So I went to St Andrews again, and for a decent length of time this time! I took the bus from Stirling at 3:10 on Friday afternoon and got there at about 5 to meet Moriah at the station. The group of dorm buildings she is in are about a 15-20 minute walk from the academic buildings and about 10 minutes from Market Street, which seems to be the main street in St Andrews where all the students go.
On our way to Moriah's dorm, we passed some really fancy old ones that are basically small castles.
Students actually live here.
Her room was in one of the newer buildings, but she has a really nice sized single (most dorm rooms are singles, as at Stirling). The bathrooms and carpeting and everything else was clean and spacious and up to date, meaning much nicer than Geddes Court at Stirling (so glad I do not live there anymore). St Andrews has a lot more money though, so it's not that surprising.
We had dinner at the dining hall downstairs (there's a dining hall in pretty much every residential hall, unlike Stirling which has no real dining halls but some little cafes/restaurants and a grocery store instead), and the food there wasn't bad. I had chicken satay, cooked broccoli, cabbage, and lentil soup with a wheat roll. The selection wasn't very big, but it probably didn't need to be. We ate at a table with some of Moriah's friends. They were all American abroad students except for one who was a full-time student from England. It was surprising to me that none of the students I met or saw seemed to be Scottish. They were all American or English, and for the most part, they were all ridiculously preppy (but not Moriah's friends). I was actually kind of disappointed by the largely non-Scottish demographic because it seemed to somewhat defeat the purpose of studying abroad in Scotland. But Moriah said the nice thing about there being so many American abroad students (there are seriously A TON every semester) was that it made it easier to make friends.
After dinner, I hung out in Moriah's room with some of her friends, and they were all really great people and fun to talk to. We mostly talked about different accents and the differences between American and English words and pronunciations (which seems to come up a lot whenever her English friend Jeremy is around). We waited there until the Union opened, which is a bar in the student union where many students go on weekends because it's so much cheaper than any of the many, many other bars in St Andrews. The Union was definitely bigger than the bar in Stirling's student union (but I never really go to that one anyway because it requires waiting for a late bus back from campus), and it was super busy that night. It was also really loud, so I had to do a lot of shouting to talk to anyone, but it was a good time. We did some people-watching, too, which was fun. Everyone was pretty tired and had to get up early the next day for various reasons, so we left at about 1:15, I think. It really didn't seem as late as it was because we had been busy doing so much stuff.
Moriah and I stayed up talking until like 2:30, so we were really tired the next morning. But we had promised we'd go to breakfast, so we got up at about 8:30. The food selection was pretty standard, except there were no scrambled eggs (sad). So I had two hard-boiled eggs, pineapple, and a bagel with nutella and peanut butter. I didn't eat very healthy that day, be forewarned. Since we were still really tired, Moriah and I went back to sleep for about an hour (I was so tired every time I went to bed there, I didn't actually mind sleeping on the floor). When we finally made it out the door for our tour of the city, we stopped at the free mini-museum about the history of St Andrews, on campus.
I asked the people there if the St Andrews Old Course was actually the oldest golf course in the world, and they didn't actually know, so they looked it up for me. Apparently, it is one of the oldest (from the early 1400s, like the university), but Musselburgh claims to be the oldest (I think it's somewhere near Edinburgh). The main reason the Old Course is famous is that it's where the rules of modern golf were formed.
From the museum, we went on to see Market Street, where I got a millionaire bar at Fisher & Donaldson, a really famous bakery that's known for its millionaire bars and fudge donuts.
The employees wear old timey pinstripe outfits.
I also went to the St Andrews retail store, where every single piece of apparel is ludicrously priced. So I bought the cheapest t-shirt they had (25 pounds!!), which is light blue with the logo and school name on the front and dark blue sleeves with 1413 (the year the school was founded, wow) on the sleeves. I'm actually afraid to take it out of the nice plastic sleeve they put it in when I bought it. At least it should be high quality. It also came with a tag that bragged about listed important things that St Andrews is older than (the Forbidden City in Beijing, Machu Picchu in Peru, Columbus in America, etc.). I used to think William & Mary was old (who, by the way, have a strong relationship with St Andrews so a lot of their students come abroad there).
