This all started late on a Friday night in September.

As I hugged my mother for the last time until after Christmas and took my first wobbly steps on to the plane, the wave of realization that these two legs alone would support me in this new ocean tumbled down on top of me. For a kid having lived his whole life in Minnesota my legs felt much heavier than I expected them to be, but this made me realize that these steps to be taken on this trip would be more important than I imagined they would be before this night.

As I write this more than two months later, I cannot even begin to hope to stuff this unforgettable experience into a tidy package of words and sentences. Instead, I send back some hopefully revealing snapshots of what life has been like for me in Scotland.

After my initial maelstrom of travel across the Atlantic ocean and into the city of Aberdeen, you can picture me lying exhausted on a bed without the sheets that are somewhere back in Amsterdam with the rest of my luggage, wearing my only clothes, and eating out of a bag of Starburst that my mother thankfully--considering that I arrived in Aberdeen at eleven at night after the grocery stores had closed--packed in my carry-on luggage. But you can also see the tired smile playing across my mouth as I think that I have made it despite all the craziness (lost luggage, getting lost in Glasgow, the man sitting next to me on the plane falling asleep practically on my shoulder) of my trip.

But a more revealing glimpse into this personal experience can be found by looking on the door to my bedroom. There you can see a picture of the other five guys who live here sometimes harmoniously, sometimes not, with me in my flat. Altogether, we are quite a diverse bunch, ranging in age from eighteen to twenty-six and from six very different parts of the world. We've said that we have virtually the whole United Nations represented with one Scot, one Englishman, one German, one Frenchman, one Kurd from Turkey, and one American. Needless to say, it has been a perspective-broadening experience.

But for all they have taught me about the places where they are from, they have taught me almost as much about where I'm from; at least they have gotten me to look at the United States in a whole new light. For example, my Kurdish flatmate has a picture on his desk of his hero, the imprisoned leader of the Kurds. We have talked about the recently ended fighting between the Turks and the Kurds, who want an independent nation separate from Turkey. He tells me how the Central Intelligence Agency captured his Kurdish hero and turned him over to the Turkish government because he wanted to institute a Marxist state for the Kurds. As a result of this earlier fighting, his family sought political asylum in London where he has lived for the past four years.

Or then there was the time that my German flatmate was telling me about the American Air Force base near his hometown of Stuttgart and the American military radio station that he can get at home.

Or the time I was correcting my French flatmate's paper on how the French government has outlawed in advertising and on TV the use of English words that have been incorporated into French in an effort to stem the tide of the English influence on language and "Americanization" in French culture. One can never really understand the scope of American influence around the world and the differing responses to this until one leaves the shell of the United States.

But many of my experiences here have also been decidedly Scottish. Today my one flatmate from Glasgow and I went to the pub here on campus (yes, that is very Scottish too--to have a pub on campus) to watch the Old Firm football game between the Glasgow Rangers and the Glasgow Celtic. It's quite an experience to hear my flatmate, who's a die-hard Rangers fan, derogatorily calling the Catholic-associated Celtic "papists" while the Celtic fans are spouting profane epithets about the Protestant-associated Rangers.

I've also eaten haggis, which tastes kind of like meatloaf, and I will be participating in a Ceilidh this weekend on my trip to the Isle of Skye with the Celtic Society. I've even taken a few courses, including one on Scottish literature taught by an ardent Scottish nationalist, who has been known to take it a little overboard when extolling the virtues of Scottish heroes such as William Wallace and Robert the Bruce, and have seen many beautiful and very Scottish sights. Just this past weekend I took a day trip down to St. Andrews, which is a wonderful small town with an even more wonderful golf course, for those of you who know anything about golf. Loch Ness was also gorgeous even though we did not catch a sight of the famous monster.

However, as my time to leave Aberdeen is now approaching only three weeks away, the people that I have met here are increasingly the most important part of this special experience. Some of my best times have been sitting around with the group of friends I have developed here, drinking tea, and talking about all that is important to us. So now I must go and leave you with these glimpses, or "snapshots", of my life here. I'm still busy adding new pictures to my ever-expanding photo album, as I will be until I have to walk on to that plane with as much difficulty as when I first left home. But these pictures do no justice to the ups and some downs of the experience as a whole. They cannot portray the reminders and memories of the widened perspectives, sense of independence, and the unforgettable experiences and people that they are to meŠunless, that is, you create your own journey and feel these same feelings, too.