Scotland Week 4

Research Reflection:

Now that I was finally back in home base after an exhausting (but dreamy) two full weeks of travel, I could focus on my actual SUIRP research project. This week was mostly spent on literature review work and refining the demographic analysis of the dataset I am using. I am back on a consistent meeting schedule with my mentor, and we brainstormed which analyses I will be using for this project. Although this is a brief update, I have also begun conducting a latent class analysis on the early maladaptive schemas.

View from Linlithgow Palace

Victoria Street in Edinburgh

Tron Kirk Market

Writer's Museum

Absolute dream

Gorgeous!!

More writer's museum

National Gallery

Song of the Week: Bless the Telephone by Labi Siffre

It's nice to hear you say "hello"

And "how are things with you?

I love you"

Cultural Reflection: 

While I enjoy the fast-paced nature of traveling city-to-city, it was refreshing to explore my home base for the next few weeks. I was finally able to build a solid foundation and continue to develop more meaningful and lasting friendships. This week I could act like a ‘tourist’ and finally visit the Edinburgh highlights. These include the Writer’s Museum, the National Gallery, and Victoria Street. Victoria Street is the direct inspiration for Diagon Alley, and the entire Royal Mile in Edinburgh is an absolute dream.

One of my favorite parts of Edinburgh is its coffee culture. There is a coffee shop on every street corner, all roasting their own brews, and mostly with outdoor seating. There is a huge independent coffee scene in Edinburgh, and each shop I visited became its own small, daily adventure. Exploring these coffee shops and rating matchas became paramount in my Edinburgh experience; I found solace in hopping between them. They welcome you in to stay. However, talking to Scottish locals, they find that the city is becoming increasingly less local with large coffee corporations and conglomerates like Black Street Coffee, Starbucks, and Blank Street popping up around the city. With the rising rent in Edinburgh, it seems like there is increasing social polarization even among this coffee culture. Even with this, the UK coffee shop culture endures because Scotland s proud of the community it’s created and the shops it supports. This is why, when Coca-Cola became the number one selling soda in Scotland, the people rallied in anger and brought their Scottish soda Irn-Bru back to the top. Their passion is palpable. 

Other than enjoying the coffee scene, I took a half-day trip outside of the city to Linlithgow. I was mostly there to visit the palace, where Mary Queen of Scots was born. There are over 2,000 castles in Scotland, and while the majority of them are pretty rugged due to their long history of conflict with England, each one has its own rich story.