Welcome

I've been in Ireland for two days now and have been having a blast. I don't know the city all that well yet, obviously, since I got on the wrong bus yesterday. The bus turned out to be the right numbered bus, but I was at the wrong bus stop. My friend and I got home perfectly fine, and without much delay though.

Currently most of the students on campus are international or first years. Everyone is moved into my apartment. There are four people, counting me, living in our apartment. We come from America, Ireland, and the Czech Republic. We've already made friends with the 4(soon to be 5) people living across the hall from us. They include Swiss, French, and Irish. We make up a veritable UN when we're all together and so far have gone out to several things, including a soccer match the first night we were here. UCD played Shamrock Rovers, which are the Irish League champions and currently also playing in the group stages of the Europa League. The crowd was rowdy with drums, and since Shamrock Rovers are the most successful club in Ireland and based in Dublin most of the crowd was supporting them. UCD ended up losing 6-1.

Yesterday I went to the city centre with my program group and walked around some to get familiar with the city. We spent time on Grafton Street and St. Stephen's Green. Also, we found a really awesome hidden park called Iveagh Gardens that has only 2 gates and both are hidden in alleys and backstreets. It has a lot of ornate statues around it and has fields where concerts and comedy festivals take place. While wandering we found a microbrewery, which I absolutely LOVE....and found out they won't serve you Guinness there. They must be the only place in Ireland that doesn't serve the black gold. I tried their Oyster Stout, and it was extremely good.

When I returned from my trip to city centre I was expecting to take a short nap but decided instead to go to a tapas night in the international student center. The Cuban salsa club spent the time grabbing people from their meals to teach them to salsa dance on the other side of the room. It was all very good food, though most of it I had tried before but it was fun to go out and hang out with all the other students. I met two new people from Switzerland, one from Germany and talked to a guy from Afghanistan for a while. Later, we all went to the student pub where I had my first Guinness in Ireland, which I honestly think tastes the exact same as in America except that the head might be a bit creamier which is always good. My roommate had to get up early this morning to go to orientation for her program, so several of us came back for tea and bed while some went to a club in city centre that had a big college party. We ended up being awake until around 2am, much longer than anyone expected (becoming a theme here) talking about the differences in the grading systems and other things between all our countries. I have a mostly free day today, though I'm not sure what I'm going to do quite yet. I'd like to go back to bed possibly and try to catch up on all the sleep I've been missing lately. We'll see...there's a lot of new things to do here...

Until next time!
Nedwords