My trip to Scotland

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Transcript

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Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Cambridge Advanced Accelerator podcast. My name is Cheryl, and I'm here to help you with all things related to the Cambridge Advanced exam, but of course also getting your level up to that C1 or even C2 level. So you guys might have noticed that for the past couple of weeks there has been no podcast episode. I know, right, guys? You've been on the edge of your seat waiting for this new episode. Waiting, we say with bated breath. With bated breath means like you're waiting, like oh my god, when's it gonna happen? Waiting with bated breath. Um, anyway, you've been waiting with bated breath on the edge of your seat, waiting for this this episode. Um, and I want to talk to you a little bit today about well, why there's been no episodes for the past two weeks. Because for the past two weeks or two and a half weeks, I have been back in my home country, back in Scotland, visiting family, visiting uh friends that I uh I went to school with, I've known since I was two years old. Um, so catching up with them, and um just generally eating far too much, far too much sticky toffee pudding. I think I had eight sticky toffee puddings in two weeks. I have not stepped on the scales yet since I've been back. Um, and um yeah, generally had a blast. So let me tell you a little bit more about the journey, but I promise we will we will come back round, we will circle back round to uh to the Cambridge Advanced exam as well. Uh so uh first stop, first destination on my holiday was Edinburgh, uh which is pronounced Edinburgh, not Edinburgh, like Americans like to pronounce it, Edinburgh or Edinburgh, Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland. So, first stop, went there, was going to see one of my favourite bands, Garbage. They were playing at Edinburgh Castle. Edinburgh Castle is the one that um Harry Potter uh Hogwarts was based on. So um what's her face? J.K. Rowling. Uh she wrote um, or she's from Edinburgh, she used to live in Edinburgh, and she wrote Harry Potter uh in a little cafe called The Elephant House, uh, which looks out is just round the corner from um Edinburgh Castle. So the streets all around there are all cobbled stone streets, very kind of old-fashioned, and it you can really feel that in her books. Um needless to say, Edinburgh has now turned into uh Harry Potter Land, and now there's like a big shop uh and uh you can go visit the elephant house where she wrote the book, even though it's not the real elephant house, because it burnt down in a fire, and then they moved it round the corner. But I don't think the tourists know that. Um, so if you are ever visiting, you're not visiting the original uh elephant house, and you have to go in a big queue now to go get into it. But anyway, that is uh not the point of my story. Um so yeah, I met up with my friends from the school. We went to go see garbage play at Edinburgh Castle. Um, my mum told me it was going to be a heat wave, it's a heat wave in Scotland, Cheryl. Don't pack any trousers or winter stuff, you won't need it. We got into Edinburgh Airport, it was absolutely pissing it down. That means it was raining heavily, it was absolutely pissing it down. I was at Edinburgh Castle freezing in my shorts and t-shirts with the rain and the mist rolling in. Um, but anyway, I had an amazing time and I got to catch up with my friends. Then we rented a car, um, and we got a free upgrade on our car for some reason. Uh, so they gave us this fancy uh they said I was supposed to be getting a say at Ibiza, and they gave, excuse me, they gave us this fancy BMW, which I was absolutely terrified of having this fancy car, because our next destination was the Mull, which is one of the little tiny islands in Scotland that has no normal roads. Uh, it's just one bumpy lane uh with um with uh very few passing places. Uh it's very curvy, uh lots of sheep that get in the way, uh, and you have to try and navigate this even if uh buses and um trucks are coming the other way. So the thought of having a BMW for this was was slightly terrifying, uh, especially because we had no excess on our uh our car insurance. So if we scratched it, I think the excess was £1,500. So I was like, oh my god, oh my god, what have I done? Anyway, we um got to Mull and uh thankfully my mum was right, a heat wave did appear, so it was in the high 20s, which for the north of Scotland, the highlands of Scotland, um is exceptionally hot. Um, so I did make use of my my shorts and t-shirts. Um but yeah, our uh our destination, our our one-way roads did not end in Mull because the next place that we went to uh on one of our many ferries, we had to