After Christmas comes Hogmanay

New Year's Eve here is called Hogmanay and it's quite a party. They close down the main street in Aberdeen and set up a huge stage so they can have live music all night. The street is packed with people but we managed to push our way through to the front so we could be right by the stage. We were with our friend Andy who's from here so he led the way. There were a few bands but the headliner was The Proclaimers ("I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more...") so it was a fun place to be for the New Year's celebration. Pretty much everything is closed down on New Year's Day so we did some much needed sleeping in after our late night out. It was lots of fun though and we saw lots of men in kilts wandering the streets for Hogmanay!

About a week after the new year I flew to California to be a Matron of Honor in one of my best friend's wedding while Andy went to Oxford, England for an academic conference. I had a great time and not only got to be at my friend's wedding but got to see my parents, brother, sister-in-law, niece and other great friends from college as well. Andy raves about Oxford and hopes to take me there one day because it is such a beautiful place. He got to see the pub (The Eagle and Child, in the picture) where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien met every night and at the conference met and had dinner with one of his favorite theologians, Stanley Hauerwas. I'd say, although it would have been nice to be together, we both loved our time where we were for that week in January. Below are just a couple of the pictures Andy took while he was in Oxford. The first picture is of the college the conference was at, the second is of the Divinity library and the third is the entrance to Christ College. He said that every building was so beautiful that he could have taken a picture of everything.