotland! I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t homesick or that I felt fully acclimatized to my new environment, but it’s been nice to stay with family and get over the jet lag in a familiar house. I arrived yesterday after a long (long!) day of travel; an eight and a half hour flight to Heathrow followed by a four hour layover, then an hour and a half to Edinburgh,\u00a0getting lost in the airport and trying to…read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","et-no-image","et-bg-layout-dark","et-white-bg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/20794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":121,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120\/revisions\/121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/hannahps\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}