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 17. September - 27 September

Scary how long I've already spent here in Scotland! Actual studies began here last monday, but in actuality I've been doing very little studying. The level is quite low for a lot of the courses, so I don't feel very pressured quite yet.

So what has my time been spent on then? Honestly, I wish I could give you a list of super cool amazing nature I've seen and cool parties and people I've met, but not too much has happened this week :(

But what little has happened I shall show you! My memory is a little fuzzy, so I don't quite recall the timeline of all these

The student house had organized a short (as in very short, after 30 mins they more or less just said "there's very little interesting to say about Aberdeen" and stopped the tour) around the city center and beach. It really is a very nice looking city!

The student house had also organized a "catch the chicken event", where we had to solve various challenges in the city center, each one revealing a hint as to where the chicken man (a guy dressed in a chicken outfit) was hiding. It was pretty fun! Amongst these was taking pictures of 3 people dressed in yellow, which turned out to be surprisingly difficult to find, so we had to get creative:

We also had to "make a birdnest of random objects"

I can't offer an explanation as to the middle fingers, I think we were mad at the judges for denying our previous submission on the basis of having no eggs.

On Wednessday I once again went to the philosophy society, which I quite enjoy. We went out partying a bit afterwards:

On thursday I had no lectures, so I decided to go to Stonehaven, a beautiful harbor town about 40 mins away from Aberdeen. Here you can walk over to Dunnotar castle, an abondoned castle. I didn't actually enter the ruins due to the hefty price of entry, but the walk there was amazing!

Stonehaven is also home to the fish 'n chips cafe that invented the feared "Deep fried Mars bar", now found all accross Scotland:

I didn't actually have any, but am open to do so with friends in the future.

On friday people had organized a Tour 'd Chambre at the student dorm, which was super fun! Honestly a wonderful party, and probably my favourite night in Scotland so far. But I've no pictures to show for it unfortunately : [

Saturday I went on a little walk with the "Highland Faffers". Our weather has been absolutely amazing for Scottish standards this week, and the walk was quite beautiful! We started the walk at the oldest bridge in Scotland, very close to the student dorm:

That's about all I have to show for now! I will leave you on the scottish informal name for 'flødeskum' (whipped cream) that I found sort of funny:

Midday 12. September - 17. September evening

I really need to start doing updates more often, cause I'm realising now that I can't remmember at all (at least in this state of tiredness) what I've been up to this week, only the last two days. It turns out that studies did not start on monday, we had one whole intro week of just events and socialising! That's actually been super nice, as I needed some more time to settle in and get ahold of the essentials things I needed to live here.

To be honest, there were some days, I think especially Sunday and Monday of quite little actually happening, and me just being in a strange state of FOMO paranoia over what social events I might be missing out on. We did have a truly amazing game of werewolf on Sunday though, which was really lovely.

Tuesday I was kind of just faffing about with no particularly well-defined goal. I had decided that unlike the former days of vague paranoia, today was going to be focused primarily on practical goals and boring work I had otherwise postponed. The boring work was done around 12, after which I headed to the city to check out the closest thrift shops. I then got the brilliant idea to buy a TV, a pretty chonky heavy TV ... 2kms away from where I live. And because this is Scotland, it of course rained. IT RAINS ALL THE TIME HERE. I would go so far as to say that it rains more than it does not rain. The rain is rarely _heavy_, which is nice, but by gods does it rain. The helpers at the thriftshop gave me a plastic bag I could sort of put over half of the TV, but honestly as i had finished walking just half a kilometer, the whole situation seemed grim. I had to constantly take breaks because the TV was so heavy. Luckily though, we're not in Denmark, and people here in Scotland are super nice and helpful, so on the way home I ran accross some students also going to the Hillhead Village, and they just straight up carried my TV the entire way there. I didn't even have a choice, they were just like "Mate, we're helping you with that". It was a local scot and two americans.

I gave it some days of drying before I turned it on but ... it works now :D !

For the end of Tuesday, the erasmus student network had organized a party at a club. It was pretty fun! I met some local scots, danced a wee bit (but only a wee bit because people are pussies and they don't want to dance :[ ), sung some Kareoke, then left around 10-11pm. It was fiiiiiiiiiiiiine, but also quite sort of spiritually empty. Like there was so many people here I knew but didn't really know well, i just kind of drifted from person to person, and remmember feeling a bit lonely as I left.

