"Strictly no parking-- as opposed to leniently no parking?"

On my third day in Galway we had orientation at NUIG. Juice boxes and folders with more information in them were waiting for us on our chairs. A parade of people talked to us, everyone from one of the Vice Presidents of the school, to a couple of Garda sergeants, to those in charge of the students clubs and societies (which are abbreviated socs, pronounced 'socks'). About half an hour into the thing, a guy came in and sat in the empty seat next to me. He asked me what he'd missed and I explained. Turned out his name was Ryan and he was to become my first real friend in Galway. It took from around 9 until 11:45 or so, if I remember correctly. There was a coupon in our folders for the College Bar and so pretty much everyone trouped over there. The College Bar really is a bar, but it's also a place to eat. There's sandwiches and soup and pizza or there's whatever they're serving in the Carvery. The Carvery line was a lot shorter and so I went through that. I got beef, steamed vegetables, mashed potatoes and milk for 5 Euros. After orientation I wandered around campus some and found the banks. I went in the All Ireland Bank (AIB) to see their application and find out how many fees were associated with their student accounts. Then I went to the on-campus branch of Bank of Ireland and looked at their app. I liked Bank of Ireland (BOI) better so I signed up with them. I got a laser card, which is a debit card and they said it'd get to me in a week. That ended up being a problem, but for the moment, I was just happy to have it set up. I wandered off campus and spent some more time exploring. I got a phone. And when it started getting dark I headed back to my apartment.

My Irish apartment-mate had come back early for just a night and so I got to meet her (she was going to Berlin with the Art Soc until Sunday). She offered me a cup of tea and we sat down to talk. The first thing I found out is that she makes a good cup of tea. She actually managed to make it taste good. Apparently the secret is no sugar, but plenty of milk. Her name is Lauren Dooley and she's a first year. She lived with two girls from New York the semester before this one. She's studying history, French, classics and English right now, but will concentrate on French and English next year. (They pick two courses of study here) We seemed to hit it off pretty quick and we ended up watching Cool Runnings together (she hadn't seen it and it's been years for me). "Ya dead mon?" is now a running joke and we want to get a Jamaican flag for the apartment.

The next day I went back to school and listened to professors from different departments tell us about the classes we're allowed to take and how to get into them. Afterwards I spent a while wandering around campus collecting time tables for the classes from the departments I was interested in. Eventually I went back to the Quad and snuck around inside. I came back out and found Lindsay, Lauren, Minn and Angela waiting to take the campus tour. I joined them and we all followed one of the guys in charge or the Student Union around while he told us about the different buildings. Ryan happened to be in the same tour group and he talked to me for a bit. We got separated as the group moved to another thing to look at and I got distracted collecting people's phone numbers. Eventually most of the Willamette girls left the tour, so I found Ryan again and we talked some more. After the tour was over, Ryan was hungry so we headed back towards the restaurants on campus. Unfortunately none of them were serving food anymore. We wandered downtown, looking for somewhere to eat and didn't have any luck. In the end we went to Scotty's Steakhouse, which is really close to Gort na Coiribe.

I spent Saturday just kind of hanging out in the apartment relaxing because it was nasty outside and I hadn't just spent a day doing nothing in ages.

On Sunday I wandered around with Ryan for a while and then we met up with the rest of my group to have dinner at the Petersen's. It was a lot of fun. We had mac and cheese and smoked salmon and crackers and fancy cheese and whiskey and Bulmer's (an Irish cider) and soda. I tried Bulmer's and the whiskey but both were really icky. Lucky for me, Ryan was happy to drink the rest of them. Emily made cookies that were really yummy. Around 9 pm, we all headed out. I wanted to help clean up, but they assured me they didn't need it.

Ryan and I went to Corrib Village (where he lives. It's closer to campus than Gort na Coiribe, more expensive and also where even more insane partying goes on) to see if any of his roommates had shown up yet. We ran into a girl going into another apartment where a couple of his roommates were. She invited us in and so we met a bunch more Irish students. It was vaguely uncomfortable because a bunch of them were drinking and one guy was smoking. They were friendly though.

