First days in the new city...

After long days of stressful packing and checklists, I arrived in Boston for my flight to Dublin three hours early and got through security in less than five minutes. The plane ride went a lot faster than I thought; I watched three movies on our personal TV screens and ate a fairly decent airplane meal. We got through customs quickly and met Stephen Robinson who paid for a cab to bring us to the apartment building. Our taxi driver was really friendly but, once we got to the apartments, we found out that he charged us way more than he should of because he knew we were Americans. We’ll know for next time I suppose.

Since I couldn’t sleep on the plane, I took a two hour nap at the apartment and got up in time to go on my first walk in Dublin. Claire brought us to a Breakfast/Lunch Café that served sandwiches and strange vegetable pies. I spent $14 USD on a ham sandwich and an apple juice, ouch. You definitely can’t eat out everyday when you’re on a budget. It snowed all day and Dublin doesn’t seem to know that salt melts snow, so they just leave it there and cancel buses and close off roads hoping it will melt. There is now an inch of ice coating the streets and sidewalks, making it very difficult to walk. There are so many shops and bars lining every street, I keep trying to make mental notes of where I want to go but there are too many! I get lost so easily so I’m really trying to get to know where things are here. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it in a few weeks.

The first day of orientation we met some of the faculty and had a scavenger hunt around Dublin. It was pretty fun even though it was freezing out. We had to get things like “a picture of a man wearing a tweed hat holding a pint of Guinness.” Sounded like a very strange request but the first bar we looked in we found a man with a tweed hat and asked him if we could buy him a pint just to take his picture, he thought we were odd but agreed anyway. Everyone we’ve met so far has been really friendly and talkative. That night the faculty took us out to this restaurant/pub in the Temple Bar area (very touristy). The Professors that we met were extremely funny and genuinely nice people. I couldn’t be more excited for classes; they all sound amazing.