Days Off in Edinburgh
Pasadena is a pretty walkable city, unlike Los Angeles as a whole. If you have a friend with a car at Caltech, or you have a Zipcar membership (which I have, and highly recommend!), you have easy access to all that Los Angeles has to offer. Edinburgh, however, is about the size of Pasadena and everything is within walking distance of the University housing (depending, I suppose, on exactly how far you want to walk, but there are excellent buses for everything else).
For example, there are four grocery stores within walking distance of my flat. As well as two bookstores, four art museums (free, by the way!), the shopping district, three Starbucks outposts, five other highly-rated independent coffee shops, excellent Indian, Thai, and Nepalese food, a wonderful (but expensive) Italian restaurant, a chip shop, and about a million pubs (with student discounts!). That’s honestly pretty equivalent to where we live at Caltech, where you can get to three grocery stores, Starbucks and two other great coffee shops, an entire street of restaurants (fast and otherwise, on Lake Ave.), Vroman’s bookstore on Colorado, Target next door to that, and all of the shopping in Old Pas within 35 minutes walking. Phew.
So, I’ve been pretty lucky at both of these campuses. I’m also pretty lucky that my schedule at Edinburgh has worked out so that I have no classes on Friday, and every weekend is a three-day weekend! I’ve already purchased tickets to spend a few of these weekends traveling to other countries, but I’ll be taking advantage of the other long weekends to explore the city I’m already in.
This week, my flatmates and I took great advantage of the cultural hub that is Edinburgh by catching the last weekend of the M.C. Escher exhibit at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Two (there are two of them, next door to each other!). The museum was a 30 minute walk from our flat. The museum as a whole is usually free, but this visiting exhibit cost seven pounds (about $11) to enter.
I wasn’t allowed to take pictures inside of the exhibit, but I can tell you that it was mind blowing. If you have interests in geometry or theoretical advanced mathematics, definitely check out Escher’s art. The man conferred with top mathematicians in the 1960’s to create insane geometrical drawings, prints, and lithographs, of shapes and systems that he had a “visual understanding” of, but not a deep mathematical understanding of. That’s like saying that you have an intuitive understanding of quantum mechanics. The man was a genius.
Walking home from the museum, we stopped in one of my favorite coffeeshops, Lovecrumbs. Their coffee is great but their decor and cake flavors (Fig and Rose, Pumpkin and Peanut Butter, Fennel, Orange, and Plum?) are incredible.
On Saturday, the Royal Bank of Scotland sponsored the Varsity Rugby Match between Edinburgh and St. Andrews Universities. My first rugby match ever, and it was free! It was also two matches: we got to watch the Edinburgh women’s rugby team smash St. Andrews, and then the men’s game was on. This one was a bit closer. My flatmates and I left early, to catch buses before the crowds, but it was a really exciting game. Rugby is fairly similar to American Football but it moves much faster.
So this has been a short recap of my abilities to juggle sightseeing and school work (classes started this week!) Do you have any questions about how to balance exploring Los Angeles, and handling Caltech courses? Hit me up in the comments!
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