Pumpkin Carving Party

Posted by Kalie on October 30, 2009

Last night I hosted a BYOP (Bring Your Own Pumpkin) Pumpkin Carving Party!  Out of the 14 people there, only three of us had carved a pumpkin before.  Since Halloween isn’t celebrated as much in Europe as it is in the states, many of my friends had never had a Halloween experience.  They didn’t know what they were getting themselves into when they came.  They simply showed up with a pumpkin and said, “Now what?”  I explained everything step-by-step.  When it came time to scoop out the insides, several claimed that it was the strangest thing they’ve ever felt!  It didn’t take long and we were all fully engrossed in carving our pumpkins.  Everyone’s pumpkin turned out really great!  We all had so much fun, and I’m so glad I could share this American tradition with my friends from all over the world.  To boost the Halloween spirit, I made some spooky dishes, including a dirt dessert and monster toes.  I think for this experience pictures speak louder than words.  I’ve posted a few here, but to see more you can check out this link: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2042164&id=1320870003&l=41c1942dda

Cheers!

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A Wee Moment – October 28

Posted by Kalie on October 29, 2009

I’m the walking definition of culture clash.  First the water heater incident, then the awful cake, and now this.  Last night my flatmates came into my room.  Apparently I’ve been using my bed wrong the entire time I’ve been here.  When I arrived, I bought a duvet and what I thought were sheets.  The sheets were a bit strange, though, because they had an opening at the bottom.  I thought maybe I was supposed to put the mattress inside the opening, or maybe sleep inside of it like a sleeping bag, but I did neither of those things and just put it under the duvet like regular sheets.  My flatmates then informed me that it’s a duvet cover, not sheets as I had thought.  They fixed my bed for me and had (yet another) good laugh.

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Cake Fail

Posted by Kalie on October 28, 2009

Last night my friend Sandy from Hong Kong and I decided to bake a cake since she had never made one before.  I was so excited to be a part of her first cake baking experience!  As it baked in the oven, it smelled absolutely delicious!  We let it cool for awhile and frosted it with chocolate frosting.  Sandy, two of my flatmates (Nicki and Pauline), and I sat down to have a taste.  I had the first bite, and I immediately knew something had gone horribly wrong with the cake; it was way too bitter.  I tried to stifle the disgusted look on my face before anyone could see, but Nicki had noticed.  She asked, “What’s wrong?”  I began with, “Umm…” and that’s all I could get out before the others figured out what was wrong: the cake was awful!  And the more we ate, the worse it tasted!  We soon decided it wasn’t worth eating any more of, but we would leave it around for our other unsuspecting flatmates to try.  :)  Luckily I had bought Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food ice cream earlier, so I broke that out and we found a new use for the disgusting cake: a scoop of ice cream + a bit of frosting off the top of the cake = heaven in your mouth!  We had a good laugh over the awfulness of the cake and enjoyed the ice cream instead.

After some thought, the chocolate cake failure could be attributed to several factors:

• The scale wasn’t working to use metric measurements, and I don’t have any US measuring cups, so I had to eyeball how much of ingredients to put in.
• The recipe said to put in two pinches of salt.  Sandy was just going to lightly salt the mixture, but it instead poured out of the shaker rather quickly.
• I replaced baking powder with baking soda.  Google told me it was okay to do, but now I’m not so sure.
• The milk we used had a “Best By” date of October 23.  Yesterday was October 27.  It stilled smelled good though.
• The recipe called for cocoa powder.  At Morrisons (the supermarket), I asked an employee where I could find cocoa powder for baking a cake.  After neither one of us could find it, she told me just to use hot chocolate mix and it would work just the same.  I believe this may be the leading factor in what made it taste so bad.  I think the powder burned while the cake was baking.

Despite making an awful cake, it was fun.  There would be no story from this experience if it had been the most delicious cake ever!

Finally, some words of wisdom from my mom, the FCS teacher: “I heard you had some troubles with the cake – oh well…that’s what cake mixes are for!”  Coincidentally, I had bought a cake mix in case my cake was a flop.  She’s taught me well.  🙂

Cheers!

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A Wee Moment – October 25

Posted by Kalie on October 25, 2009

I learned a very important lesson today: water heaters are not meant for milk.

