The Loch Tess Monster: A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints

St. Andrews was the first place I'd ever heard of in Scotland. Not for its golf, but its university. It always had a table at every college fair I ever attended, promoting itself as the small liberal arts school with a brogue. St. Andrews was good enough for Prince William, but too far away for my parents to even let me pick up a brochure when I was 16. Oh the irony that I'm in Scotland anyway.

St. Andrews may have whetted my curiosity about Scotland like a good whisky whets your palate, but when it came to picking a university of study abroad at, St. Andrews never even occurred to me. It may have beaches, but there was something more alluring about Edinburgh's reputation for the black plague, Harry Potter, oh and the really good English literature department (I was going to study after all) that made me pick it instead. I continued my St. Andrews ambivalence by not bothering to visit it up until this past Monday. What can I say? When you have gale force winds in relatively sheltered Edinburgh, going to the seaside isn't exactly your first thought. But with sun and too much free time than a 21-year-old should ever be allowed, I thought now was the time to finally see why all my friends declared St. Andrews "delightful" and said I "had to visit."

On Monday morning, I left Edinburgh in a panic. All the trains were running late at Waverly and I started to wonder if it was even worth the trouble. Yet after I finally got on the train going towards Dundee and the conductor called out our stops in towns with quaint names like Queensferry and Ladybank, I knew I had made the right choice to get out of the chaos of Edinburgh. The train ride was one of the most tranquil I've ever taken, with view of the Firth of Forth. After growing up in the State of 10,000 Lakes and every Malone vacation ending up by large bodies of water of some sort, it was calming and familiar to see the sea. Although my placid attitude broke when I realized with excitement that we were taking the famous Forth Bridge over the water, something I'd only ever seen from Calton Hill before.

[I would go back to St. Andrews just for Jannettas ice cream.]

With its hour plus train ride and then fifteen minute bus ride (there isn't a train station in the town itself), St. Andrews is a true escape. The cute small town is full of cheesemongers, charming bistros, and history everywhere you step.

The campus (which is spread throughout town) had some intriguing history, after all, it's the third oldest English-speaking university in the world.

The religious history of the city is even more intriguing. Even though it was named after the patron saint of Scotland and was once the ecclesiastical center of the country, St. Andrews was also the center of the Scottish Reformation's violence. City landmarks often note victims of both Catholic and Protestant schisms. Patrick Hamilton was one of the Protestant martyrs as you can read the plaque below. However, only 18 years later, the archbishop of the city was executed by Protestant reformers. What is now an adorable town was cataclysmic 500 years ago.

[Superstition holds that if you step on this spot you will fail your degree at the university. So after students graduate they make sure to jump up and down on it.]

[I may be entering the real world, but that doesn't mean I'm more mature.]

Although I wish I had visited St. Andrews sooner, I'm glad I decided not to study there. While you can feel like an accomplished visitor by taking in the entire town in a few hours, it could get awfully claustrophobic. Although I've heard the university thrives on kooky traditions (like jumping in the sea on May 1) that you don't get at schools in large cities like Edinburgh. But the world gets even smaller, I heard more American accents there than I have in Edinburgh for the past five months, not a huge surprise given how much they market the university to American students. I didn't go abroad to meet more Americans, although Edinburgh does have its fair share and some of my closest friends are from the States. I've had friends who loved it, but St. Andrews makes for the perfect afternoon away for me.