St. Andrews

In the morning, we departed on coach ride to Saint Andrews, Scotland. St. Andrews is a beautiful, remotely isolated town about 2 hours from Edinburgh known world-wide for its golf courses and St. Andrews University, which was founded in 1413 and is currently one of the top universities in the world. The university is known for its many famous writers and thinkers who have attended, and is perhaps most well known right now for being the university where William and Kate met while studying Art History for too long ago. The area is very picturesque and the people who reside and study at the university tend to be very wealthy. Interestingly, half of the golfers and half of the students at St. Andrews are from the United States.

We took a brief tour of the St. Andrews Castle. The castle overlooked the ocean and Andrea explained that the only good castle is a castle with a well inside because when castles are under attack, people my not be able to leave to get water for weeks. She also explained how enemies often tried to invade the castles by digging pathways underground beneath the castle to come up from below. The term “undermine” possibly originated from this technique, as the castle’s soldiers would dig tunnels underneath the enemies’ tunnels to undermine the tunnels, making them collapse completely.

The rest of the day we spent on our own exploring St. Andrews. Jill, Claire, Alexa, and I stopped at a noodle house to get lunch. We brought it out to a grassy area near the ruins of an old church to sit and eat. It was very sunny, so we spent a good part of the day relaxing in the sun and enjoying the surrounding scenery. We took one stop at a small village called Falkland on our way back to Edinburgh.