Week One: Scotland and Aberdeen

I first started drafting this in an Edinburgh hostel, halfway through our first weekend trip – first to Edinburgh and then to Glasgow. Now as I’m waiting for my Aberdeen to London flight (after which I’ll be doing some travel around Europe), I’ll try to finish this post up – since my flights been delayed almost 3 hours :(.

I’ll give an overview of impressions of Scotland and Aberdeen and my host school. This was eventually one long post but I’m going to split it.

Scotland and Aberdeen

Aberdeen is located in Northeast Scotland – and it is is *really* north. It lies just above 57 N, placing it just at a higher latitude than Kodiak Island, and just around the northern border of Newfoundland and Labrador – (thanks Wikipedia). It’s industry is quite reliant on the North Sea oil and gas industry – you see this as soon as you land in the ads for random oil/gas industrial services as you go to baggage claim.

Aberdeen is the 3rd largest Scottish city by population, behind Glasgow and Edinburgh (“pronounced edinbruh as I figured out”). People from Aberdeen are called Aberdonians, similar to the Dundonians of Dundee to the south, and different from the Glaswegians of Glasgow. I asked one of the CS teachers what Edinbrugh-ians? were called and she didn’t know :P. Update – wikipedia says “Edinburgher”.

The first thing I noticed about Aberdeen was that it was really gray (sorry, grey). Scottish weather seems to oscillate between clear + sunny, and damp + drizzly. And it always feels just slightly damp here, so it seems like winters here are very wet. Aberdeen in general is surprisingly several degrees C warmer than Boston, despite being 15 degrees north. The architecture in Aberdeen has grown on me! It’s quite pretty – even though the gray Aberdeen granite is a bit lacking in color (see pics below)

Random fact: HTML <center> tags throw off British people because here, it’s spelt <centre>. My host teacher has actually converted to defaulting to the American spelling because he uses these so often. Same goes for stuff like color vs colour. Hmm I wonder how universally US/English-centric programming languages syntax is. I wonder if there are any examples of non-English/non American-English syntax programming languages. If you’re bored check out the wikipedia page on esoteric programming languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language#Examples. And I just realized I should have done a lesson in one of these. But Lolcode tho:

HAI 
CAN HAS STDIO? 
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

And regarding food – according to my host teacher – Scottish food is very “stodgy” (read: unhealthy but filling). Stuff like butteries – which are like really lard-y/salty croissants, haggis, meat pies, sausage rolls, etc. I’ll write more about food later! I’ll leave you with some food pictures from my first week.