Craigs, cairns, caramel, and a whole loch moor!

This post is going to cover quite a lot of time in (hopefully) not too many words and (unfortunately) fewer pictures. My first week was "Fresher's Week," which is a week of no classes for freshmen (here "freshers") to settle in and prepare for school to start the next week. I got here exactly on time because I figured I needed to be here during that week, but it turns out I didn't really need to be here for anything until Tuesday, when I had my meeting with my academic adviser, who helped me pick my classes. I am currently enrolled in Gaelic Language for Beginners, Gaelic Culture 1A, and Power and Piety: Medieval Europe from 1100-1500. All of my classes are really fun and interesting. The first thing I learned in Gaelic was that "gay-lic" is Irish Gaelic, and "gah-lic" is Scottish Gaelic. My first two lectures in the medieval class covered the 100 Years' War, which was interesting and both lectures were pretty packed. After a summer of working asphalt, taking notes this quickly is both a bit of a shock and very refreshing at the same time. The culture class has started out with the teacher very strongly asserting a lot of her beliefs about Gaelic language and culture. Both of my Gaelic teachers grew up bilingual with Gaelic as their first language. Gaelic is dying slowly, but has been on a steady decrease ever since the turn of the century (although it was decreasing even before that). The rate at which native speakers die and new speakers are introduced to the language are unequal, and it's possible that Gaelic will be classified as a dead language in the next 25 years; it's already been classified as a minority language.
After two years of French, two years of Spanish, and two much more intensive years studying Latin, beginning languages comes pretty easily to me, so the language class is moving a bit slowly for me at the moment. I hope it'll speed up a bit once people start catching on and the grammar starts to be more heavily introduced. Right now I can tell you if the table is big, or if the window is good, but I'm itching to get into more complicated sentence constructions (not to mention learning a verb other than "to be").
In the first week I also joined two clubs: the University Concert Band, and the Lairig. I had my first rehearsal with the concert band last Tuesday. The group is huge, though mostly due to the woodwind section; there are about thirty clarinets, forty flutes, and six oboes (all of which you hear). The rest of the group has a pretty traditional representational, except that there is only one tuba and three percussionists. I won't comment on the ability of the group directly, but when I sat down next to an older woman from the community (the band doesn't include just university students) and stated while putting my horn together a little apprehensively that I hadn't really played in about six months, she smiled and said that until last year, she hadn't played in thirty years. The conductor is nice enough, and he works well with the group, but he uses a British naming system for notes, so I'm constantly having to guess what he wants us to do (it's usually pretty obvious). A quarter note is a crotchet, an eighth note is a quaver (sixteenths semi-quavers), and whole notes are semi-breves. It was a little difficult to follow at first when I had no idea whatsoever what he was talking about, but the students around me explained it during the break (the rehearsals last about two hours, once a week on Tuesday nights). I explained our system, going by fractions of the whole note (which is apparently the German terminology), and they all agreed that it made sense as well. It was a fun cultural exchange. I'll continue to play with them to get some group playing in, but I missed the audition times for the orchestra.
The second club (or society, as they are called here), was the climbing club, called Lairig, which is the Gaelic word for a hill pass. The Freshers' Trip was on Sunday, the 28th, and I bagged (you don't just climb them here) four munros in one trip. The plan was originally to do five, but we were initially held up by a couple of people that had wandered onto the long hike accidentally. Luckily, our paths crossed with a group from the Lairig doing a shorter hike and they took off with them and we took off to three more munros. The munros are any hill in Scotland over 3,000 vertical feet, and were first recorded by Sir Hugh Munro. The problem with them is that the number keeps changing because there are debates about which are individual munros, owing to the fact that there is no definite rule determining how far down you have to go or how much distance must exist between to peaks above 3,000 feet before you have two separate munros. So some munros are up one side, and then down a bit and crossing a ridge at basically the same height to another slight incline and you have the second munro. Most are pretty definite. The first count by Sir Hugh was 283, and there are currently 284 munros. I climbed four two Sundays ago: Lochnagar, Carn a' Coire Bhoidheach, Cairn Bannoch and Broad Cairn.

The highlands.
On the way to Lochnagar. It's a bit blurry because my camera was being dumb.
Lochnagar (the loch) in the background, the Lochnagar (munro) summit just to the left of me.
Almost at the summit. The weather was really good for Scotland. It only rained lightly a little bit as we approached the top, and a few more sprinkles throughout the day, but for the most part it was just windy and cold. The clouds move really fast here, everywhere, every day.
The summit plaque thing. This lists what munros are where from the top of Lochnagar.
From the top of Lochnagar.