Most of the stores and restaurants in St Andrews are crazy expensive, but it's a very wealthy community with lots of students from wealthy families. It must cost millions to buy one of the houses in town.
There are only three streets in St Andrews, so it's kind of dumb that I don't remember what the name of the street the cathedral is on, but there are some really massive ruins there. The cathedral was abandoned after the Protestant Reformation, but what's left of it really makes you wish they had taken care of it. Even the circles of rubble where the pillars were are huge. Everything was way bigger than the abbey ruins I saw in the Borderlands, and I can't imagine how long and hard it must have been to build the cathedral.
Where a pillar was. I should have used my foot for scale.
Right outside the cathedral ruins is the North Sea. Normally, the water is very calm, but there was a storm coming in, so the wind and waves were crazy.
You can see the pier trailing off the end of the land.
On the pier. We didn't go all the way to the end because the waves were breaking so high. On a nice day though, you can just hang out here or on the rocks on Castle Beach.
Castle Beach is usually at the bottom of this outcropping (where the castle ruins are, obviously), and you can get sea glass there at low tide. But on this day, there was no beach to speak of.
Our Historic Scotland membership passes (courtesy of Arcadia) let us into the castle for free. It's definitely the smallest castle I've seen so far, not to mention the most ruined. But the view of the sea there is gorgeous.
The center of the castle. The area it covered wasn't very large.
Views from the castle:
After the castle, we walked down to the biggest beach, but the wind was really bad, so we didn't feel like walking on it. Instead we visited the aquarium there, which was very tiny and nothing special, but better than being outside in the cold.
They did have a blue lobster though.
And the cutest seals ever (seals are native to Scotland).
We walked along the road past the academic buildings. Denison could take some design pointers.
The philosophy department
A fancy academic quad
At some point, we stopped for lunch at Butler's which sells wraps with crazy fillings and funny names. The most famous wrap is called the Sofia Loren. Moriah got the Rock Ness, and I got something called The Classy Chick, which has smoked turkey, cranberry sauce, brie, avocado, and oakleaf. I normally don't love wraps, but this one was amazing, especially with the toasted, crunchy wrap.
Near the end of the day, we went to the Beanscene, and I tried a London Fog, which is like a chai tea latte, but it tastes different and contains more milk or cream, I think. I also got a really great shortcake bar (there are many kinds of shortcake bars in Scotland) that had layers of lemon filling, crunchy vanilla meringues, and white chocolate. We hung out there for a while and talked to some nice, friendly guy. It seems there are a lot of random instances of meeting nice people in St Andrews, since it's such a small town. Although Moriah told me that, if you smile at random people on the sidewalk, like we do in Granville, they will think you're weird.
After coffee, we went back to Moriah's room for a hour or so, and I took a nap. Later, we grabbed dinner at a pizza place on Market Street on our way to the bus station. I forget the name of it, but it's one of only two food places open late in St Andrews (the other is a fish and chips place), so all the drunk people go there at night. We actually met another nice, random guy there who was also an abroad student, and he told us that he had just gone golfing at the Old Course (which is crazy expensive). He was really friendly, and it made me kind of sad that it's not as easy to meet people at Stirling as it seems to be at St Andrews. Also, I figured out at this point that, whenever you go to a pizza place in Scotland, you're supposed to get a 10" pizza all for yourself because they almost never sell single slices. Up until now, I have been going to pizza places and just leaving, annoyed that there are none where you can eat by yourself.
So that was my weekend trip. I think I successfully had the full St Andrews experience, and it was really a lot of fun hanging out with Moriah and meeting her friends. St Andrews is so beautiful, I'd love to visit there again if I ever make it back to Scotland someday.
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