drive up to the island of Skye. Um, and whilst driving up to the island of Sky, if you want to to Google any of these places to get the pictures, I will be sharing some on Instagram as well. Um, we had to drive from Kilhoen uh up to Fort William and then up to Sky. From Kilchoan to Fort William again back to our our one one-way roads or single-lane roads. Um, and of course, we met every giant truck on the way on these uh on these one-way roads. We met uh a guy in a Land Rover pulling a boat, yeah, an actual boat, uh, and we happened to meet him, of course, on a curve, a blind curve where we can't see anything. We met this boat coming the other way, and well, you know, one of us had to reverse, and it wasn't going to be the guy with a giant boat. So as in our BMW, trying to not um land in the potholes, potholes are the big holes in the road, land in the potholes or uh a ditch. A ditch is um when you have like holes in the side of the road, so when maybe the road is a little bit higher, and then if you go off the road, you're gonna your car is gonna tip over onto the side of the road in a ditch. So uh we're trying to avoid the ditch, trying to avoid the sheep behind us, trying to avoid the potholes, reversing backwards in this BMW with this giant uh Land Rover with a boat coming towards us on the curve. That was that was fun. We needed a glass of wine when he got to our next destination after that. Um, and our next destination was, of course, the beautiful sky, uh, which is where the fairies live in all the legends, the fairy pools. Um, so we were in Skye for for four days. Um, slightly better road conditions. There were some that had two lanes, but of course, if you wanted to visit all the tourist destinations like the fairy pools or climbing the mountains, old man's store, of course, these were single track roads, and they were filled with tourist buses of people wanting to see these. So instead of a uh Land Rover with a boat, we got big giant tour buses coming the other way. Uh that uh yeah, the tour buses win. So we had to do a lot of reversing and praying that the fairies would protect us and not scratch the car. Um next destination after Sky, we got the ferry across to uh Lewis and Harris, the island's Lewis and Harris. Ellie, my wife, she thought it was Louis and Harry was the name of the island. She's like, When are we going to see Louis and Harry? No, it's Lewis and Harris. Uh, and we met up with my sister there and her partner, and um, yeah, had a great old time back in the rain again. Uh, it was like 14 degrees uh in our shorts, back in the rain. Uh, so we had the rain and the mist rolling in on these one-track roads uh this time, going up and down in the mountainous parts. Um this time you had a lot of marshy, boggy land um that was at the sides of the road. So if you went off the road a little bit, then you were gonna get stuck in that. Um, and uh you're not gonna get any kind of um um breakdown, breakdown service out there. There's no breakdown truck gonna come to the middle of nowhere. So uh yeah, we didn't definitely did not want to come off the road there. We had Highland Cows, that was our kind of biggest traffic in Lewis and Harris. This is in the outer Hebrides, so the um not so many tourists are going to this part of Scotland. So the the kind of rush hour traffic was sheep who would not move off the road, some cows who also decided not to move, some Highland cows, uh, deer, deer running across the road. This was our traffic in the mist and the rain in um in sky. So, why am I telling you all about these stories uh of Scotland? Um, well, number one, I know you guys have been asking me how my trip was to Scotland was, so just to fill you in a little bit on my trip, which was absolutely amazing overall. Um and um we kind of finished it off uh in one of my favourite places in the world, which is Danon in Scotland, where my auntie lives. We went to stay with her for uh four days, and um and my mum came as well, so it was it was fantastic. Um I missed the day of it because I had to go on an emergency trip to Glasgow because I discovered my passport had run out and I needed to get uh a very, very expensive emergency passport uh made. Um, but yeah, overall, absolutely amazing trip. So, what's this got to do with the exam? Well, a lot of people think when they first start preparing for the exam, and I've heard this from many people, that they didn't realize how difficult it was going to be. They thought they would just need to practice a few exams, you know, just do a few mock exams, just do a few tests, and then they would be ready in a month or two for the exam. That you know, their their English was already a decent level, it was going to be easy, it was gonna be like traveling on a motorway. So your destination is Cambridge