Everything in Ireland is cool

For some reason the people at the Quinn School of Business treat American students better than all the other international students. I'm not sure why, but I'm not complaining. So that means that the group of American students has trips to cool places planned for throughout the semester. Today was one of those trips.

We started out at Croke Park:

This is the third largest stadium in Europe. I think it fits 84,000 people, but I could be wrong.

This is where they play the Gaelic Games, such as Hurling and Gaelic football. They do other things, but those are the coolest. The people on the field here are practicing for a Gaelic football all-star game or something like that.

I like the shorts they wear for the Gaelic games.

If your county is good at Gaelic football they could win something like this trophy at the all-Ireland final.

I tried to use a Hurley stick, but I suck at things like that so it didn't fare well. It was good to see how the Gaelic Athletic Association helped to shape nationalism in Ireland. Bloody Sunday actually occurred in Croke Park during a hurling match to raise funds for an anti-British group. History is everywhere here, it's really cool.

After that we went to Malahide Castle in the north of Dublin. It's a really cool castle that people actually lived in until 1975. It was in the Talbot family for 800 years. I couldn't even trace my lineage back that far, much less hand down a castle.

Before doing any touring we had a delicious lunch. Hooray for not paying for food!

The castle was built in the 14th century by a bunch of invading Normans. They had good taste but most weren't very attractive.

Carpet with the family crest. Their floors are officially cooler than mine.

This is my favorite room in the castle. It could be because it's the dining hall, but I do like the ceiling. Notice the horde of portraits along the walls. These were everywhere and most people just looked funny. This room could have done without the portrait of Oliver Cromwell over the door. Especially since the original occupants were Catholic.

They have a big front yard.

We also drove back along the coast and got to walk out on the beach. It was really sweet to see the bay and the Irish sea. It was quite windy and a little cold, but it was beautiful. There is an island in the middle of the bay. The coast is really rocky and dangerous looking, but there were people surfing anyway, but the beach was big and long.

Molly, Hayley and me by the beach. It has been quite windy out recently due to a tropical storm of sorts. There are all sorts of downed branches and trees because of the wind. It is very exciting to pick up the branching and wave them around when you're having a night on the town.

Hayley likes to have fun while on the beach. Notice how hard the sand is, we didn't really sink in at all. It made for good beach walking.

A scenic view of the beach on the bay. For being so cloudy most of the time Dublin is quite pretty.

Pictures!

I have put some more pictures up online so that you can see what I've been doing without me having to explain them. Here's the link:
http://community.webshots.com/user/mandi042
I'll put a link to it on the sidebar sometime soon.

Cheers!

Home away from home away from home

This past weekend was an exciting adventure to the Irish countryside, county Monaghan, for what many like to call "homestay experience." However, based on stories heard the day prior to leaving for the homestay, this experience seemed like it would be less of a homestay and more of a stay the night lost in the dark countryside. The story goes something like this: A week before my homestay, other Arcadia students stayed with the same family. One night they went down the road to hang out with people (down the road is like a few miles down a curvy, narrow road mind you). These boys didn't know how to get back later that night and ended up sleeping on a bench in front of someone's house until about 6 in the morning. Then the next day they were put to work digging holes. So I was a bit worried to stay with this family, being sick and all, I wasn't quite cut out for manual labor.

It turned out to be a really nice weekend though. I stayed with two other girls, Hayley (my rommate) and Berit, who I didn't know so well. The family we stayed with was a mom, dad and their 8 year old son Kieron, who like to play soccer, a lot. The first night we got in late so there wasn't much to do except awkwardly sit around the living room playing games with Kieron and watching risque television with the mom, Teresa. The next morning when I woke up this was my view:

The little boy's name is Anton, and he liked to kick the soccer ball, but not play soccer.

This is the house we stayed in. Brand new, there wasn't even floor in the bathroom. There are lots of newly built houses in Monaghan, it is apperantly cheaper to buy some land and build a new house than buy a house.

The Irish countryside is absolutely beautiful. It is hilly all over, unlike the country of the mid-west. The grass is really green and they use hedges to divide property. So it always looks really cool. There are tons of cows all around, more so than sheep unfortunately. We even got stopped by cows on the road into town:

There are cows aplenty in Monaghan. Some were fuzzy and cute.

