This past weekend I had the enormous pleasure, nay the privilege, NAY THE HONOR, of seeing Julie Fowlis perform live. For those of you who don't know, Julie Fowlis is a folk singer (my favorite folk singer) that sings exclusively in Scottish Gaelic. She is one of the many artists who seek to preserve the heritage of Scotland through saving its native language. She is from the Highlands herself. You may have heard her music before in the Disney movie Brave. She has also won a bunch of awards for her music over the years. Through the student newspaper I write for, I got a ticket to go see her perform at the Shakespeare Globe Theatre in London.


The day started out less than 24 hours after my life-long best friend Hannah flew in to visit me. We got up unfortunately early and got on the train to London. We met up with my friend Ben who I know from my undergrad as an anthropology student. After lunch in which we ate at the diner outside London Euston which serves heavenly Nutella milk shakes, we took a shortcut through London University. (I think it was London University) That shortcut turned into a bit of a detour as we spotted an Egyptian archaeology museum and had to go in. We said we would spend only ten minutes there, but it turned into more like an hour after we chatted with a PHD student doing research on one of the skeletons in the museum.

After that we did some pretty touristy stuff for a while. Hannah wanted to see the National Portrait Gallery where we spent some time making fun of old English fashion (codpieces....why???). Then it was down to the river to see the London Eye, Parliament, Big Ben, all that jazz.


 Next we headed down the river to The Tower of London and the Tower Bridge before crossing over to the Globe Theatre.

There was a terrifying 15 minutes where the people at the theatre did not have any record of my ticket. They had to make a bunch of phone calls to the press office before I finally got it. Unfortunately it was only one ticket, so Hannah and Andrea (who had come along, Ben had left us at this point) hung out while I went to the concert.

For those who follow this blog, I have stated a few times how important Scotland is to me, and how connected I feel to that particular part of my ancestry. For any country, one of the most important parts of its culture is its native language. For the Scots, their language was taken from them by the English over several hundred years of oppression. There are Scottish artists today who fight to preserve their cultural heritage by performing in Scottish Gaelic. Julie Fowlis is one of these artists. Her music keeps me feeling close to Scotland even when I am thousands of miles away. Needless to say I was so excited to see her live I could barely contain my excitement.

The theatre itself was a small side theatre that was lit entirely by candle light. It was absolutely gorgeous. It was also a pretty small room, so no matter where you sat you had a good view...not that it mattered to me because I had an amazing seat!

When Julie and the other musicians came out I was so excited. She was as lovely as I had thought she would be, and had a Scottish sense of humor that was charming and funny. She started off with a cheerful song. She said she always did so because Gaelic songs had a bit of a reputation for being depressing. This made the crowd (mostly Scots) laugh pretty hard. Some of the songs were fun and silly, like one about being sea sick, and others were deeply sad and emotional. One was a song adapted from one of Scotland's most famous poets. It was a poem about grieving for his brother. I did not understand the words, but the emotion behind it and the pure magical power of Julie's gorgeous voice literally moved me to tears. I looked around the audience and saw I was not the only one crying, so I didn't feel too embarrassed.

I cannot fully describe to you what it was like seeing her live. I felt transported to the highlands, like my soul had flown to the north and was dancing on the mountains. It was magical, heart wrenching, and powerful. I could have listened to her forever.The spirit of Scotland is in that woman's voice. But unfortunately, all good things end, especially when those good things are a person singing live. Leaving the concert was physically painful for me, and I went into a mini mourning because I did not know if I would ever see her perform again.

On the way to the tube station we walked through a pretty interesting area of London I had not been to before, and I am eager to visit again, so that helped lift my spirits a little.

Still, it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, and one I am not sure I will ever get to repeat. I hope I do, but until then, I have all her albums to keep me.

Yay! The second part of my hiking trip! I left off where I was about to climb Beinn Dorain. The first half of the group dropped us off outside an Inn, and after a somewhat unpleasant encounter with a local guy in a van muttering angrily at us, we set off. We being myself and three of the guys from the group. Not a large party on this one!

Almost as soon as we started up the mountain base the weather took a turn for the worse. Plus there was snow on the ground from the beginning rather than us reaching it at a higher altitude. Snow is better than slush though, because slush just leaves your feet soaking wet.