The societies begin

On Wednesday was the big "welcome fair", where each of the 150+ (!) university societies get to adversite and promote their club and activity

... Sponsered by Dominos pizza, of course. Anyways, besides the massive 2hr queue, this was pretty cool! And a lot of the societies really sparked my interest. I had been feeling a bit down over lacking genuine connection with people the last few days, so it was nice this through some of these societies

Of the ones that sparked my interest; Badminton, book club, cocktails and mocktails, MathSoc, Bouldering, Filmmaking, Philosophy, Mountaneering, The Highland Faffers. After going through the booths, the Sport Village (a big sports complex in Aberdeen) that hosted this event had also brought to the field outside some scottish wildlife: Highland cows! And a cute goat! And there was massive fluffy bunnies too. Anyways, wednesday was super enjoyable. After I finished the welcome fair i went to get a haircut, checked out the library, encountered by chance this massive 70kg therapy dog ... and worked a bit on my website. Next up on the agenda was amassing a bike. I had heard from another student here of BeCycle, where you could supposedly get a bike for free just by paying a deposit. This place indeed does exist, and its super cool:

Bassicly you book a time, talk about what kind of bike you want, then they find out, tell you how its broken, and tell you how to fix it. So you have to do a lot of this fixing yourself, but they'll help you significantly, and will make sure to safety check the bike before they hand it over. I spent about 2-3 hours there, but it was a super nice process, and I'm very happy with how my bike rides.

After the bike fixing, I just barely managed to get to the only bike shop that was still open to buy a lock and safety helmet, ran by the mcD near it to get some quick dinner, then biked down to a philosophy night event I had heard about at the fair. This event was great, and I really really liked the people there, they seemed super cool, and ended up drinking a bit with them after.

On thursday, I went to the filmmaking society intro meeting, where we had to write, shoot and edit a short film in 3hrs. It was honestly a bit of a mess, and not particularly well organised, especially the editing (they wanted us to use university laptops that couldn't at all handle the footage, and we had to edit all together in the same room with a bunch of noice). Honestly around when we had to edit I was pretty close to just giving up, as this didn't seem to work at all, and we had shot like less than half of the stuff we needed. And all the noise! So i decided to just kind of say fuck it and take the short in a more surreal weird direction. You can see the result here:

Yikes

I then went to the math society at 6pm, where they had a math quiz.

... But it was 200 questions long! I really cannot quite convey just how long a 200 quiz Kahoot feels, but its endless. And it was actually a very well made Kahoot BUT the first 100 questions had nothing to do with math! I wouldn't say I regretted going buuuuuut it did feel slightly awkward being this 26 year old in a classroom with mostly 17-19 year olds doing a kahoot. I left a wee bit exhausted.

That's it for this update! Will post more pics tommorow though!

11. September - Midday 12. September

Everything went pretty good today, honestly no complications throughout!

I travelled from Esbjerg Airport, the tiniest airport in the world, to Aberdeen airport, and went through security and borders check with no issues (they really honestly could not give less of a shite)

The flight offered some really gorgoeous clouds, and the scottish service on board was super nice, they were very talkative (expecting to see more of this).

I took a bus from the airport, then walked the last kilometer and a half over to the hillhead student village. You walk through a super pretty park with a large church towering over it:

Strange fact about this park; It was originally the garden of some rich family, but was donated to the public on the condition that the nature would not be disturbed by putting lights in there. This means the park is completely dark, and incredibly dangerous after sunset:

We've been told not to walk here after sunset, as there's lots of muggings.

Anyways, I arrive at the student village, and its super nice:

The people at the reciption were super nice and easy to work with, and gave me my card:

I really do the oppenheimer face well

My room is quite small, and smells kind of strange. Its also a huge mess right now! I really need to soon spend some time packing everything out, but i keep postponing it on the grounds that I need to be social. There's also incredibly little in the kitchen. Went to Alda today to buy a decent amount of the essentials, but there's still a lot of work needed there.

Anyways, I've been a dofus and forgotten a ton of stuff at home. I also swear i had read on the website that you didn't need to bring a duvet and pillow, but you did, but also my ass was saved by a big room of leftover duvets from last semester! Phew!

I needed to wash this duvet and these pillows (not catching scabies in the UK again...) and the washing house turned out to be a great social spot! Met two dutch folk in there, and decided to go to Lidl with them

I then returned, met my roomies, all of which (except the last guy whom i have not met) seem super nice! Two german ladys and a scottish lad. Also turns out that the two german ladies also wake up early, which is quite nice!

Anyways, after a bit of time chilling, i want to get some nice indian food with the two netherlandians (dutch folk) and a third Icelandic guy that happened to have also studied in Aarhus. No pictures of the indian food unfortunately, but it was pretty banging (also very expensive though).

Town (at least the part i walked through here) was super nice and medieval-looking.

Today was spent on:

That's it for the first update!

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