On Saturday we started the day off with a little soccer, then went into Monaghan Town for some shopping. I got some recommended cough syrup because I made a bit of a ruckus coughing that night. Then we drove back home. Played more soccer:

This is one of my favorite soccer pictures. Kieron is totally into it and Hayley is afraid of the ball. Kieron told me that I was "the worst football player in the world." After I played goalie for awhile he admited that I was a pretty good goalie, but I still was bad at soccer. There is nothing quite like the truth.

We did take a short break from soccer to climb up the hill behind the house and look around. Berit (who Kieron called Parrot) was conned into carrying Kieron up and down the hill.

And then went for a walk to see the beautiful countryside. Some of us took bikes and biked around, but I got tired and ended up walking most of the time.

You can see the divisions of land here, up the hill and to the left. There are many hills like this all around Monaghan, it's quite pretty and different from what I'm used to.

On our walk, you can see Hayley, Teresa (the Mom) and Berit and Kiron on bikes. This is a typically sized country road for cars going either way. Passing gets to be pretty scary.

Kieron was really excited to take this picture with me. I have a way with kids.

That night we went over to a house where some more Arcadia students were staying and then took a bus taxi into town again for a good old fashioned night on the town. My host father recommended a hot whiskey for me to clear my sinuses. And it worked really well! I felt fabulous for the rest of the night. Until we had to wait in the rain for the taxi to come pick us up agian.

Overall it was a good, quite weekend in the country. I really enjoyed being able to live quitely, and in a normal house with cooked food. After eating pasta constantly, decent food was sooo delicious, I event ate peas! Sunday was a quite day, we played more soccer, and then some tag and went home for a quite evening at the apartment.

Tourist Day

Last Sunday the roommates and I went out for a day of being tourists. We took pictures with multiple cameras, looked at maps, got lost and went on a tour. It was quite excellent and we learned a lot about Irish history and how sweet it is.

Our first stop was St. Stephan's Green, which is a park in the middle of Dublin. Apperantly Central Park in New York was based on this park. It's absoulutely beautiful and my pictures don't do it justice. I'll have to go another time, just to take decent pictures.

The roommates in front of the mucky lake in St. Stephan's Green.
From left to right: Jordan, Molly (who doesn't actually live with us), Hayley, Bill, and Allan

















Sitting on a fountain with my roommates. And a little boy to the right who I was afraid would fall in the fountain.

These next pictures are out of order, but they are from Dublin Castle. Which I believe is a Georgian castle built on top of what was a Norman castle that burnt down. There is actually a moat burried underneath the castle. We got to go see it and it was quite... danky. But cool none the less. For 200 years they didn't know there was a moat burried underneath the castle. Until one day in the 1980s when the water pressure kind of exploded a tower. Good thing it was beign used for a tax office and nothing worthwhile was ruined. Dublin Castle was given to the people of Dublin in 1922 when the English gave up their rule of Ireland. It is now a government building still in use by the president (who is female by the way).

Before we went on the tour we explored this area in front of the coach house, or some other building. The little brick paths mean nothing to us, but were really fun to follow along.






















Inside the castle is this beautiful portrait of Earl de Grey. Who I think was a Viceroy of Ireland back in the day. He also owned a tea plantation. Tenpence for whoever can guess what kind of tea he grew!

















This is a room inside the castle. Rooms like this are used for meetings and confrences, but I'm sure they just drink Guinness and talk about Family Guy. In 1922 when the English handed over this building to Ireland, they gutted it and took everything, including the drapes! So this beautiful old furniture was donated by some cool, generous people. Lots of the furniture was given as gifts from other important people from around the world.

















This is a big ball room with paintings on the ceilings, which didn't really turn out well in this picture. They use this room for innagurating the president and such. More boozing with drunken dancing occurs here.

















Outside of Dublin Castle here. You can see the only tower left standing from the original castle. It used to house prisoners but now it is a museum for the Garda, (the Irish police).

