To be fair, I had never used nor even heard of water heaters before coming to Scotland.  In case you haven’t either, they’re basically water pitchers with a coil in the bottom to boil water for tea.  I wanted to make hot chocolate so I thought I would just use the machine to make the milk hot.  It worked just fine, but now there’s a horrible burning smell every time we use the machine.  Lucky for me one of my flatmates and two of her friends were there to witness my embarrassing moment.  This is one moment that will be hard to live down.  🙂

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I’m A Survivor…

Posted by Kalie on October 24, 2009

…Meaning I survived my 21st birthday.  It was actually quite simple!  Since turning 21 here isn’t as big of a deal as it is in the US, my friends went easy on me with the drinking bit.  But there were a few who understood what a 21st birthday is like in the states: two of those people tried to recreate that experience for me, while the other two protected me from it!  We went to The Watering Hole (the university pub in the Hillhead Center) and spent the entire evening there.  My flatmates surprised me with presents: chocolate chunks for proper hot chocolate, black tea, a tea set, a wonderful card, and a cake.  They were so thoughtful!  Throughout the evening I had 16 friends stop by to help me celebrate by birthday.  We (well, most of us anyway) ended the evening around 12:30.  Sarah, Lizzie, and I stayed up talking and eating cake late into the night.  I woke up the next day feeling fine, which I think is a rare occurrence for most people after their 21st.  I feel so lucky to have made such great friends already during my short time here.  This was definitely one birthday I will never forget!

Cheers!

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Full Scottish Breakfast

Posted by Kalie on October 19, 2009

I now know why Scotland is known to be one of the unhealthiest nations in Europe.  In Glasgow I tried my first full Scottish breakfast (at a German restaurant, ironically).  My breakfast included two types of bread, a fried tomato, mushrooms, baked beans, sausages, bacon, black pudding, and tea.  Black pudding, you ask?  According to Wikipedia, black pudding is also known as blood pudding.  It is a type of sausage made by cooking blood with a filler until it is thick enough to congeal when cooled.  Yum, right?  I took a bite of it, and that was all I could handle.  It wasn’t too bad (it was actually similar to haggis), but the thought of it being dried blood was too much for me.  I managed to eat everything else on my plate.  Because of that, I could feel my arteries beginning to clog from all the unhealthy tastiness (you only live once, right?).

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A Wee Moment – October 19

Posted by Kalie on

I was in my geography class today and the professor put up a slide that had the word “towards” on it.  I thought about how he should have used the word “toward” instead because “towards” is the British version of the word.  And then I realized that I was in Britain, and it made me happy! 😀

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Glasgow

Posted by Kalie on

I took my first long weekend trip this past weekend to Glasgow.   Sarah and I had been planning this trip since late September.  The main reason I wanted to visit Glasgow was because two groups I know, MC Lars and Bowling for Soup, had a concert on the 17th.  Later on, Sarah discovered that some bands she knew were having a concert at the same venue on the 16th, so we got tickets to that concert as well.

We rode the bus for three hours, arriving around 2pm on Friday.  Since we couldn’t check into our hostel until 4, we found a nice German restaurant to eat, drink, and relax at until then.  The hostel  was more like a hotel and so much better than the first hostel I stayed at in Copenhagen.  We had a room all to ourselves so we didn’t have to worry about locking up our backpacks.  There was a bathroom in our room and breakfast was included.  Before the concert, we wandered around and made our way along the River Clyde and found a coffee shop positioned on the river.  We stopped for a cup of hot chocolate and enjoyed the sunset view from the river.  I enjoyed the concert that night, despite not knowing any of the bands.  Sarah and I have similar tastes in music so it was a pretty safe bet that I would like the show.  The venue was quite large, and we had a perfect view of the stage.  The bands that played were Four Year Strong, Ghost of a Thousand, Anti-Flag, and Alexisonfire.

