So...the past few days have been pretty interesting, finding my around and all. We made it down to their mall and basically shopped for a while at their "Pound Store" (basically our dollar tree)...which I never thought I'd love that place so much! I basically got everything there I needed. After, I bought an awesome cd at their store...a band called JLS. They're from England and are pretty big here right now. For any of you that know me well enough you will not be surprised when you hear them...just type in "JLS 'One Shot' music video on youtube. That will say it all :)

After that the mall's alarm system went off and some scottish automated voice said "This is an emergency" and no one would let anyone in their stores anymore so we had to leave and a firetruck came. Guess we'll never know what happened! We also went to this interesting store where they just had a bunch of catalogues you looked through, found what you wanted, then went and told the lady at the counter the number for it, and they gave you a ticket to wait for your order number to be called, then they gave it to you. Pretty cool, but also different.

Today we had a bus tour of Stirling and the surrounding areas. We went to Dunblane, saw their cathedral, to Stirling castle, and then to their municipal building. There, a young boy in a kilt playing the bag pipes greeted us as we walked in to meet the mayor or "provost". They had all sorts of little snacks for us inside this really nice room and people serving all sorts of alcohol to us in wine glasses, beer, wine, and even orange juice haha which of course I had. Our tour guide on the bus was pretty funny. He is a student at the University and Irish and said it was the "blind leading the blind" cause he hadn't been around in the city much in the past four years...awesome.

Some random things I've learned:

- buses here have seat belts...I almost asked if they were kidding when they said "buckle up" on the bus. I guess the like to be safe here in Scotland.

- The sink has 2 faucets, one hot, and one cold. So basically I have to decide when I'm washing my face whether or not I want to burn it off, or freeze it.

- I have yet to see any big awesome houses...they're all smaller and really close together. I've only seen some big castles.

- Our bus tour guide said not to try and capture the ducks in the "loch" on campus since supposedly some Chinese students were thrown out of campus for doing so one time...the tour guide then went on to say "They probably wanted to eat them." And then I thought "ummmm I don't think you can say that...especially since there's some on our bus"... haha. Yea, and people were worried about me saying something stupid!

- They seem to serve all food in smaller portions than I'm used to, and I wasn't the only one who noticed that. Again, should I be surprised??