Story Location: Scotland
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U.S. Election: A Perspective from Abroad
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This year was my first time voting in a presidential election; it’s the same for many of my U.S. friends studying abroad with me. We couldn’t help but notice how odd it was watching it from across the ocean. Sitting in Scotland, reading BBC and the New York Times, scrolling through Twitter and Facebook, it…
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Edinburgh: 4 Friends and Their Families
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Parents worry. That’s sort of their job. Even if their son or daughter is 20 years old and hasn’t lived at home in years. Even if their child normally goes to school hundreds of miles away and there’s this thing called a cell phone that reduces that distance to almost nothing. Of course, that’s not…
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Sights and Society: Remembering the History as a Tourist
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A perk of studying abroad with IFSA-Butler: the excursions that are included in the cost. Last week, IFSA organized a trip to the Highlands for all the students on the Scotland program—that’s around 100 of us from four cities, on four buses on a four-hour drive. (I don’t know why but four seems to be the…
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Why I Chose to Make Friends Outside Edinburgh’s Queer Community
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As an asexual person, I live a very quiet life in the LGBTQ community. I identify as queer, so it’s hardly surprising that I have a lot of friends who also identify as queer. Well, I do back home that is. I didn’t regularly attend any LGBTQ clubs or groups or anything like that on…
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A Homesick Student’s Guide to Spending the Holiday Season Abroad
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For me, November is always a hard month. By November, I’ve passed out of midterm hell and I wade through the month as a sort of holiday purgatory; it’s when I feel the most homesick. Normally, I don’t go home for Thanksgiving—the break is too short, the plane tickets too expensive—but as the air gets chillier and I…
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How to Get Involved in Theatre at the University of Edinburgh
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Edinburgh is well known for the performing arts. Every summer, it hosts the Fringe Festival, one of the world’s largest gatherings for music, theatre, dance and comedy. Although Fringe 2016 has already passed, my tutorial instructor for my History of Edinburgh course told us during our tour of the Royal Mile that his favorite game…
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The Unexpected and Everlasting Benefits of Study Abroad
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When I was deciding to study abroad, the last thing on my mind was my impending senior year job search. For one, I never really considered that study abroad would help me in any way down the line. I didn’t study abroad to better prepare myself for my career, I studied abroad to have an amazing…
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4 Differences I Noticed on My Homestay
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Spending only a weekend at my Scottish homestay was not nearly enough time. The two days we spent with our host family in Cumbria were jam packed with all the touristy things—day tripping around the beautiful Lake District, climbing hills (by car, thank goodness) to see the rolling green spread out before us, visiting the Beatrix Potter…
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Stereotyping Can (and Does!) Happen to Anyone
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Studying abroad in Edinburgh, Scotland, and traveling throughout Europe taught me about independence, other cultures, and perceptions of one culture by another. Stereotyping a country or its people is common and something that I encountered frequently while abroad. My accent gives two clues as to where I’m from: the United States, and if one is…
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Sense of Direction in Edinburgh
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You wave goodbye to your family, dragging your suitcase behind you and your stomach is already alight with butterflies. The fluttering creatures go weightless at take-off and maybe drop a bit at landing, but they don’t really disappear for a few of days. Moving to a new country—a new continent—incites all sorts of feelings, from excitement to giddiness, probably…
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