After that, the exact sequence of events gets a bit muddled. Lauren got back late Sunday. We all met Rita at 10 am on Monday. Then we started trying out classes. Putting together a schedule was a fun game because we aren't allowed to pick any classes that start before 11 am and we can't have any on Fridays either. This is because Professor Petersen's class, Irish Pilgrimage: Ancient, Medieval and Modern goes from 9:30 to 11 every Tuesday and Thursday and our Irish Life and Culture class goes from 9 to 11 on Mondays and Wednesdays. Fridays are off limits because we have several weekends excursions that often start on Friday mornings. The first one I tried was Development of the Castle in Medieval Europe. It's an archeology class and I've never taken one of those before, but it was nice to have the professor immediately acknowledge that he had a lot of visiting students and that he knew most of us weren't archeology majors. The next class I tried was Medieval Drama later that day. It was supposed to start at 5 so I showed up at least 5 minutes early. There weren't very many people there. We waited... and waited... and waited some more. The professor never showed. I had heard that happened sometimes and so eventually I just packed up and left. The next day I went to the castle class again (from here on out, it's Clastle, as it was eventually nicknamed by Lindsay) and tried one more time for Medieval Drama. This time the professor and a lot more students showed up. The class itself sounded fairly interesting, but what really convinced me to stay was that the class would be putting on one of the plays at the end of the semester. I'm looking forward to that and hoping I can be in it. On Wednesday I tried (you'll notice a pattern here) Medieval History: 5th to the 9th Century. I like the professor for this class. He's got a wonderful dry sense of humor. Without changing expression or tone of voice he will slip in these little comments that, if you're paying attention, are hilarious. On Thursday I tried out Celtic Civilization: 'A Field of Gods and Men'. The main problem with this class was that half of it was on Friday.

See, how classes work here is kind of odd. There are two hours of class a week (sometimes plus another hour of tutorial). They are almost never both in the same place though. For example, my first hour of Clastle (Monday) is in the D'Arcy Thompson lecture hall. The second hour (Tuesday) is in IT 125. A lot of them are also at different times. Medieval Drama goes from 5 to 6 pm on Mondays and 3 to 4 on Tuesdays. It's strange. The problem with the Celtic Civ class, which was one I really wanted to take because it's all about mythology, is that one of the hours was on a Friday. I talked to the professor after the first class, because realistically it's about five Fridays I'd be missing out of twelve, and he said that it had been done before even with all the missed classes. I also wanted to sign up for an English seminar which is a smaller specialty type class. All of the classes I had been in so far were big lecture type classes (hence the lecture halls). The seminars though are little classes like we have at Willamette and more interactive. There were several I wanted to take but firstly, you can only take one seminar per term and secondly, only one of the ones I wanted really fit into my schedule. It was going to be on Spenser's The Faerie Queen. I got in, but Professor Petersen recommended I not take all of the classes and so I ended up just keeping Clastle, Medieval Drama and Medieval History because all of those fit into my schedule and I had liked them so far.

That weekend we left for Dublin, which I'll tell you all about in another post. Once we came back our Irish Life and Culture class. I didn't understand how this class worked until it started. There are actually 4 hours a week. On Monday we have Irish Literature in English with Professor Kirry O'Brien. Immediately after that we   have Irish History with Professor Mary Clancy. On Wednesday we have Sociology with Professor Marilyn Moylan and then Irish Literature in Irish (translated) with Professor Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh (her first name is pronounced Alva). All four of these classes are mostly focused on modern Ireland (aka Ireland after 1900 for the most part). I was kind of disappointed by this, particularly for the history class (I wanted to do ancient Irish history), but as it turns out that one's my least favorite any ways. 


In and around going to classes I mostly explore, do laundry, eat, clean, do homework, upload pictures, take Irish dance lessons (not the kind I do at home, more like Riverdance type stuff) and explore. I've been meaning to go explore more bars and pubs but because of money and not really having people to go with or an interest in drinking, I haven't really done any of that. I do set dancing, which is kind of like the Irish dancing I do at home, on Tuesdays in Monroe's but that's one of the only bars and pubs I've been in. I've looked around in some stores. I've seen the outsides of plenty of places. I've tried out a couple of restaurants and several grocery stores. I found out that laundry prices are outrageous here. It's 10 Euros for two washer and two dryer tokens. I rented a bike and have ridden it around a bit. The group has done things together like a potluck and going to a hurling match. We've also done things in smaller groups. I bought my first ever alcoholic beverage, a Mixed Fruit Kopparberg (it's a cider) and drank all of it even though it was only good (aka, it tasted like juice) for the first third. It didn't do anything all that interesting to me either, it just made my head feel hot for 20 minutes or so. I've only been to one céili here so far because they're only once a month.

