After spending so many hours driving in Scotland and Ireland, I got completely comfortable with driving on the left side of the road. Now that I'm back in PR, I'm finding myself actually having to apply conscious thought to remember which side to drive on. Most of the roads I drive are very familiar, so habit takes over. But when I'm turning onto a road I haven't been on before, I briefly find myself trying to remember which side I'm supposed to be on. It's surprising; after years of reinforcing certain neural patterns, I wouldn't have thought that just a few days in a new system would be enough to brush the patterns out of the sand.

Yesterday was incredible. Gary (Irish), Greg (German), Andrés, and I rented a car and took a roadtrip up to the highlands. It couldn't have gone better, especially considering it was relatively unplanned. The weather even cooperated — yesterday was the only clear, blue, sunny day I've seen since I arrived.

We had planned to spend Saturday, the day before our excursion, making the preparations for the trip; determining a route, making the reservation for the car, etc. We did decide on a basic, flexible game plan, but the car reservation part kind of evolved into "making one phone call that didn't accomplish much."

Update: Greg prepared a map indicating the route we took, and marked all of our stops sequentially with numbers. Very cool of him. Here's the map.

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My first evening in Scotland was an appropriate one. One of Andrés' roommates, Gary (from Ireland), had a friend named David visiting, and it was his last night here. It was a given, then, that we go out to a few pubs. Over our first few pint, Andrés' Scottish roommate, Tony, taught me a few unintelligible Scottish phrases (for example, "See, you! Geddi dinye!" which can be loosely translated as, "Excuse me, sir. Pardon my intrusion, but it appears you aren't consuming your beverage quickly enough."), and I put them to great use throughout the evening.

Over the course of the night, I experienced loud, messy drinking games, a polite ejection from a pub, pissing in an alley in view of pedestrians, yelling my newfound unintelligible phrases at said pedestrians, and passing out on the floor. Ah, I belong here.

Although the medium format film I brought along for the Holga is ASA 400, I've been requesting that they inspect it by hand just to be sure it wouldn't be fogged by the X-ray machines. I've read people mention that they'd had film damaged despite the airlines' assurance that anything below ASA 800 is safe. If it were just one or two rolls, I'd have taken the risk, but this is 15 rolls — something like $35 worth of film, so I figured that just to be safe, I'd ask them to inspect it by hand.

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So hectic. I'm finishing up packing and getting ready to leave for the airport for Scotland. I head off around 2pm, and my flight leaves at 4:14pm.

We had a bit of a complication as far as the trip — as my parents were getting their things together a few days ago, they realized that my mom's and my sister's passports were expired. Ouch.

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Lately I've had a growing interest in experimenting with filmmaking. I'm familiar with the basic editing techniques, so I think I should be able to figure that part out with little trouble. The part that sounds more fun is the shooting itself. The problem, of course, is that unlike photography, filmmaking is more often fictional. You come up with a story and then interpret it for the camera. Photography can more often be about capturing what already exists.

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