Scottish Deep Thoughts

The past 7 days have been a blur and I am just catching my breath now. I was busy collecting money and permission slips and organising last minute details for 2 school trips on the weekend. The first was Friday to Glasgow to watch a production of Romeo & Juliet. 24 students, 3 other staff members and I left right after school (1:30 on Fridays) and made it to Glasgow by 5. We booked Pizza Hut for dinner before the show at 7:30. I was expecting a very traditional performance. Everyone was pleasantly surprised to see that it was a modernised version (think the Leonardo di Caprio version but set in a Glasgow tenement). It was great. We had just finished studying it in class so my students were really into it...some tears were even shed from some of them! A succesful trip ended back at home at 2am.



The next day I was off again to Murrayfield in Edinburgh with 40 students to watch the 6 Nations rugby match Scotland v. England. A packed stadium of 50,000 fans turned out to watch Scotland beat the "Auld Enemy". This is one of the best memories since I've been here! (the boys with the painted faces were part of our group).

Sunday I was able to catch my breath...until Monday. After a particularly stressful day of teaching I took my rugby team up to Inverness to play Dingwall. We hadn't played this team before but knew we had a good chance of winning as they were a newly formed team. We played well and chalked up our first victory! The guys were really excited and I was happy that they finally won!

So now I am enjoying the second consecutive day off due to "bad weather" (bad weather in Scotland refers to 6 inches of snow). It was a pretty weak reason for school closure compared to Canadian standards but I'm not gonna complain.