And before I know it, a week and a half has gone by.

Last weekend, four of the five girls in my flat went out for two adventures.  The first of these was the Great TV Adventure - our sitting room, though cozy, left us desiring something more to do in there.  We ventured out on Saturday morning to find a TV at a thrift shop (and found 21" TV for £25, no less!) and a cable box at Radio Shack.  Right, so the second half of that isn't so interesting or exciting, but it meant that we could carry the TV two blocks back to our flat, up one set of stairs, hook up both the TV and cable box and get an impressive - 8 channels.  4 of which are BBC channels. Around here, though, that's worth it, as the TV has really changed the way we function in our flat.  Rather than just being in the kitchen/sitting room at dinner time, we tend to stick around for a while during the afternoons, and especially on weekends.

We all thought it was a major relief to finally get TV, especially as I was the only one to ever read BBC News online.  Now, if our internet ever does cut out again (as it so often did through Fresher's Week), we still have a lifeline connecting us to the outside world.  And we have a way to watch the Olympics.

Next day, we went to Portobello Beach.  The weather was a beautiful 55 degrees, the water was significantly colder, and I'm the only one who comes from a climate even a little similar to Edinburgh.  Tracy is from Nicaragua, Michelle is from Beijing, and Yi Xiao is from Shanghai.  Yi Xiao brought a friend, Brandon, also from Shanghai.  They're used to warmer weather.   Somehow, I convinced all of these girls that taking off their shoes and rolling up their pants would be THE BEST IDEA EVER! and we all dipped our feet into the North Sea.  We spent a good couple hours running around in the sand and the water (I'm thoroughly surprised none of us got sick) before going up to the main drag.

We stopped at a pub for chips and Guinness, and by about 5:30 we tried to leave - only to find out that the beautiful day we'd left on the beach had turned into a heavy downpour.

Thanks, Edinburgh.  Loving the weather.



We waited in the pub for another twenty minutes before the rain stopped and went back to our bus stop.  It took a full 40 minutes to get there, as we'd walked the length of the beach - and when we arrived we found out we were late for the last bus back to the city.  By only three minutes.  Good timing.  The taxi back only cost ten quid, which split between five people wasn't bad at all - especially since, if we had taken the alternate bus, we would have had to transfer and it would have ended up costing each of us £2.40 instead of just £2.

Coming up this week: a Chinese Feast on Thursday and a possible 24-hour challenge with the building on Saturday/Sunday.