Today I'm leaving Edinburgh, and heading with the group of 8 IFSA-Butler students to Glasgow. Although the four star hotel, and gourmet meals and view of a castle from my breakfast table have been nice, its time to get back to the real world.

The past two days have been filled with meetings and information about what lies before us in terms of study and expectations. The Glasgow School of Art sounds fantastic. Although I already knew a lot about it, I'll outline some of it for the people I haven't talked to. Every week students are expected to put in about 35 hours of studio work in their private studio. The instructors periodically drop in to critique your work, but the projects are largely self-guided and self-motivated. We don't have a traditional American class schedule, but we do have one class on Thursdays on critical theory and art history. Otherwise there is no assigned homework or bigillions of written papers. The studio is only opened from 8:30am-6:30pm, with restricted hours on weekends, so I can't do homework late until the night, which means... no all nighters, ever. This is just what I need.

A couple of quick things about Edinburgh, where I've been staying for the past couple of days. The city is huge and cosmopolitan - to me it seems a bit like Paris, if you've ever been there. All the women wear highheels and smart, stylish clothing. I feel like I really don't fit in here... but oh well!

I ended up renting a bike on Friday, and pedaling as fast and as hard as I could for about 2 hours. An inept Italian mechanic tried to help me set up the rental bike - but I ended up helping him put on my pedals, raise the seat and pump up the tyres (British spelling!). The manager offered me a job, but I politely declined... After checking the bike's brakes I was off. I didn't even turn onto the wrong side of the road once, and I must say, riding in traffic here is a lot of fun. The roads are like patchwork quilts... they have small patches of cement, small patches of cobbles, and small patches of asphalt. In addition, the roundabouts are fantastic you can go zooming around them really fast.

I also visited the velodrome, but didn't get a chance to ride. There was no one there to help me get a bike, but I did get a personal tour of the facility. The track does look exactly like ours, except for the fact that its tucked away in a ghetto of Edinburgh. Barbed wire fencing, huge tenement like housing and graffiti sprout up all around it. The track was actually built in 1979 and its holding up just as good as ours.

Since i didn't ride the track here, I've just decided that I am going to Manchester to ride on the indoor velodrome there - they just finished it. :) !!!!!!!!!!

Yesterday I also went to the Edinburgh national museum, where we got to see a Picasso ceramic exhibit. Although I found it interesting, the permanent display of taxidermied animals was much more enthralling. They had a collection of thousands of stuffed animals - from ostrich to kiwi to tiny bugs and snakes - you name it they had it. Its one of the creepiest things I've ever seen.

Well, I have to pack my stuff, I'm leaving in 30 minutes!

TTFN.