Very quickly into the hike we realized that there were many dips and streams that could not be seen from the surface, which resulted in a few moments of a person falling through up to their waists. This only happened to me once thankfully. There was, of course, a lot of the more minor falling through the snow up to your thigh situations, and those happened quite a lot. Now, the thing about me is, whenever I am surprised I make this sort of weird, but brief, shrieking noise. It is almost like a yip, but a little more intense. Anyways whenever that happened the guys would think I had hurt myself or something and stopped to ask if I was okay. *The shame*. I tried to keep a control on that x.x.

So very quickly I realized that I might had made a mistake. My legs were already extremely worn out, and we had barely started! It was then I knew I was in for a rough ride.....

The weather really was on and off in terms of visibility, however what was always on was the wind. The wind was crazy! The above picture was us looking up the mountain...
and this is from the same spot looking back down. Luckily it never got nearly as bad as it had been on Monday. We could always see a fair distance around us, so we didn't get lost. The funny part of this experience was this hiker that followed us up the mountain. At first he had charged past us, but then realized we had a better grip on the path than he did, and he just followed us from a distance. However once we got to the point where things started to get pretty steep, we took a break for a few minutes. He then decided to go on past us and ended up going the completely wrong way, turning around and going back down the mountain. He didnt even make it very close to the top!

We stopped for lunch on a rather frozen rock, which thankfully was short, before heading on up. Now, my memories from this part of the hike are very few. The ones I do have are very white, and involve a lot of pain. My calves were on fire, which was to be expected, but for some reason my hip was also in agony, like someone had put a hot coal right in there and it burned me whenever we climbed. Extremely unpleasant.
 I mean, my God just look at that! It was absolutely incredible. I could not believe that I was in that spot at that moment to see this.
Even in the other direction, which was largely obstructed by clouds, there was a hidden treasure.

Now, there was a visible peak right in front of us that we assumed was the last one. As the boys headed on up to that peak, I was suddenly struck by the moment....haha no. I ran out of oxygen at the high altitude and started to hyperventilate. That was a scary few minutes. I eventually managed to stop doing that and catch up with the others, but it was definitely not something I enjoyed. Of course, after that moment of thinking I was going to pass out on top of this mountain, the peak we had been walking towards turned out to not be the real peak. I wasn't even surprised at that point, just disappointed.

THIS was the real peak.
I made this picture super big so you could see what was between us and that peak. It was a massive snow drift that looked like it was about to crumble into an avalanche at any moment. I was pretty vocal about the fact that I did not want to cross it. In fact, I had made up my mind that if they had insisted on trying to cross it, I would refuse and wait there for them to come back. They checked the way across out and discovered it was covered in a layer of ice which made it almost impossible to walk on, so luckily it was decided dying was not worth it!  I mean, we were practically at the same height as the peak, maybe only 10m lower, so I did not consider it that big of a deal.

Now the trip back down was dare I say it, almost fun! Why you ask? Well quite a bit of it involved us sliding for 50-70m on our butts down the mountain. We would actually go quite fast and it was a lot of fun, plus much easier on the legs, to do!
This is one of the sections we slid down. Obviously those are foot prints, but right before that we had slid all the way down that part of the mountain. And somehow my pants did not rip at all!

The rest of the way down was fairly uneventful. I was pretty cold and wet by the time we got back, and generally in pain. After we met up with the rest of the group back at the Inn, we headed back. I was determined to take the rest of the trip easy. I was happy that I accomplished what I did that day, and that I had pushed myself to do it, but I wasn't willing to do it again x.x.

The next day, of course, the whole of the group wanted to do a big mountain climb. Thanks to the vocal-ness of myself a few others, however, a low level hike was arranged. This easy hike once again had only four participants on it. It was completely different group than the one I had been up the mountain with the day previously, mind you, but I was happy for it because these particular people I had not had a lot of time to talk to, and that day turned out to be the perfect day for talking!

