Yep, I'm American... I Think

A certain someone told me that she follows my blog quite closely and, therefore, I should update it as often as I can. Well, in all truth, I could update this blog daily because I have that much time on my hands but in reality no one really wants to hear about my day to day boring-ness. But just to humor this friend of mine I will tell you about my life over the past few days (even though I was planning to take some more pictures before I blogged again).

I started classes. Two of them are HUGE lectures with 100 to 200 students (Foundations of Criminology and American History 2). My other class, Identity, War and Revolution in Europe 1789-1918, is much smaller with about 30 students and is discussion based. I'm excited about all of them but I particularly liked the lecture on my second day of American History. During this class our lecturer "quizzed" us with some American trivia. It is with a heavy heart that I tell you that I did not know: the population of the U.S. (I was WAY off), that we had a president who was unmarried, or how many presidents had been assassinated. Our approximate population is 305,200,000 people (I guessed about 150 million above that - whoops) and the only unmarried U.S. president was James Buchanan. Apparently four, not two, U.S. presidents have been assassinated. In chronological order, they are: Abraham Lincoln (1865), James Garfield (1881), William McKinley (1901), and John F. Kennedy (1963). Random fact: November 22 (the day Kennedy was shot) is also the day Margaret Thatcher left office... obviously not the same year. However, I did know: the percentage of the population that is white (72%), the percentage of the population that is African-American (13%), how many time zones are in the U.S. (4), and that the border between U.S. and Canada stretched about 4,000 miles (just FYI the U.S./Mexico border is about 1,900 miles). I'm sure Mr. McCollum would cringe if he knew about my severe lack of knowledge on American history (and can you believe I'm considering it as my focus for my history major?!). Aside from becoming very aware that the British know more about America than most Americans, I think this will be one of my favorite classes even though it covers my least favorite part of U.S. history.

Last night I went to this bar/resturanut called Frankenstein's with a few of the girls I've met here. The cool thing about Frankenstein's is that it was a church and has now been converted into this big bar. Despite being a very cool atmosphere (a plastic Frankenstein makes a showing every two hours or so via slow crane-like bed thing that hangs above the main resturant area), we waited FOREVER for our food. Granted, Tuesday is a very busy night because students eat for free provided they buy a drink; nevertheless, we were told twice that they were out of the food we wanted and proceeded to spend nearly 3 and a half hours there and most of that time was spent waiting. It was funny for a while and then it just got kind of ridiculous. I think we spent about as much money replenishing our drinks as we would have if we'd actually paid for a meal elsewhere but whatever. It made for some good girl bonding time. From now on we plan on going for lunch on Tuesdays instead because it might be less crowded and they won't have run out of our food.

It was a nice day in Edinburgh today meaning it was cold and overcast but not very rainy. Nothing really exciting happened today except that I bought a sweatshirt at a second-hand shop because I was so cold on my walk back to my dorm. That's my update and I hope that someone is somewhat satisfied. :)