Leah’s Scotland Blog

I am a 23 year old biochemist from Madison, WI who has been given the incredible opportunity to help start up a new service for my company in Glasgow, UK.  I am leaving on Sunday (yes, Easter) to live there for 12-18 months and get the new site up and running.  I know what question is going through your head, "Are you excited?"  I believe I have been asked this by every single person I have discussed my upcoming departure with; including the cashier at a gas station that wanted me to start some kind of account (by the way moving out of the country is an excellent way to get them to stop offering promotions), my dental hygienist (of course, I couldn’t answer as there were sharp instruments in my mouth), and the postal worker helping me forward my mail to my parents’ house. The short answer, "YES!”  Being able to live in a foreign country and actually experience day to day life, not just the tourist angle, as well as being able to quickly travel to any European country because I feel like it, makes me just a wee bit happy.  Not to mention the benefits to my career (don't worry, there won't be too much related to biochemistry on this blog.)

Of course, on finding out that I would be away having adventures, my friends (actually one friend, Kelly) informed me that I must start a blog and keep everyone (mainly her) updated.  For those who don't know me, I am very bad at long distance communication.  The majority of my e-mails (which are in general very functional) are less than 20 words in length with not a few being only 2 words.  Also, I have put only 50 hours of airtime on my cell phone in 2 years and I don't have a land line.  And probably the length of this post can only be attributed to the answer of the above question.  So, hopefully, having this one main place to relate my stories will help this deficiency and allow anyone who wants to read, keep up to date.  Another friend, Joe, has pointed me to this blog tool (which I quite like, so thanks very much) and I am going to do my best to update my blog every week.  I know I won't be faithful to this, but I will try.  Sometimes there will be no incredibly interesting topics, so I might have to write about biochemistry. But, in general, I think my friends will enjoy it and maybe random people who stumble across it will find a couple interesting posts.

In addition, because some weeks I will be at a loss of what to say, I will also include fun Scottish/European facts to help fill space.  The first being “The Scottish Vocabulary Word of the Post”.  I’ll start you off with an easy one.

The Scottish Vocabulary Word of the Post:  Flat = Apartment 

Then I will try to tie the vocabulary word into my experiences (e.g. If you would like to see pictures of my flat in the west end of Glasgow, you can go here ).  Which brings me to the last piece of information on this post. I will be putting a lot of pictures from my expatriation (yes, that's what it's called) on Flickr.  So not only can you read my ramblings you can also enjoy my slideshows. 

That’s it for post #1, hopefully there is much more to come.

Cheers!