Megan’s abroad in London, England, until Dec. 13.

Hamish the Hairy Coo is a cow. That’s it. He’s a cow (the word coo means cow in Gaelic, the original Scottish language), and I spent a solid 15 minutes taking pictures of him this weekend. I loved every minute of that photo shoot.

That experience pretty much personifies this past weekend’s trip to Scotland, where I visited Edinburgh and the Highlands with a group of about 50. The trip was sponsored by Arcadia University, the school that arranged my study abroad program. On this trip, we saw castles and heard lots of history, but it was the tiny things that really excited me.

Exhibit A: Our tour guide. Yes, he had an almost scary knowledge of Scottish history. But really, all I cared about was how he looked. He rocked a blue and green kilt each day, accompanied by black hiking boots and wavy hair that reached past his shoulders. Whenever we followed him around, it basically created a huge sign above us that said “We’re tourists!” But it didn’t matter, because he was awesome. Apparently he got really drunk one night with some students and got into a fight with a bar owner, all while wearing zebra-striped pajama pants. So that’s something to think about.

Exhibit B: Scottish names. Everything that has a name in Scotland is either adorable, impossible to pronounce, or both. This always made street signs exciting. On the cute front is a (technically English) town right below the border called Berwick-upon-Tweed, where we assumed everyone had to walk on fabric, and Granny’s Green Steps, which was just a big staircase connecting one street to another in Edinburgh. On the impossible-to-pronounce front was pretty much everything else, including towns like Pitlochry and the word loch itself, meaning lake,which requires a ton of phlegm to pronounce.

Sure, Hamish had a backstory. Apparently he was about to be killed to prevent the spread of Mad Cow disease, but Scottish schoolchildren protested, so he was spared. But as touching as that story is, it didn’t really matter. What mattered was that our itinerary just said “Hamish the Hairy Coo,” and nobody on the bus had any idea what that meant. It could have been a castle for all we knew, but it ended up being a pretty cool farm animal.

What I love the most about Scotland, aside from its gorgeous mountains, is its tiny quirks that make it so different from England. While England, at times, can just seem like America with better accents but no Chipotle, Scotland felt a lot different. And since I’m going to be traveling most weekends from now on, it was a good transition to what’s ahead.

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