I think this is from the top of the second munro, Carn a'Coire Bhoideach.


Pretty sure that's a different summit with a view still of Lochnagar.

To give you an idea of the wind. I have two videos, as well, but Blogger's being weird and I haven't been able to upload them just yet.
The walk was nice, and one of the Lairig members and I pretty much walked on our own ahead of the main group for most of the trip. He has climbed more than 170 munros, and is bent on doing them all. He knows a lot about them as well (everything about them I know I heard from him). The weather, again, was really good on this trip, and I enjoyed it a lot. My favorite parts of this trip were tramping through the heather and hopping over little brooks and streams in the bottoms of ravines like highlanders would have. The terrain and the weather are all what you expect, and you never forget you're in Scotland while you're out there.
My next trip with the Lairig was this last weekend. We left at 6:00pm on Friday night and headed out for a small church in the Cairngorms where we stayed, stopping at a supermarket on the way to get food for the weekend. I didn't have a sleeping bag yet, but it was alright since we were staying in a heated building as our base and going on day trips Saturday and Sunday from there. I took my comforter (which was provided by the University) from my dorm, and just slept under that on the floor. I slept just fine, and was plenty warm.
Saturday Jimmy Roy took two other newer members and myself up Monadh Mor (which now, thanks to my Gaelic class, I know "Monadh" is pronounced "mon-ach" and "Mor" means "big"). The weather on this trip was decidedly different from the last. It was raining from the start, and the wind really picked up when we started approaching the ridge. Jimmy commented "You know it's good when the rain is going up." What he meant by "it," I'm not entirely sure, but it was proper Scottish weather either way. Once on the ridge, we were into the snow, and the wind was blowing tiny icicles into the right side of my face at about 60 miles per hour, they said, the wind chill bringing the temperature (again, according to them) down to about 20 below (but I don't know if that's centigrade or not...). I wasn't too wet until about the second false summit, the clouds around us making it hard to see past the edges of the ridge (however, it's not so bad when you can actually see the edges of the cliff; we were nowhere near white-out weather). Upon reaching the cairn (pile of rocks) at the summit, we turned around pretty instantly and started heading down. I didn't have gloves and couldn't move my fingers, and one of the other guys' gear was entirely failing him, the jacket he was wearing that used to be waterproof was doing nothing, and every one of his layers was soaked, not to mention the amount of water in his shoes. My shoes started to get wet only when my gaiters slipped up from the bottom of my shoe onto my heels, but I couldn't put them back down since my hands were so cold. Once we were off the snowy boulder-covered ridge, Jimmy suggested we get down off the hill as fast as possible, so we broke into a light jog. This was really fun, since we were actually running through the highlands. I couldn't help pretending. I also couldn't help taking the lead, and we ended up taking a pretty good pace the whole way back. Running through heather in 30 mile per hour winds in the rain and cold is actually pretty fun. You have a hard time watching the ground, however, when you're surrounded on all sides by huge green hills and valleys, with small pockets of Scots pine trees (they look like trees from parts of Africa; bent little things with pine needles only at the tops spreading out) and tiny streams from runoff everywhere. I didn't get any pictures of this trip because it was too wet the whole way, unfortunately.
Sunday I went out with the same guy who'd had the issues with his gear the day before, Andy, Kristina, and Marcus to try a stab at Braeriach, the third tallest munro in Scotland. Unfortunately, while we had phenominal weather up to the first couple cairns on the ridge, once we were about two kilometers from the summit the decision was made that the conditions were too poor farther up, so we turned back. I left my camera in the car that day, since the weather had been so bad the day before, but it would have been the perfect day to get some excellent photos of the area. On either side of the ridge we were on, scrambling over boulders pretty much the whole way (which I think is really fun), were huge sliding cliff faces of the other two munros next to us. Four of the five tallest munros in Scotland are in the Cairngorms, where we were. I have officially baggd five munros, and hope to have a few more before I head for home. We stopped for fish and chips on the way back, and I was back at the dorm last night at about 9:00pm, I think. I went to bed soon after.

I am officially up to date on the blogging. I don't know how regularly I will be posting now, since this trip entails a lot more in class boring student work, as opposed to my last blog in Italy where every other day class was exploring something amazing in Rome. I'll be going out with the Lairig pretty much every weekend, however, and if not then I'll be in a different part of Scotland for sure traveling on my own, seeing something of interest (I hope to make it at least to Edinburgh and our family's castle remains before I leave, and hopefully Glasgow as well). Tonight I'm going to the Lairig Ceilidh, and it will be my first official Ceilidh since being in Scotland.

Gaelic Word for the Day: (am) peann (pronounced "pee-ow-nn"): (the) pen