This is a really cool room, I think it may be called the Drawing Room. But what it really is, is where the single ladies sat while everyone else danced the night away in the ball room we saw above. It was considered impolite for a lady to be without an escort in the ball room, so the men had to come to the door and ask a lady to dance. Unfortunately for many women, there weren't enough men who wanted to dance.

This is another view of outside the castle. You can see better here how the old tower has merged with the newer buildings. There are also now places for people to park cars! Dublin is full of old history mingled with present day life.

I've decided that every weekend that I have nothing planned I'm going to see something cool in Dublin. There's history everywhere here, so I'm sure there will be no shortage of places to see.

Senior year revisited

Classes started today, and they started well considering my first class was at 9am. My Human Resource Development class was cool, I'm excited for it. I also met a girl from Minnesota who worked with one of my best friends from high school. It was nice meeting someone else from Minnesotaa, we come few and far between here. Which may not mean much to you, but when there are about 10 people from Boston in one class it gets pretty exciting to see people from your part of the country. The interesting part of this first class though is that it is about half Irish students and the other half international students, mostly from Boston. So I'm taking class with people from all over Ireland, Spain, the states, Canada, Italy, Germany and Argentina. So it should be an interesting semester.

Class number 2 gave me some problems though. Well, maybe not problems, but... ok I got lost. I say today reminds me of my senior year of high school, and this is because it was my first year of college. And even then I had been on campus earlier in the summer so I knew my way around mostly. So being on a new campus and not knowing where buildings or rooms are is relatively new to me. Being the genious that I am, I circled the wrong building on my map for my finance class. Mind you, I only had 10 minutes between classes to locate this building and get to class. So I go into the complete wrong place, leave, look around in circles for a bit, consulte my map discretely, and then finally walk to the right building. After figuring out which theatre my class was in I am safely walking in the doors 10 minutes late with about half the class. An interesting thing about this lecture hall is that it was bench seating with long tables for desks. Rather uncomfortable and the desk/table thing was really skinny. My first assignment for Finance is to make 2 stock portfolios for 2 different people using growth shares and value shares. Which of course I have no idea how to make a stock portfolio. I think I'll be getting to know my Finance professor very well. I'm thankful my roommate Hayley is in the same class as well.

Next I was supposed to have my Finance tutorial in the Quinn building. However, I somehow managed to miss the fact that tutorials are not going to start for a few weeks. So when I get to the room the lights are off and no one is in the room. I wandered around confused and asked a professor in the other room, the people at the front desk and no one could help me. I left the building feeling dejected and silly. Especially silly now that Hayley has told me tutorials don't start for a few weeks and I spent all that energy to find a class that wasn't going on.

For those of you who may be curious, University College Dublin has about 22,000 people and is the largest university in Ireland. The school was founded in the 1850s about the same time as the U of M. However, the university moved to this campus in the 1950s, so the builidings are not as old as some at the U. Campus is absolutely dead on the weekends as everyone usually goes home to visit family or the international students travel places, nothing at all is open. New students are called "freshers." Every class gets a party, which I think means that every class I'm taking gets a party, or something like that.

So in about an hour I have my final class of the day, Marketing. Hopefully this will go better than finding my non-existent class.

First Week Recap

It's hard to believe I've only been here for one week, it feels much longer. So far everything is going well. Classes start on Monday and my schedule looks pretty nice. I got in to all awesome classes that I wanted, and I'm very thankful. I am using my phone from the States here; however, I had to get it unlocked so I could use it here. My new number if you want to spend a lot of money to talk to me is: 085 763 7412. Here's a day by day recap of the interesting things I've done so far:

Sunday
I got in at 8:30 Dublin time, which is about 3:30 Indiana time. I didn't get any sleep on the plane, which sucked a lot. But the food was pretty good. A group of us took a bus to our hostel, which is one of the nicer ones in Ireland.

The outside of our hostel.

After putting our luggage in our rooms some of us went out for drinks. Though it was only about 11am in Dublin, it was still party time in the States. So drinking at that time was socially acceptable. Guinness, as you can imagine, is huge here. And it does actually taste quite different, mostly due to the fact that it comes from just down the road, instead of across an ocean. They also transport Guinness in huge trucks, like oil tankers.

