There and Back Again: P.S. I Love Ireland

Hello World!

I am having the best time in Ireland! Today particularly was an amazing day, as nine friends and I went on a tour of the Irish countryside, past galway bay, and up to the cliffs of Moher. It was breathtakingly beautiful. I got some incredible pictures, but even those don't do it justice.

Anyway, I'm exhausted from my busy day, but I've been feeling guilty over not updating since I've been to Ireland, so I've copy pasted an email to my mom explaining how every things been going since I've got here, and then I'll attach some pictures from today!

My new room/ house is great, particularly in pictures. In real life it looses some of it's charm because it is freezing! And not just outside, but in the house! They do this thing where they only run hot water twice a day for three hours- 6:00-9:00 am and 4:30-7:30pm. At first we thought, well that's sort of inconvenient but we can just adjust to working our showers around that. Then we realized that because everything is heating via radiator here (in which hot water run through pipes that supposedly radiate heat) we only have any form of heating ability during those six hours! Kind of very suckish. But, it's something everyone here has to deal with, even non-university Irish folk. Supposedly hot water is never automatically heated in Ireland, so whenever someone wants to take a shower or heat up a room for a bit, they have to turn on this thing called an immersion water heater, wait twenty minutes, take a shower or whatever, then turn it back off. I suppose it is economical and environmentally friendly, so it does make sense, and is probably a system the rest of the world should adopt, but it'll take some getting used to. For now, my duvet cover is nice and thick, and I also bought a huge cozy blanket that's been a life saver, and which I carry with me all over the house (like linus from peanuts!), and I never take off my thick green wool sweater (thank heaven for it!).

My housemates are all pretty great. I got put into a four person house instead of eight, which at first I was a little bit disappointed about, because I was kind of excited about how easy it would be to meet people with seven room mates, but it turns out it's ridiculously easy to meet people anyway, so I'm kind of glad to have to share the space with less people. There's less room for drama and less chance of disliking or fighting. The girl who lives downstairs right across from me is named Rihanna. She's 22 and from Wisconsin and has never been to Europe before either, and so is keen to do as many weekend trips around as we can. She's really great, very very nice, and we get along very well. The first day I met her, we ended up going into the city to buy duvet cover and sheets and everything, and by the end of the day I felt like I had known her for forever. She came with another girl from her home university named Alyssa, who's also great, so we all became friends quickly. Alyssa's super handy to have as a friend because she's got like a built in gps system in her brain. She actually can look at a map for a second, or go quickly through a place once in the start, and she'll instantly perfectly be able to find her way around, and know exactly where she is. It's crazy, and so convenient because I couldn't be more opposite. The next day we met the first of Alyssa's roommates, named Katherine, who's from Australia! She's really really awesome, and has the best accent. So the four of us have been hanging out a lot.

I also have made a whole ton of completely crazy hilarious fun Irish friends. The first night I was here, I dropped my bags in my room and then, feeling restless, went for a walk around my village. There I bumped into my friend Liam from stfx and we stopped to chat. then this random Irish girl walks up to us and introduces herself, then invites us to a house party, so we instantly made a ton of crazy fun Irish friends within like twenty minutes of arriving, it was perfect! We've spent a lot of time with them since then, and they are so much fun!

The two boys live upstairs. Brandon's from LA (there are a ton of American exchange students. Also just a ton of American exchange students in general, like a few hundred at least. Maybe even a thousand, I couldn't tell you, I'm terrible at estimating numbers in a crowd). The fourth is Michael, who's from France and is very nice, very tall, and really likes tennis, and chocolate biscuits (Irish people get crazy angry if you call them cookies). That's all I can really say about him because we have a tough time understanding each other. He's speaks English alright, but with kind of a thick accent, and I don't think he understands it as well as he speaks it, which is not helped by the fact that I talk so fast. The village itself is great, it's set up so it's very easy to visit and meet new people. It's pretty isolated from the rest of campus, and mostly full of first year Irish students, which I think it's funny because it's like the Irish equivalent to MacIssac. I do kind of like that it's first years though, as they tend to be much more eager to meet new people and have fun than upper years in any country. So all in all, I'm pretty darn happy with the whole living situation.

So that's a quick introduction to my first week. Here are the pictures!