Greetings from Ireland

So, I have been in Ireland now for 10 days. For the first few days it was rainy and "stereotypical" Ireland I suppose, but the past couple of days it has been beautiful. Sunny all day, no rain, probably low 70s.

The picture up here is one I took from the bridge that connects the campus.

Thus far I've gotten pretty well settled. There are still nights when I can't fall asleep until after 3am here, but luckily I haven't had any classes before 10 am. While here, I am going to be only taking four classes. At University of Limerick they do classes differently. Instead of just having lectures two times a week they also have "tutorials". Tutorials haven't started yet, so I'm still unsure of what they are. So instead of each class being 2hrs a week, classes are at least 3. The classes I'm taking are:

Irish Music
Social and Urban Geography
20th Century Irish Fiction
Sensibility and Romanticism

The last last two classes are both English classes. I've been going to class for one week now, and they all seem like they're going to be very interesting. Originally I was considering taking Gaelic, but in the end decided that it would be a better idea not to.

Some friends and I went on a bus tour the first weekend we got here, and I posted some pictures on flickr, there are also pictures of my room on this. Here's the link for that:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/42324093@N04/

I will mostly be adding pictures to this and not on flickr.

On Thursday, it was such a nice day that my friend Lauren and I decided to look for an abandoned castle that is just on the edge of campus. We found it, and it turned out to be really cool, we even got brave enough to climb to the top. Both of which we would have never done if we hadn't heard from the local Irish students that it was pretty safe.


The Entrance to get there.


Our first view of the castle


Picture of the stairs we climbed


View from the top!

On weekends, almost every Irish students goes home to work or just spend time with their families, so it's very quite. Most people have been feeling a little sick recently, so today is going to be a very quite day :)