Today was a complete waste. I just felt horrible all day. I think I am having a bit of homesickness, which my other friend who lived in Europe for a year told me about. It was basically debilitating. I will just have to get up and work hard tomorrow since I have to do both Latin and Old Irish. That brings me to another subject. One of my many many readers asked what "hell Tuesday" was. It is basically 2 hours of Old Irish, 2 hours of Medieval Latin, and 1 hour of postgraduates arguing at eachother with large vocabularies and often very little brains. In addition, there is only a 1 hour break at noon for lunch. It is an exhausting day so usually I don't do anything afterwards.
Today was Burns' Night (his birthday) in Scotland. It is basically where you hear bagpipes and eat haggis in honor of Scotland's greatest poet Robert Burns, who was for his time a general lay-about but is now the poet laureate of Scotland. There is a complete ritual which goes about eating the haggis. They play a traditional bagpipe song while it is brought into the room. Then they read Ode to the Haggis and do ritual cutting of the haggis in front of it. After they have read it and cut it, everyone toasts the haggis to a shot of whiskey. We did all of that here at Mylnes Court and they got one of the staff with the thickest Scots accent to read it. It was a glorious Burns' Night.
A note on the haggis. It is basically like a crumbly sausage. My friend who has been here and had it said it was bland but this was a nicely spiced. They even had a veggie haggis. Of course, we had whiskey. I think that the Universities in Scotland are the only ones in the world which actively encourge you to drink alcohol and they past it out at student functions. Anyway, it was all very very nice and Scottish.
In any case, I have a huge amount of work to do tomorrow so I am going to get some sleep.
posted by Chris #9:56 PM | 0 comments |
