Canary Islands!

On March 30th my flatmates Jenny and Vivian and I got on a flight to Lanzarote, part of the Canary Islands, in Spain and late afternoon yesterday I got home. It was really a great vacation. We stayed at the Bellevue Aquarius hotel, which was amazingly beautiful. We got an all-inclusive package which was great because we were given breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks basically for free since the cost for the hotel was relatively cheap. The food was good, a bit repetitive but good. I honestly don't think that I could put the trip into words so I will just put up the pictures and allow you to imagine how my trip was (I'm gonna make them bigger then normal just to show how amazing they are)/

We had a lot of cat visitors at the hotel! We named all of them :)

The hotel

Whaaatt??

This morning I got up early and as I was looking out my window an egret landed in the yard next to my flat (this is where the chickens and ducks come from). Guess I've got a new friend!

Now that's some crazy weather!

In North Carolina I always thought we had the craziest weather, it would change so quickly, hot one day cold the next. It always drove me crazy. But Edinburgh totally surpasses North Carolina's crazy weather. This morning I woke up to beautiful blue skies and lots of sun. Giving me the urge to go for a nice long walk. Before I was about to leave for my walk I looked out the window to see dark clouds and rain. Great. I sat at my computer and started to hear that the rain suddenly turned into hail, I watched my window and soon I couldn't see because it was hailing so hard and there was tons of wind. In an instant the hail stopped and suddenly the blue skies and sun returned. So I decided I should take advantage of the momentary sun, so I went to the store. When I got out of the store it was cloudy again and when I got back to my flat it started hailing again! And now as I sit here in my room I can see blazing sun and blue skies. Now realize that this all happened between 10 am and 1pm. Wow! Can't wait to see what happens next....

Hmm Sweden for the weekend? Yes I think so.

This past weekend two of my friends and I went to Stockholm, Sweden for the weekend. My cousin was nice enough to allow us to stay in his flat while he was away on vacation, so we were right in the city center. I was their official tour guide for the weekend, seeing as I've been to Stockholm a million times. Our adventures started Saturday morning where we went to the open market and a cool modern furniture store. After that we went to Skansen, my favorite part of Sweden.

Me on a Dala Hast, a traditional Swedish figure, except normally a lot smaller.

Bison!

Lynx!

Ahahahah I love the squirrel's ears

Fighting seals!

Moose!

There was a baby moose that kept coming up to the fence wanting people to pet him. He came up to me so I started petting him. As soon as I stopped he would nudge my hand, just like a dog would, he didn't want me to stop petting him! I told my friends that the trick with any animal is just to scratch them behind the ears, they love it!

Luckily we had beautiful blue skies and sunshine that day!

And there was still snow on the ground!

Overall it was a nice relaxing and fun weekend. And of course I did enjoy eating some great Swedish candy, no one makes candy like they do.

This morning when I woke up I heard a funny noise outside, I'm of course used to the chickens making noise but now it sounded like the chicken had a cold (we'd have that in common). So when I got up and looked out the window I was surprised to see that we now have a family of ducks living outside! 

That explains the funny noise...

More Eggs!

Next Weekend I'm going to Stockholm with a few friends and my cousin was kind enough to let us stay in his flat. So I decided to make two eggs for his daughters since when I went to visit them they wouldn't let me stop drawing pictures for them.

This is one side of the first one

Here's the other side

The second one

The other side of the second one.

Then I decided that I'd have a bit of fun and make one that has meaning to it, or at least all of the designs have a certain meaning, according to a website that I found on pysanky. 

So this egg has two rams on it, I chose the ram because 1. he's cute 2. I'm born the year of the ram and 3.  they are symbols of strength, dignity, leadership and perseverance. So the next band around the egg (called an eternity band) is a symbol of protection. Then the diamond sieves symbolize the separation of good and evil. Next the pink waves around the egg symbolize harmony and immortality.

In between the two rams is a sun which symbolizes life, warmth and love. 

If you want to look at what all the symbols that can be made represent, here is the website that I used Pysanky Symbolism.

National Museum of Scotland

For my architectural history class I have to write an essay on a building in Edinburgh, describing the building and giving a critical analysis. I chose to write about the National Museum of Scotland, built in 1998, that sits in the middle of Old Town. The great thing about this is that it's pretty close to my flat so today I went to the museum and took tones of notes and pictures of the architectural aspects of the museum.  I had intended on actually looking at the exhibitions but the architecture of this building stuck out so much that I didn't have any time to look at the exhibitions.

I didn't actually take this picture, I had to get it off the Internet. It was raining today so the picture wouldn't have done the building justice. But as you can tell the building is very modern and sticks out among all of the older buildings around it. 

This is the main entrance part of the museum...doesn't exactly look like a museum right?

This is looking down from the 5th floor at the main entrance.

All along the stairs and in random parts of the museums there were these seats carved into the walls, which I thought was very cool.

There were tons of these niches and cut outs in the walls that serve absolutely no purpose but they were part of the reason I never looked at the exhibition, they were everywhere! And always different shapes...

See here are more odd cutouts...I don't think I even looked at the displays beneath them.

I thought this was really cool. Again serve no purpose, but you can see through them to the other side and I guess they make going down stairs a little more interesting.

I'm certainly going to have my work cut out for me analyzing this building. There was really so much to it and I actually got lost quite a bit (my map didn't help). Maybe I'll go back one day and actually look at the exhibit, which shows the changes Edinburgh's gone through since it's founding. 

Pysanky

With my free time I have been dying eggs in a special way called Pysanky. What it is is you heat up a tool called a kistka, dip it in beeswax and then draw the wax onto the shell of an egg. What ever you draw with wax will be the first layer, which is white (or brown depending on the original color of the egg). Next you dye the egg in any color you want, and then draw on the wax again to keep that color. You keep dying the egg until your design is finished and then at the very end melt off all the wax, revealing your colorful design. At this point you have to "blow out" the egg, which means you poke two holes in the egg, one on top and one at the bottom and then literally blow out the yoke inside. This part is actually quite disgusting to watch, and if you use black dye be prepared to look like you're wearing black lipstick...
But at the end you're left with something beautiful and delicate. I love doing it because it calms me down and relieves my stress (course it can add stress if it doesn't go my way), but it's still something I really enjoy doing. So the past few days I've made three eggs. Now I bought new dyes, and I'm not used to them yet so I've been having a little bit of trouble with them, and they haven't exactly turned out the way I've wanted but they still look cool!

This is the kistka

This egg gave me the most problems, the dye didn't coat the egg evenly and the coloring was off, so I didn't get all of my designs on the egg.

This was made with a brown egg, this time the black dye gave me a lot of problems...

This egg turned out better then the others, the only problem was that the brown was really supposed to be red and then I was going to dye it a darker brown to make the deer. 

So now I think I understand how the dye's work and I can really make them look cool, so I'll put up more pictures when I make more!

Oh yea, awesome thing, my flatmate found a mouse in her bed yesterday...that makes me just soooo happy!