Seeing the rainbow after Scottish rain

by: Christine Mastalio
Staff Writer

I traveled halfway around the world and almost got killed in my own backyard.

After three months of confusion in the United Kingdom, I had finally learned to look right first before I stepped into traffic. My welcome home present was almost a Christine pancake in the streets of Iowa City.

My roadside adventures may be a slight exaggeration, but it is the little things that throw you off when experiencing reverse culture shock. Instead of flushing the toilet, I batted at empty air. The flusher was supposed to be on the other side. I could not open doors and I had completely forgotten about tax. In Scotland all tax is added in; the price you see is actually what you pay. In vain, I searched for mountains and green grass. All I saw was a flat expanse of snow with a barn or two to break the horizon.

After returning to Ambrose, Scotland feels like a surreal adventure. The 600 pictures lying on my dining room table, however, prove it really happened. I have two journals full of my travel stories but I will touch on just a few.

After close to 20 hours of traveling, I arrived at Stirling University in Scotland in September. It was raining, true to Scottish tradition. A bus dropped me off in front of a stone barrack-like building. A portly woman gave me two keys and said, “The stairwell’s around to the left”. At least I thought she said that through her heavy accent.

I was left alone with 75 pounds of luggage to figure out where I lived and what to do. I had no program contact, no idea where the international office was, no idea where I was, and all the Scottish people sounded like aliens.

Within the week, this shy Midwestern girl had met people from at least 10 different countries, learned Scottish slang words, and figured out how to ride the bus to get groceries and cook for herself.

On an overnight trip to London I learned one important fact: buses smell. Suspicious looking people also traveled nine hours through the darkness to reach the capitol, and sleep was a distant dream. Arriving at 7 a.m., we saw so much of the city that I wore a hole in my tennis shoes.

Portabello Road market stretched for an hour and still we did not see the end. Herrod’s giant department store was surprisingly a highlight, although the suited men with chocolates would not give us collegiate looking travelers the time of day.

St. Andrews gave us a true taste of Scottish weather. Winds gusted hard enough to make an umbrella useless, and I was continually wiping my glasses to protect myself from the drizzle. The sun shone intermittently as I furtively avoided security on the oldest golf course in the world. Ruins large enough to fit two St. Ambrose dorms inside were our playground for the day, and, of course, we warmed up in a quaint Scottish tea house.

Scotland’s beauty never ceased to amaze me. It is not often one can look out the kitchen window and see a beautiful lake surrounded by green grass (even in December) and a mountain covered in fall colors in the background. Loch Lomond was a stunning place for a nature walk, although windy as usual. To add to the experience, we had a picnic at the foot of a castle while it flurried snow.

My boyfriend Neal and I dressed in seven layers for the premiership league champions match between Manchester United and Villareal. We didn’t see any riots but we did see the most amazing soccer in the world. Moves that eluded me throughout my soccer career looked as easy as walking for players like Wayne Rooney and Ruud van Nistelroy. The crowd was as silent as a Sunday morning church service until someone took a shot or a referee made a questionable call. Then, 68,000 people stood in unison and erupted into noise.

I saw Rome, Florence and Pisa in five days and only got lost once. Not bad considering my only Italian words consisted of thank you, chocolate chip, beautiful, goodbye, and left. Everything in Italy was huge. There are no words to describe the three football fields that could fit inside St. Peters at the Vatican, and the Sistine Chapel was worth the two hour wait in umbrella-saturating rain.

I also discovered why Rome is such a holy city. To cross the street, you step out into traffic and pray. Drivers seemed incapable of following simple red light etiquette, and cars were parked everywhere, making it difficult to distinguish streets from sidewalks.

The Fountain of Trevi could be a metaphor for the entire trip. We walked along a bustling city street and suddenly found ourselves in front of a massive and beautiful stone fountain. In contrast to a metropolitan universe, it was an unexpected surprise.

Studying abroad was like that. No matter how far away or lonely I felt, there was always a rainbow after the Scottish rain. I learned to laugh at my adventures, or misadventures, and mostly at myself.