Advanced exam. So you put on your um you know, on your phone, on your Google Maps, whatever it is, you put destination Cambridge Advanced and A to B, it's a straight line on the motorway. It's very easy to get there. However, that is not the case with the Cambridge Advanced exam. Most people take a minimum of six months to prepare for the exam. And this is if you have a fantastic level of English already. If you've already got a high C1 level of English, six months should be a good amount of time for you to prepare for the exam. However, uh if you've only just finished B2, if you've just passed your first certificate or have about B2 level, it's going to take you closer to a year to be ready for the exam because you're not just preparing the exam technique, which takes about six months, you're also improving your level as well, which is about another six months. Okay. Roughly. It could be nine months, it could be 12 months, it could be a little bit longer, but this is more or less our timeline. The Cambridge Advanced Exam is one of the most prestigious English exams in the world. So, you know, it's uh it's Cambridge, right? This is one of the most prestigious universities in the world. It's like going to Harvard or uh Yale in uh in America. So it's not something that's uh easy, it's not something that you can just do a couple of mock exams and and be ready for. Otherwise, that would kind of uh negate the prestigiousness of the exam. It would make your certificate when you get it at the end less valuable because it was too easy. Okay, so you're doing uh an exam that is gonna open so many doors, change your life, so uh it's not gonna be a motorway to get there. It's gonna be like me driving in the islands of Scotland, okay? But there's gonna be potholes on the way, there's gonna be sheep, there's gonna be tourist buses driving at you, there's gonna be people uh in Land Rovers with big boats, okay. There's gonna be ditches at the side of the road, there's gonna be sheep that just don't move. But uh that is the journey with Cambridge Advanced, and I know this is a kind of cliched quote, but it's all about the journey, not the destination. You need to make mistakes, you need to have difficulties in order to improve in your English. It's normal and it's necessary because that's what helps you learn. That's what helped me and Ellie become a better driver. By the end of the journey, we were like, we were driving back to Edinburgh. We're like, oh my god, this is so easy now because we'd experienced the more challenging roads on the way. We had given ourselves that experience, we knew how to handle all these different situations, and it's the same with the exam. So sometimes you might feel like you're not making any progress, like this bloody sheep will just not move off your road. But then when it does move and you go forward and you know how to deal with that sheep the next time that that happens, then it gets easier and it gets easier, and you'll find that you're being able to drive faster and faster towards that destination. If we think about dear old Frodo in Lord of the Rings, uh imagine that story if he just like got an Uber to Mordor and just threw the ring in and was like, okay, job done. That was easy. No, it's all about the journey. The journey is where you do the learning, the journey is where you become a better English speaker, and it's where you're going to learn things that you're going to remember for life. Because after all, we don't just want you to pass an exam and then forget everything the next day. Okay, like I used to do with my history exams at university. Used to cram all the dates into my head the night before and then do the exam and then forget everything the next day. Uh I wouldn't you wouldn't know that I have a history degree from Edinburgh University or history and sociology because I don't remember any of it uh because I was cramming. Instead of taking the slightly longer road, but learning things really well and actually becoming a better person because of that. Um I didn't take that road with my history, um, and I regret it. And I don't want you to have that with your English, okay. So if you're ever feeling that the process is slow, you're getting a bit frustrated, just remember these windy roads in Scotland. It's normal, okay? It's expected, and it's what you need to grow as an English speaker and to really pass the exam well. Okay, the journey is not a motorway, the journey is one of these bumpy, windy roads full of animals and boats in Scotland. Okay, so that is my words of wisdom for this week. Um, I hope you find that useful. If you want to kind of chat more about my trip to Scotland uh or anything we've mentioned today, feel free to send me a message, and we will see you all again next Monday. Take care.