Besides that girl, Bridget, I met one my first day, I made friends with an American guy named Ryan Fitzgerald. We hung out a lot more at the beginning of the term. He's the one who made the comment on the No Parking sign that's the title of this post. We haven't seen much of each other recently though. Lauren, my apartment-mate is also my friend. I haven't seen a lot of her either recently. I made another Irish friend and his name is David Crowe. We met at the first Irish Dance lesson. He was tapping his feet around at the lesson during a pause and I asked him if he did sean nós (yet another kind of Irish dancing I don't know how to do yet) or tap. It turns out he's a set dancer and what he was doing is called battering. Technically I am a ceili dancer, but we do sets and the basic steps (minus the battering) are the same in both types. He was the first person my age I'd met who did any kind of traditional Irish Dancing (not the leap-y Riverdance kind that is) and so we got to talking and now we're friends. I've met other Irish people through Lauren and David and more Americans through various means, but there aren't really any others I'd count among my friends just yet. 


And that's mostly what I do when I'm in Galway. Anybody have any specific questions they want answered?

New Country, New You (part 2)

I started walking up Headford Road and just kept going. I found the Town Hall Theatre by accident. I also found a really neat store called Enchanted Vintage Clothing that really is all vintage women's clothing. It's all very expensive, but I like to stick my head in there sometimes and just look. Eventually I did actually find Shop Street. It's the main center of "town," or downtown as we would call it, Galway. It's a walking only street that's lined by shops with little alleys branching off of it. There's all kinds of stuff on Shop Street, everything from bakeries to pubs to McDonald's to clothing stores to a thrift store to tourist trap-type shops. It's really fun to wander up and down it which is all I did for a little while. I was looking for the bank or Carphone Warehouse or somewhere to eat. I found Carphone Warehouse first. I went it and looked around. This one did have a bigger selection so maybe that would help. They were also kind of busy so I eavesdropped on the sales guy that was helping a couple of American girls. The girls were asking questions I needed answers to as well like where was the best place to get cheap groceries and where to go out to eat. I only kind of caught the answer to the question about grocery stores. Turns out he meant Aldi and Lidl. I had explored Aldi earlier, and I had seen Lidl.

After it became apparent that they were going to be busy for a while I decided it was okay to go eat. I wandered a little further down Shop Street and saw some musicians playing while standing on top of poles. A little farther on I encountered Griffin's Bakery. It made me smile so I went in. I was thinking maybe I'd get a roll and some coffee or something, but they took me upstairs and gave me a table and a menu. I ended up ordering the 'mini Irish' which is the smaller version of an Irish breakfast. It was a pot of tea, which at that point I had yet to figure out how to make palatable (I'm not really a tea person), a sausage, potatoes, beans, a fried tomato, toast, a rasher and an egg. I ate all of it. Even the sausage. Not only was I hungry, but it was good. The sausage was better than any restaurant one I've had. Still not my favorite though. The rasher is, for those who don't know, kind of like bacon. It's usually a wider piece of meat, but not any thicker and it's floppier. They don't do crispy rashers here. The egg was over easy or medium. The fried tomato was interesting, it would never have occurred to me that people would eat that. It's not like it was breaded, it had just been tossed in a hot skillet. It doesn't do much to the inside, it mostly just made it warm and caused the skin to bubble in an icky way. The bean reminded me really strongly of Bush's baked beans, which I really like. The taste was a bit different in an undefinable way, but other than that, they're pretty much the same.

