Weekends Away

Last weekend was Halloween but instead of having a spooky night in Edinburgh, I decided to take a last minute trip with my flatmate Caoimh and her law friends Anke, Alex, and Meghan to the Highlands! Their programme had reading week and I'm not a huge fan of Halloween anyway. It was just an overnight trip with a group called MacBackpackers. We left early Saturday morning and headed north.

Our first stop was a town outside Birnam Woods, as made famous by Shakespeare's MacBeth, where Beatrix Potter used to holiday.

"Macbeth shall never vanquished be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill Shall come against him."
- William Shakespeare, Macbeth, 4.1

We got our lunches in town and walked around. There was an awesome cathedral which was half functioning, half in ruins. The cathedral is situated by the lovely River Tay.

Our next stop was the Hermitage, which is pretty much a nice park. There were lovely paths and a waterfall.

After that we travelled to Ruthven Barracks. Scotland was having a typical ten minute pouring session as we approached the barracks so we all got soaked walking up but it left us with a beautiful rainbow!

Following that we went to Clava Cairns which are 4000 year old ruins believed to have been used when humans worshipped nature and the sun and the moon. Now they're just piles of rocks.

We then stopped at the Culloden Battlefield for tea. This is where a lot of Highlanders died fighting the British. It was really sad to see all the markers for the mass graves for individual clans.

We ended the day at the shores of Loch Ness by the little town of Dores. Sorry, no monster spotted! Everyone was invited to swim in the waters, which were freezing. The only people brave enough to do it were Alex and Anke who changed into their swim suits and rain in. Caoimh and Meghan took their shoes off and waded in. I was happy enough to dip my finger in - it was ice cold! *Applause* to them.

We spent the night at a hostel in Inverness and had a lovely dinner at a place called The Castle Tavern(?). On Sunday morning we stopped at Loch Ness again. We drove along the Loch for a bit and took pictures of Urquhart Castle, a lovely ruin along the shores.

We took a few photo stops along the way back south including Falls of Foyer and Glen Coe, the site of a mass murder of a clan. We also stopped in Stirling to see the William Wallace Monument.

Hamish, the Hairy Coo

It really was a wonderful time! The girls I went with were really nice and made me feel welcome.

Yesterday, we made a trip out to Glasgow. It was me, Mags, Sophie, and Caoimh. We took the train out and spent three hours shopping at a wonderful, cheap, store called Primark. Then we took a tea break and met Sophie's friend Tasha. Then we did a little more shopping and met up with Matt, who came in later, for a drink. We had dinner at Wagamomma (joined by Danny) and then met up with Sophie's uni friends for drinks. A lovely, lovely time to be had and lots of bargains to be found!

A Tip on Tipping

As I mentioned in my last Dianna's Dash of Different Diction post, I wanted to let you all know about tipping in the United Kingdom. It's quite different here than in the United States where, in my opinion, tipping is a large part of society and is expected. Here are some examples:

-In America, if you're given a tour, you would tip the tour guide if they're good. Here no one tipped the tour guide (see the upcoming post on the trip I took to Loch Ness).

-In America, if you take a taxi, the driver waits for you to give them a tip. Here they run/drive off before you can give them one. For taxis, I usually just round up my fare and tell them to keep the change. If I don't have exact change and they give me money back, it's their loss because they usually drive away right after I had them my change. But I especially try to give them a tip if they helped me with any luggage.

-In America, waiters and waitresses rely on tips. They get paid a really low salary and make all of their income on what you leave behind for them based on their service. In general, you can give someone around 15%. I usually give that on average but more likely I'll give 20%. If they were extremely horrible and rude, I will leave 10%. In the UK, 10% is more like what you leave behind. As a former waitress, t's really hard sometimes for me to leave only 10% but my friends always give me my money back when I try to leave more.

-You don't tip the grocery delivery man who carries your groceries all the way to your flat for you.

Those are all of the examples I can think of now. If you have any questions about other situations, leave a comment and I'll ask my flatmates!