A Year at St Andrews...

This weekend held the most weird and interesting of St Andrews traditions. I have briefly mentioned academic families to you all. Raisin Weekend is a celebration of these families.  The tradition goes as such: third and fourth year students 'adopt' Freshers and Study Abroad students (JSAs and JYAs), to be their 'children'. Their job is basically to help their children get acquainted with university life.


The festivities of Raisin Weekend start off with Raisin Sunday. In the afternoon, Academic mothers hold tea parties for their children. In days gone by there used to be mainly food at these parties, but now a days there's more drink than food. In the evening, the children are entertained by their dads' parties. Where lots more drink is provided. The parties can go on for a long time and almost everyone is at a party on that day.

The next morning (Raisin Monday) the mothers dress their children up in (usually funny) costumes and send them to collect their raisin receipts from their dads. The raisin receipt used to be a piece of parchment which acknowledged that the dad had received a pound of raisins as a thank you gift from their children in Latin. Now a days its written on almost anything. This receipt has to be carried to St Salvators Quad, where a huge foam fight takes place.  The kids get covered in shaving foam and everyone is completely unrecognisable.


My Raisin Weekend was fun. My mum's party was interesting, we had a lot of people there since it had hers and all four of her flatmates' kids. We played a few drinking games until everyone was too disorganised to play anything any more. Then there was just music and socialising. I went on to my dad's party in the evening and I had fun over there as well. Our hall was full of people having parties all over the place and it was noise and mess everywhere. I actually got to bed pretty early that night.

Monday Morning I woke up to go over to my mum's so she could dress me up. I was dressed up as a sheep and since one of our sisters wasn't able to come, my mum felt like her duck costume was going to go to waste and so I ended up having the head of a duck as well. A morphed sheep-duck is what I became. My other sister was dressed as a caterpillar. I went over to my dad's to collect my raisin receipt, but there was no answer when my sister and I knocked on his door. So we went to the foam fight without our receipt. That made me sad. Some of my friends had a tumble dryer as their receipt, some others had a pole with bottles attached to it, there was one who had a bust of Beethoven, and another who had a glove filled with canned food.

I made my way to the quad, and saw ton of people waiting outside with police keeping order all around. When I entered the quad with my sister, everyone was covered in foam. My sister and I locked arms and held our cans of shaving foam at the ready.  Within a minute of stepping inside, we were ambushed by two guys who covered us in foam. Then we went around spreading foam on anyone who didn't seem to be covered in enough. We saw our friends and covered them in foam as well. Then it was time to leave.

Exiting Sallies Quad on Raisin Monday

To start off this entry and to explain my excitement in the title, I have to let you all know that I have never seen the snow before and have never ever watched it snow. And with you knowing that, I'll begin...

I woke up this morning and looked outside my window. It was still dark, but the ground below looked white. At first I thought it was frost again, but it seemed to be a little too white for just frost. I said to myself, "Did it snow? in St Andrews? in November??" And the more I looked at it the more it felt like it had.

I was so excited! Snow in St Andrews! (Now, I have to explain that it does not snow very often in St Andrews, due to its proximity to the sea.)  I was busy taking pictures of the snow that lay on the rooftops and the grass, when it started to snow again. Soft, pretty, flakes came twirling down from the sky, down and down they fell until they joined the rest on the ground. It was so beautiful. Everything turned white. It looked like a Christmas card from my window!

The view from my window as I watched my first snowfall!

UPDATE:
If that much snow was cool, the next night,  we had massive (for me) amounts of snow. Everything and I mean everything  this time was white. It was so beautiful. We had enough snow for people to build snowmen, which they did on our hall grounds and on the golf course and various other places. I got to help build a snowman on the Wardlaw lawn. We named him Ian, after our warden.  We made snow angels on the lawn , and then went to slide down the hill right outside Wardlaw. 

More pictures now here!

This past week was reading week over here.  Reading Week is a week's break from classes, meant for students to catch up on reading and other work. Most people however, go home or go travelling. A few of my friends went to Berlin, a couple went to London, another went to Ireland and few others travelled around Scotland a bit.

I just stayed in hall. I was going to take advantage of Ryan Air's superb cheap flight deals, but I had an essay to write. I knew I would feel incredibly guilty if I went without having my essay done, and I knew that I would not be able to get the essay done before I went either. So I stayed here, stuck reading and writing about animal mating habits for my evolution class.

I found that living in the computer room in hall is actually not that bad. I like the lighting in there. It's a great place to study in, without being isolated. It's right opposite the dining hall, so that's convenient. It makes for a good spot to write essays, and it's nice when you have a friend in there as well.

One of my friends was writing an essay for his history class and so we'd both sit there tapping away at the keyboards, occasionally stopping to complain about how pointless it all was (me), to share a weird name in the text (him), or to tell the other about a funny passage (him and me). It might have lengthened the process a bit but it definitely made it less boring.

