In the Land of Gingers: The Return I: Carbisdale Castle Trip

Well hello there!

This marks my official return to my blog! Hooray! So the plan of attack to catch everyone up on the past few weeks is to make separate posts about each trip I took. This one will cover the international student trip I went on at the beginning of March to a castle.

On a Friday afternoon, I went with about 100 other international students to northern Scotland to stay for a weekend in a castle-turned-youth-hostel. This castle was up by Inverness, which is a beautiful part of Scotland. This used to be an actual legit castle. It was built for the Duchess of Sutherland by means of some sketchy incidents:

-she was the daughter of a reverend who married some Captain

-the Captain died mysteriously in a hunting accident....

-she grieved for the appropriate amount of time and then married the Duke of Sutherland

-the Duke also died mysteriously and left everything to the Duchess in his will

-the Duke's family was not to pleased with this and took her to court over the will

-the agreement they came to was to build her a castle "in the fashion that she had become accustom to living in". Thus, Carbisdale Castle.

That's the basic rundown they gave us at the castle. More about the history of the castle can be found here.

We got to the castle Friday night where they gave us a giant meal. This is very unusual for a hostel. The meal was great and so filling! After that, we went to our room. In our room, there were many Americans, one Swiss, one Dutch and me. That night, the head of the international students department had organized a song night. He had all of the nationalities of everyone on the trip (41 nationalities!) and would pick one out of a bag. If your country was called, everyone had to go up and sing a song from their country. Of course, Canada was picked first. There were about 15 Canadians or so. Thanks to my French Immersion education, I know exactly zero English Canadian songs and about 40 French ones. Almost everyone knew Land of the Silver Birch, so we sang that. I just went "boom-diddy-a-da" with the others who didn't know the song. Some of the other countries songs were crazy good! There was one Chinese student who went up by herself and sang a Chinese pop song from a few years ago and she was AMAZING! She can actually legitimately sing. We all demanded an encore and she sang it again. The New Zealand students did their Haka song/dance, which they gave 100% on. If you don't know what that is, you should look it up on youtube. It's an aboriginal tribal song/dance that the New Zealand rugby team does before every match. The Americans went up and sang a Backstreet Boys song (can you get more American?), which was pretty hilarious. They had one guy who knew every word and was obviously passionate about the song. It was pretty awesome.

Some pictures of the castle's interior:

She had a bunch of Italian marble statues in the main hall. Apparently if you pushed that one of an angel kneeling, a secret passage way emerged. After they told us this, they said "Oh but don't try it. It will break". This just made me want to push it more!

Library

There were a ton of books left by hostel visitors and other's provided by the hostel.

This castle was pretty unique. It was in an old style, but she had electricity running throughout.

Hallway upstairs

I LOVED this fireplace. So cool.

Tartan carpet.

The castle at night!

The next day, we had a full Scottish breakfast: eggs, potato pancakes, beans, tomatoes, bacon, and toast. So filling. After that, we picked up a packed lunch that the hostel had prepared for us and went on a hike through the forrest.

Found a little waterfall and I decided to play around with the shutter speed (smokey!)

There was this little village that had this horse farm. They came right up to us. So cute.

After the hike, we took a bus to Dunrobin Castle, which was the Duke of Sutherland's family's castle. This castle was absolutely beautiful.

I would have much rather lived in this castle than Carbisdale.

This is a panoramic picture I took so I could capture the garden. Made from 3 pictures.

The castle was right on the ocean.

The beach was so nice. I'm glad that the sun decided to come out for these castle pictures.

Obligatory jumping picture.

After that, we went back to the castle to another homemade dinner. Indian food! It's everywhere here and I actually really like it! I'm going to had to find a decent place back in Regina. After dinner, we had games night, which sounds juvenile but was really really fun. We had races with balloons, strings and cups, and other icebreaker-ish games. We didn't win but we had a lot of fun. This was our team: