One Week Down; 21 to Go!

We have been in Scotland for one week now, and in some ways we feel like pros. I no longer have to remind myself to look “right,left,right” before I cross the street. I say “hiya” to people I pass on the Lade Braes path on the way into town, and can easily convert pounds to dollars and kilos to pounds. I even met up with a friend last night for a Zumba class and was able to understand most of what the instructor was saying. There was one point in the class where she said, just after the warmup, that everyone should feel free to take off their jumpers, and I did have to look around quickly to see what item of clothing we were supposed to remove. Thankfully, a jumper is a jacket! Zumba in Scotland is pretty much the same thing as Zumba in the U.S. (they even do the Charleston!), although I did notice that the phrase “booty shake” doesn’t really work as well when shouted in a British accent.

The whole family is starting to settle into a good morning routine, after only a week. Since the sun doesn’t come up here until about 8:30 in the morning, we’re all a little slow to get up and out of bed. The kids wake up about 7:30 and have breakfast (yougurt for John, bread and Nutella for Emma, and pieces of fruit for both), then spend about 20 minutes trying to tie their uniform ties. We leave for the bus stop about 8:20 each morning, and we’re now pretty good at timing our arrival with the arrival of the Greyfriars bus. One could set a watch by the buses here, and by the movement of the kids in the neighborhood toward school. Most of the kids headed in our direction are aiming for the 8:28 am bus to Madras College, which is the St. Andrews secondary school, though we do see a few of the littler ones darting in and out of various hedges on the way to the other primary school in town, called Lawhead. The bus to Greyfriars comes at 8:30 on the dot, and it’s usually a small, squat bus, but every once in a while, a double-decker bus comes in its place. Emma and John said that the driver won’t let the kids go up to the second level, though, which is kind of a bummer. We are all looking forward to the first opportunity to whip around one of those roundabouts from the second story of a bus, but I guess we’ll have to wait until we get to Edinburgh on a weekend trip!

The kids tell me that their bus arrives at school about ten minutes early every day, so they have a pre-school recess each morning, in which John plays soccer and Emma stands around in a big group of girls who are all texting each other ( a global phenomenon, apparently). At nine, they go into their classrooms and begin their lessons. Emma’s class is doing a bit about Robert Burns, as many people in Scotland celebrate the national poet’s birthday on January 25^th with a Burns Supper, and they are all participating in a special program on Scottish opera. John’s class is reading a novel about a ‘fat bag,’ which he says is a vacuum cleaner. Something about that seems to have been lost in translation…However, I am learning quite a bit about Scottish culture through them. Emma, for example, patiently explained to me the difference between a pence and a shilling last night. And John corrects me each time I use the word “soccer” instead of “football,” and has already adopted the correct pronunciation of Edinburgh: “Edn-bruh.”

They both seem to be getting along well with the other kids at school. Emma has made fast friends with a group of girls, and comes home every day with more tales about an English boy named Charlie who is routinely naughty. She says the girls complement her about her “mega-cool” water bottle and her blond hair. John has already been elected the de facto captain of the “football” team after he scored a quick goal during his first recess. He likes a boy named David and another named Liam, and also talks about a kid from America named Everett. He said one boy, upon learning that he wasn’t Scottish, asked him if “they have igloos in Japan.” John said, “I’m not from Japan, but no…they don’t.” Apparently, the kid nodded, satisfied with John’s answer. So, I thought they were getting along well with everyone, but when John got off the bus yesterday, he walked over to a small pile of hardened ice, left over from the snow that fell in Scotland around Christmas Day, broke off a big piece and started to kick it home. “You must be practicing for soccer, huh?” I asked. He said no…he was just pretending it was the head of a little girl in his class who is from Nigeria. When I asked why he didn’t like her, he just shrugged and said, “She asks me too many questions…” I guess I’ll have to get to the bottom of that one at some point!

Both the kids say they can understand most of their classmates most of the time. Emma thinks it’s incredibly cute that the really little girls in P1 have a Scottish accent, and when she asks them a question they can’t understand, they all say “pardon?” in tiny little Scottish voices. She said that one of her friends imitated her American accent yesterday, but that it just came out as very flat and drawly. I think that both of them are more confused by some of the vocabulary, rather than the accent: “holiday” means vacation, "trousers" means pants (and "pants" mean underwear...so that's really one to watch!) and “hob” means stove. I agree with them that it’s difficult to get used to , and still think it’s ironic that while we say “math,” they say “maths,” and yet our “sports” is their “sport.” And I would love to ask a native Scot why they pronounce a word like “river” as “riva,” and yet call someone named Lola “Loler” Seems to me that they could easily just switch that around. But, it’s probably best if I just hold my American tongue on that one!