I did make it to Edinburgh for a night. I went there with a friend to see a play, which was quite interesting. I had fun. We had fun and spent the night at her friend's flat. We walked about Edinburgh for a bit that day, and did a tiny bit of shopping. We went to a store that had there really interesting dresses. One of them had heavy bead-work all over it, it probably weighed half as much as I do. I decided to try it on. It didn't feel quite so heavy when I was wearing it and it was reasonably okay to dance in as well. I definitely wasn't going to buy the dress, it costs something like £295! Definitely out of the question! I sneaked a few pictures of myself in the dress, though.

I worked on my essay a bit more after I got back from Edinburgh on Saturday. Then on Sunday, I had dinner with my academic mum and discovered that I have a brother on that side as well. He's quite a cheeky fellow, when our mum said she'd like to adopt him he said he wasn't sure because he had two other mums lined up and would have to decide who's the best.

The days here are getting quite short. It's four o'clock in the afternoon as I write this, and I've already had to turn on the lights in my room, although it's not completely dark just yet.  Yesterday was a dull day with heavy cloud cover and we didn't get to see the sun at all. Today was nicer, the sun showed up for a bit and it made me happy. 

This week is probably going to be uneventful, until the weekend that is. This coming weekend is Raisin Weekend, and is the highlight of the St Andrews social calendar. It should be fun, and I am looking forward to it.

I'm away from the US, but somehow I don't think I can ever truly be away. The US is everywhere in the world, on TV and in the newspapers.  Sadly, when you're actually in the US the existence of this outside world is barely noticed or acknowledged.  

 The US Presidential election took place yesterday and well, if you have an internet connection you knew about it. St Andrews has a lot of American students, so yesterday there were all night parties at various places to watch the election unfold.  Even outside of St Andrews, there was a lot of talk and hype around the US election. Newspapers had large articles about the race in the weeks leading up to it, and television coverage was widespread.

One of my friends here had her birthday yesterday, so we went out to a pub for a while and then came back to hall and turned on the TV to watch the election. The BBC was covering it here. It was a little past midnight here before the first states had counted their votes and there were cheers when Obama won a state.

I didn't stay up all night. I was too tired for that, so I went to bed at two. I was not feeling too well however, and woke up at half four because I couldn't sleep. A  friend of mine sent me a text saying "Obama won" at about 4:35. Since I was still too ill to go back to sleep I made myself a cup of tea and turned on my computer to watch a few clips of the speeches from Obama and McCain. It was quite moving to see it all. Most people over here are happy because they wanted Obama to win. This goes for both the US citizens as well as the non-US citizens out here. 

I was never truly interested in American politics, largely because I am not an American citizen as yet. But I have been reading about the presidential race while I've been in St Andrews. Maybe it's the fact that I'm here and the people here are interested in politics or maybe it's the very nature of this election, which going by the numbers, seems to have brought a lot more people out to vote and seems to have reached a lot of people.

It somehow feels like America has won back a bit of respect from the rest of the world, by electing Barack Obama as President,  the first African-American to hold that high office. It truly is a momentous time in history. It is hard to imagine that just half a century ago, blacks in America did not have the same rights as whites, and now today, Barack Obama is President. The American people have proved that they can see beyond colour and race, and the face of America has changed. The world will see a new America and one in which, as Obama said "all things are possible."

Maybe it won't be so bad to be a US citizen after all.

EDIT: The UK papers a day later.

I know this entry is a bit delayed, but I was too tired on Sunday and busy on Monday and well.... anyway, Halloween...

Yes, for those of you wondering, it is celebrated here. Kids do dress up and go trick-or-treating, and jack-o'lanterns are made as well.

Honestly, I don't know much more about  what people all around Scotland do for Halloween, but I do an awful lot about what St Andrews did. There were parties galore. Since it was a Friday night, there was the Bop as well. Uni Hall had its customary party vodka bar, and there was much dancing.  It was also the night of the James Bond film release and there was a special event for that at the cinema, it was black tie, with martinis and popcorn served.  A few of my friends attended that.

I went to the Uni Hall party, dressed as Flora- The Goddess of Flowers. It was a little bit of a cop out as I had been Flora two years ago, and some of you may remember my stories from that Halloween (wink, wink).  The thing about the costumes here is that girls tended to dress up scary, as opposed to cute or  sexy or pretty like they do in America. There were a lot of vampires and witches among the girls, and the Joker from The Dark Knight was the predominant choice among the guys. Fake blood, face paint, white powder, dark eyeshadow and black eyeliner were all significantly used among both girls and guys. There was one guy who painted himself red and stuck a note on his chest that read "Why the Irish need sun cream". It was quite a laugh. There was a girl who was "a molested Snow White", in the pretty snow with dress, but with fake blood all over her arms and knees. Slightly disturbing, but still, pretty innovative.

I enjoyed myself at the party, and later against my better judgement decided to go to the Bop. Not that I really lost anything by going, but I felt like I should have used that night to relax a bit, and maybe have done some work the next day. But I went, and partied it up even more out there. There were more crazy costumes at the Bop and it was a lot of fun dancing. I stayed till the end, and I came back quite late that night and chatted with a few friends online, before finally going to bed.

Pictures form Halloween are up in My Pictures now.