Saturday morning we took a bus tour of Glasgow.  With the hostel was included two day hop on-hop off bus tickets.  We sat on the open air top of the double-decker bus, despite it being very cold!  It took about an hour and fifteen minutes to complete the commentated tour.  We decided we needed something hot to warm us up, so with the help of Sarah’s travel guide and a few strangers who gave us directions, we found The Willows Tea Room.  I’ve been to tea rooms before, but until just recently I haven’t liked hot tea, so it was exciting for me to order it (ginger tea, to be exact) at a real tea room.  Along with that I had a cranberry and turkey sandwich (give it a shot – it’s tasty!) and a caramel dessert.  Re-energized, we went back out to the city to do some shopping.  It was at this time that we almost got run over by a dump truck.  The previous sentence makes the experience sound much worse than it actually was.  Here’s the story.  We were standing in the pedestrian shopping area listening to a Scottish band play, when suddenly a dump truck nearly bumped into me.  The driver was going really slow, and laughed at our shocked expressions.  Not a very traumatic experience, but it’s an interesting fact about myself that I’ll use from time to time.

The concert on Saturday night was great as well!  The Leftovers, MC Lars, Zebrahead, and Bowling for Soup were the bands.  After MC Lars performed, he said he would be in the back if anyone wanted to talk with him.  Since he was the entire reason I came to Glasgow, of course I wanted to talk with him!  We waited until after Zebrahead played to try talking with him so there wouldn’t be as many people around.  We talked for about 10 minutes and I got a picture with him!  He’s really quite a sweetheart for being a nerdy rapper (a sample of his music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYMwW6Lc-9M).  I told him how my boyfriend, his friend, and I are all fans of his and how we were going to go to his concert in Lincoln last year, but his bus crashed.  That why when he signed my ticket he said, “Sorry we crashed.”

Sunday morning we woke up a little too early, as the bus route didn’t start until 9:30, but we enjoyed sitting in St. George Square talking for 40 minutes.  Throughout the day we walked around the beautiful Glasgow University, botanical gardens, Glasgow Cathedral, and People’s Palace.  After a long past couple of days, we were pretty exhausted and ready for a rest.  We tried finding a quirky coffee shop called Where the Monkeys Sleep that promised “ballistic beans” (whatever that means), but unfortunately it was closed after walking 20 minutes to get there.  So we headed back toward the bus station and found a coffee shop that raised my hot chocolate standards forever!  The waiter brought out a mug filled with hot milk and a stick with a chocolate cube on the end.  To make my hot chocolate, I had to melt the chocolate in the milk for a few minutes.  It was absolutely amazing!  We killed enough time there until it was time to go to the bus station and head back to Aberdeen.

Glasgow, a city known for its architecture, was a great place!  It is a rather new city, despite being home to the second oldest university in the UK.  Because of this, I think I prefer Aberdeen to Glasgow.  I love being among all the old stone buildings.  But Glasgow was a great city to visit and I had a lovely weekend!

Cheers!

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Flatmate Food Night, American Style

Posted by Kalie on

My meal was a success!  It was a bumpy road getting there, though.  First off, I don’t consider myself a very good cook.  At all.  Since I’ve been here, I’ve managed to burn noodles.  (I know, I’m not sure how that’s possible either.)  I can bake desserts with no problems, but actual meals are a different story.  Anyway, I went to the supermarket with the intention of making coleslaw, fried pickles, cornbread, BBQ chicken wings, scotcheroos, and Kool-Aid…An hour later, and my meal plan was beginning to change.  I couldn’t find many of the ingredients on my shopping list, either because they were known by a different name or they simply weren’t available over here.  I looked all over the store for certain things (specifically cornmeal, butterscotch chips, Kool-Aid, and corn

syrup), asking several workers for help, but had no luck.  So I ended up buying things I thought would be equivalent and hoping they would work.

When I began making the food, I had to jump yet another hurdle.  The metric system is used here.  My recipes were for the American system.  I didn’t have any US measuring utensils.  So many Google searches for things like, “4 cups flour to ounces” later, and I was set.  I managed not to burn anything, and I think everything turned out okay!  Because of a lack of certain ingredients, my final menu consisted of coleslaw, fried pickles, frozen grapes, BBQ chicken wings, chocolate chip banana bread, and Coors Light (with the cool color changing bottles).  There were no leftovers, except for the Coors.

Cheers!

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A Wee Moment – October 13

Posted by Kalie on

I was at the posh new Sports Village working out, when one of the machines asked for my weight so it could better calculate how many calories I was burning.  I entered 105.  Later I realized that the machine was not using pounds, but rather kilograms, in which case I should have entered 47.  Oops!  Good thing machines don’t judge!

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