One of many Guinness trucks.

We had a low-key day and got to just wander around and get over our jet lag. I found a door that I liked very much. There is a ton of graffiti around here. Nothing too spectacular though. There are a lot of punk kids loitering about, which is funny.

Sweet door or gate thing.

Monday
We started our orientation, there isn't too much to report there. Afterward we went on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour of Dublin, which was really cool. We got to see a lot of cool places, of course I couldn't tell you how to get back to some of them. But the ride helped us to better acquaint ourselves with the city. Dublin is a mix of old and new buildings. It's rather odd to see new stores in old beautiful buildings.

Hayley and I by St. Patrick's Cathedral

The River Liffey by O'Connell Street


Fields inside the Trinity campus.

Exit signs in Ireland are funny.

People bike a lot in Dublin, there are tons of bike lanes all over, even in city center. I'm jealous. And I miss my bike. I thought this bike lane (or cycle path as they say here) was pretty hard core, taking precedence over cars.

Tuesday
The business students had to get up extra early for orientation today, 8:30am instead of 10:30am. We learned some useful thing in orientation relating to how classes are here. For a class there is generally one essay and one final in essay format. So I need to brush up on my writing skills. During the break before lunch a few of us went to the Natural History Museum, also known fondly as the dead zoo. We found out this name comes from the hundreds of dead, stuffed animals that fill the museum. It was kind of cool, and kind of creepy/musty. Some of the animals were stuff a long time ago and you could tell. That night we saw The Importance of Being Earnest at the Abbey Theater. It was quite funny, all the parts were played by men, which gave it a good twist.

Wednesday
This day is one of the more exciting. We finally got to leave the hostel and move into our accommodations for the semester. I am living with two other girls from my program, Hannah and, Hayley, in Roebuck Hall. Which is extremely new, we're the first residents, and it is amazing. There are six of us in the apartment and we each have our own bedrooms with connecting bathrooms.

My room, the bathroom is to the left.

The kitchen is really nice, there are huge windows that overlook campus and out to Dublin Bay. It's amazing. The three other roommates are international as well, though not through the same program I'm doing. Bill is from Pennsylvania, Allan is from Ottawa, and Jordan is from Boston. I really lucked out because all of my roommates are wonderful and we have a good time hanging out together. Wednesday night we went out to the campus bar, which is an experience you'll never get at the U of M.

Thursday
We had nothing going on today, so we went out and bought more groceries at place down the road a bit. Taking buses in Dublin is dangerous, as Hayley, Molly and I waited over an hour to catch a bus for our return trip. Molly and I signed up for the gym as well, so hopefully I'll be fit and trim by the time I get back to the States. Nothing else too exciting happened.

Friday
Today we had orientation at the Quinn School of Business. The dean is awesome, he is funny and relaxed which is totally opposite of everything in Carlson. I got my computer set up to go on the internet and my schedule. I'll be taking Finance, Marketing, Human Resource Development, International Business and Irish History. I have no classes Tuesday or Friday and my earliest class is at 9am on Mondays, which is a poor choice of days to start early if I say so myself. Later today we're going back to the store to get dish soap and other necessities that keep getting forgotten about.

Cheers!

I leave tomorrow

I leave tomorrow. I have to practice saying I leave tomorrow, so that when tomorrow comes hopefully I'll be able to say that I leave tomorrow. It's strange to think that I'm finally leaving for Ireland, after thinking about it and dreaming about it for 9 months, its finally becoming a reality.

Packing is not fun, and I must say that I was extremely organized and prepared to begin packing. Though I wasn't prepared to have too much stuff to fit into my luggage. So after a panic, and a brillant suggestion by my mom to use a bigger suitcase, I have most everything packed. It feels odd to leave home for four months and only have these to live out of:


















Right now I feel a bit dazed, as though this isn't really happening. Going to Ireland is something I've dreamed about since December last year when I started applying. And now it's happening, I have to pack, I have to say goodbye, I have to be ready to be completely on my own. I think I can do it. Afterall, I will be in Ireland and I'll love every minute of it.

Next time I write I'll be in Ireland!