Any ways, I ate my food, paid and kept wandering down Shop Street. I found the bank (Bank of Ireland) and went inside. Apparently the place to open a new account was on the first floor. That's the floor I thought I was on, but the sign was pointing up. I only found out later that the ground floor is the one you enter on and then the first floor is always what we would call the second floor. It's rather confusing. The lady behind the new accounts desk gave me some paperwork and told me to go to the bank on the NUIG campus because they'd be better equipped to help me. I went back to Carphone Warehouse and got in line. I explained what I wanted to one of the guys and he gave me a couple of phone models and sent me up the street to check with another guy to see if they would work. See, cell phones are really complicated and to make a lot of technical stuff simple, you can't use a cell phone out of the country you buy it in without changing some programming. Here it's called unlocking, in the US it's called jailbreaking and it's not entirely legal. So, this guy's shop was supposed to be near the joke shop that was a couple doors up. I didn't know near could mean above so I wandered around for a bit, getting frustrated and then I noticed a small sign about cell phones near a stairway. I went up and finally found the place on the second (third to Americans) floor. I checked the model numbers with the guy and he said he could break the first one.

It was just about 3 when I left the cell phone breaker guy's shop. I had promised myself I would head back at 3 because the whole group was supposed to meet outside reception at 3:30 to walk over to the school. I started to head back towards the school, but I didn't take the exact same route back I took getting to Shop Street and so, as happens a lot, I got lost. I came out of some unfamiliar streets by a TK Maxx which made me laugh out loud. Dunno why the name is different, but inside it's exactly like a TJ Maxx. I decided to do a quick walk through because after one night I knew I'd need more than a duvet and a sheet. It is cold here. I found a nice and decently sized Columbia blanket, bought it and left. All of that took a while though because the check out line was quite long. I hurried out of the store and kept going in the general direction of Gort na Coiribe. Pretty soon, I was walking up a much steeper hill than I remembered walking down. I knew I was off to the side of Gort na Coiribe, but that was it. Eventually I found my way down the hill and ended up near the Galway Shopping Center. Unfortunately, it was after 3:30 at that point. Back at Gort na Coiribe, I was still trying to decide what to do when I was hailed by the group. They hadn't left yet even though it was 3:50 or so. I ran inside, dropped my hangers and we left for the school. Rita O'Donoghue was our guide. She's fantastic. She was really nice about me being late too.

The school, National University of Ireland, Galway, is about a 20 minute walk from Gort na Coiribe. We walked through campus to get to the Quadrangle which is probably the most famous building. It's old and castle-esque. I think it's 17th century or something like that. Apparently students don't have classes in there anymore, but it's still really cool to look at. We went in one end and met Maeve Cuffe and Fiona Dwyer who organize our program from this end. This was also the first time we officially met Professor Petersen's family. Her daughter, Emily, her son, Aaron, and her husband, Matt. Everyone was very nice. There was a dinner waiting for us. It was chicken and mushrooms and rice and a roll and our choice of beers or water. All of us opted for water as the beers were all American. It was kind of them to try and make us feel at home, but those who actually drink didn't come to Ireland for American alcohol. We ate our dinners and got a packet of information that included our student ID cards. Dessert was cheesecake and fruit. All of it was really yummy. While we ate we shared some travel stories. At some point during the whole thing it came out that Brian's bags had been lost by the airlines. People were talking about letting him borrow stuff and someone mentioned (since he's the only boy in our group) loaning him dresses as a joke. Someone else quipped back something along the lines of, "Ha, yeah, new country, new you." Hence the title of my posts (although I don't mean it quite the same way).

It wasn't that late but it was already fully dark. The sun rises really late and sets early here. Rita walked everyone home because we hadn't wandered in the dark yet. We walked to the Petersen's apartment first and then she took us most of the way back to Gort na Coiribe. I ran over to Curry's and bought the hair dryer I had been looking at. I don't remember what time it was when I got back, but I fell asleep pretty soon after.

And there you have the second half of my first day in Ireland. Now I'm more than a month in and so I'm thinking I'll try to do one post to get you all caught up and then try to update more regularly and less painfully detailed.

Also, fair warning, the internet at Gort na Coiribe is really slow and not very consistent, so I'll upload pictures to this post when I get the chance (probably at the school on Monday because their internet is at least a little better). On the pictures note, as a lot of you've probably seen, a lot of my pictures are on facebook. Not all of them are though and for those of you who want to see everything I'm working on making an online album. Once I've finished, I'll put a link here and on facebook.