BRRR!!!!! As beautiful as this country is and as much fun as I am having, it is still COLD and I'm still having disagreements with my radiator. I did however go out and buy another blanket to out under my comforter, and that has helped quite a bit. Now, onto to the part of the post with no complaints!

My second week of classes went much like the first. However, because of a schedule conflict that I didn’t realize was there until last Saturday, I had to make a few adjustments. One of the lectures for my Imperialism and Decolonization class conflicted with my two hour lecture in Irish Folklore. I was originally going to (regrettably) just give the folklore class the boot and fill something else in because come one people-a class that basically set up the history of the British Empire and then would proceed to tear it to pieces (academically, of course)-come on! It was going to be awesome. However, I realized that dropping folklore would of course mean adding another class. The problem was that any other class that I had been pre-approved to take conflicted with something else, so it would have been very hard to switch everything around. See, here at UL, when a class, or “module” is offered, there is only one section offered, unlike USC where one class can potentially have several different sections. Also, I got my sheet from Rachel at the SA office and realized that I actually hadn’t been approved for Sources for History. I quickly fixed this by getting in touch with my dean. Bam. Problem solved, no panic attacks or worrying. Although I really wanted to take the Imperialism class, it just didn’t work out. Oh well. Life’s hard. Get a helmet.

In changing said class, I did have to pick another. The only one that would actually fit was Modern Irish Cultural Geography. I show up for lecture, and the professor has an overheard (you guys remember those things before we had LCD projectors in every classroom?) transparency of a town here in Ireland. He sits the whole time reading from his book (that he has written, of course) about all of the people who lived on his street as a kid. It is…interesting. However, he doesn’t have tutorial sections, isn’t going to give us a final exam, and our only assignment the whole semester is one paper, so I won’t really complain. I guess he’s comparable to Professor Binns from Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

My other professors and classes are all pretty awesome. My European Society and Governance professor is an old guy who really knows his stuff but has a wonderful sense of humor. The first day that he was there (he was out last week) he said to us “Now, as you probably have noted, I am old. Sometimes I will have a senior moment in which I forget where I am and need to ask one of you what I was saying. However, most of the time I will be pretending to have a senior moment so that I can see who is paying attention.” He also said to us that he finds universities comparable to asylums and senior homes, in which the students are the nieces and nephews visiting their crazy relatives, aka the professors, and listening to them ramble. I like this guy.

My Irish Folklore professor speaks VERY quickly and bounces from one thought to the next(I wonder why I have no trouble following her…) but she really knows her stuff and gets the point across quite well.

My music and dance class has a somewhat dry lecture for what it is, but the tutorial is…interesting. I have gone from an instrument with twenty-something tone holes, a thumb rest, octave key, etc to the tin whistle which is comprised of six holes and a mouthpiece. We were sitting in tutorial playing “Happy Birthday” while the cello in the next room was putting out some serious classical piece. Nice!

The best part of last week was the trip I went on with the International Society. We left (early) Saturday morning to go to Co. Clare and Co. Galway. We went to the Cliffs of Moher, which were absolutely BEAUTIFUL cliffs ant drop 700 feet down to the ocean. We also stopped in the Burren, one of Ireland’s six national parks. Basically, it’s a lot of limestone. We stopped on the edge of the coast, so that was nice. The wind blowing, the smell of the salt in the air, the waves crashing; it makes go weak in the knees just thinking about it. Once we were in the Burren, things got interesting. While Ireland does have major highways, they only get you so far. The rest of the roads are the beautiful winding country roads that you see in pictures and movies. This usually wouldn’t bother me, but try going down these rapidly winding roads in a tour bus. Needless to say, once we got to Galway, I found a pharmacy and bought motion sickness pills for the next day. They put me into a somewhat drunken stupor for the day, but who cares. I didn’t feel sick!

In Galway, I went around with Emily, another girl form USC, and Dana, who goes to school in Syracuse. We did a little bit of shopping and then went into a pub where I had my first Bulmers cider. TASTY. After we left the pub we went to another bar where live music was promised. The bar was in an old church with a lot of the wooden architecture and decoration is intact. It was a really cool place but it was so crowded that you couldn’t move. We left around 12 and went to Supermacs for more French fries!

The next day we left the hostel we stayed at (which was very nice and very clean) and went to the Kylemore Abbey in Galway. It was so beautiful that I felt bad taking pictures because I knew I couldn’t get the whole thing and the feeling of the place in a picture. I felt like I would have needed some serious panorama. The pictures I took were great, but they just didn’t capture it.

That’s enough for now-I’ll update again with a few more details in the middle of the week, but right now I’m about to rinse off and then go swimming (indoors, of course!)