We decided to stay in the area around our base, and left walking straight from our trailers. It was gorgeous outside! It was so warm, the sun was shining! I could not believe how nice it was.
That mountain on the right of the photo? Well the taller peak is where we were supposed to go on Monday, and the shorter one next to it is where we had ended up....whoops! Our walk on Thursday involved a lot of tiny country roads that went through sheep and cattle fields. The sheep had their little lambs, and the cows had little calves!
After that we stuck to the roads, and eventually ended up in a tiny village where I sent the postcards I had been carrying around with me all week. We decided to walk out to the docks of the village on Loch Etive.
 There wasn't much left of the docks to be honest, but it was still pretty cool!
From where we were, we could actually see our trailers on the other side of the loch, so we just followed the shore back around. There was one perilous bit where we had to cross a rather large tributary. We all got our feet wet, but it didnt matter because we were right back at the trailers. We spent the evening relaxing in the heated apartment, where we discovered from the other group that their hike had taken a  horrible turn, and it took them 6 hours to get down the mountain! They did not return till nearly 8 at night! When they got back we had a rather wet BBQ in the rain, and went to bed a bit after.

The last day was not a hiking day at all! We went into the town of Oban to explore. Now, apparently there is a rather famous whiskey distillery in Oban that everyone wanted to check out. Everyone except me. I know, I am such a killjoy. So while everyone went to do that, I went shopping! Woooo! There was a bookstore I spent a lot of time in, and at another shop I got this really nice pair of gloves for only four pounds! Eventually I did wander my way up to this famous distillery and took a look inside. I ended up buying a postcard for myself and some whiskey fudge for my friends back in Birmingham. Later, while I was in a local information store, I got a phone call from my German crew for me to come meet up with them, which I did at a coffee shop where we hung out until it was time to meet up with everyone else for dinner. We had a really fun conversation about my German ancestry during that time, and they invited me to come to Germany to explore where my family came from! Very exciting :D

We ended up having dinner at this Italian restaurant right on the harbor. Don't know why we went with Italian, but my meal was really good, so I didn't mind. Plus the view was amazing. I was facing the wall of windows out over the ocean and got to watch the sun set. After dinner we headed back to the trailers to get some sleep before our trip back the next day.

Alright, let me just get this out of the way. Despite all the amazing things I have been up to lately, I have been too busy, and more recently, too ill to update this blog. But I am back now and hopefully will be able to keep up with myself a little better!
 Yes, you could go on top of the dam! The metal ladder climbing up to it was probably one of the coldest things I have ever touched. Would not recommend.

 I was actually not very cold on the way up. I had enough layers on that I could protect myself from the wind, and the constant movement kept me warm.
 This picture illustrates that whiteness I was talking about. Everyone was taking pictures of the blank abyss we had landed ourselves in!
 This is what remains of the entrance into the fort.
 Here is an old well! It is all filled in now of course, but it is still there!
 This stone is dfjksfjdkl. This is the stone of kings! This is where all the kings of Dalriada were crowned, and they had to put their foot in the stone. You could see the footprint that has been left behind! Yes, I put my foot in the stone. The ancient kings had small feet!
 This is what is left of the king's hall. As a side note, I was super excited to be here because it was the location of my favorite book series. I was basically in tears when I realized that this is where we were going, and I couldn't stop myself from giddily making it known to the entire group how happy I was about it.  I know what you are thinking! Katie, why were you so excited about it because of a book? Nothing in that book actually happened! I would say to that, yes I know this is a famous location where many REAL important things happened, but I love my fictional characters and I don't care that they weren't real....just let me have my fun.
 I did feel a bit weird getting in the grave, but it has been vacated for over a thousand years so....it can't have been too bad? Right???
 This is generally what the tombs, or cairns, looked like from the outside. They once had more structure and were actual buildings, not the pile of rocks they look like today. This is for you mother, who belittled how difficult these were to make with your "they arent very nice looking" comment (yea I remember that. I remember everything O.O)

 This one was a communal grave that had tons of bodies in it at some point. Probably a collection of the community's richest members.

We also saw some stone circles! My first ever stone circles, I was very excited.
 Beeing able to see a stone circle for the first time was a pretty significant moment for me. I wish I had been able to spend more time there. There were also these massive standing stones. Supposedly an old story teller used to go around telling people touching the stones was bad luck. I hugged the darn things. Between that and laying down in the grave I should have suffered a gruesome death by now x.x
After we left the valley we headed up and took a look at a 1700s castle. It was pretty cool, you could go around inside it and even the roof! As castles go it was pretty small, but still an interesting place to explore. At this point though, everyone was starting to get tired and ready to head back, so we didn't spend too much time there.