Tá mé go maith

Good news, the “Who Loves Megan the Most” competition has officially begun! Just kidding. But yesterday I got a package from Katonah, full of Life cereal and decorations for Halloween (which they do celebrate here). I also got a letter and beautiful watercolor picture from Shradha. And if Rachel gets the immigration details for her mission sorted out, then she’ll hopefully be visiting me in a couple weeks. The contest is off to an excellent start. (No purchase necessary to enter, emails are just as nice.)

Enough cereal to last the month? Only time will tell.

I bought some Irish yarn the other day so I’m finally knitting myself a pair of socks. I usually knit while watching TV. This week there hasn’t been much on the news so we’ve been watching MTV (from one end of the spectrum to the other…) mostly Jersey Shore. What’s really bad though is this show called Geordie Shore, which is basically the British version of it. I’ll tell you right now, it’s nowhere near as good. At least Jersey Shore’s characters are somewhat likeable; these people from Geordie are awful. It also probably doesn’t help that they don’t censor ANYTHING after 9:00 at night, so instead of hearing the bleeps and leaving the actual words up to my imagination, I get the full force of their obscene vocabulary in all its glory. How nice.

I finally started my Irish language class this week. I really like it a lot so far. After 2 classes I can say “Hi, how are you, good, thank you, what’s your name, my name is Megan, what’s your phone number, 086-779-1504”. I also ordered a cup of tea in Irish (“cupan tae”), and I was so excited about it that didn’t think and took a huge sip right away and burned off half my taste buds. I tried speaking some Irish to (more like “at”) Anthony, since he’s had it for 12 years at school, but apparently most of it went in one ear and out the other, and what few phrases managed to stick are all in Munster dialect, where as my teacher uses a Connemara dialect. This is basically what I know.

Lacrosse is great; I had practice again last night. Last week when I brought a stick home, Anthony kept picking it up and messing around with it because he’d never seen one before, so I brought him with me to play last night. He said he liked it and he’ll come back next week. The thing with him and a lot of the Irish players is that they’ve played hurling for so long that they keep getting the sports confused, so in the middle of the game they’ll just pick up the ball with their hand and put it in their stick, because I guess you can do that in hurling. Or even better, they'll toss the ball up out of their stick and try to bat it into the goal instead of just throwing it in. It’s so fun though, and fortunately the girls’ team is growing. Yesterday we had 9 girls at practice: 4 who have played before are 5 first-timers. I met a girl named Alex last week from Maine. She's a first year but she's doing a full-degree here, not just a semester of studying abroad. She's played since she was really young, but she says she was always on the bench at home, but here she seems like a super star, so I think she's going to try out for the Women's National Team next month. Apparently the women’s team has no restrictions about what country you’re from. They hope to have at least half of the team be actually Irish, if possible, but really they'll take what they can get. I’m so jealous.

Sweet Irish lacrosse shirt I want. I can't get over the harps everywhere.

I tried an Irish step-dancing class Wenesday night with Katie and Sarah, but it was actually no fun at all because I have absolutely zero dance experience and the teacher was awful so I don’t think I’ll be going back. One of my friends here has taken Irish dancing for like 11 years though, so she’s going to do it. Hopefully she has some performances during the semester I can go to, because it’s really cool to watch.

Tonight dinner club is making tacos, so I’m bringing over a Tres Leches cake, and I think Molly’s making guacamole. Feels just like home. Except most the people here are from the north and don’t like spicy things at all, so I’m keeping my expectations low for these “tacos”.

I can’t believe tomorrow’s October! I guess it feels like I’ve been here for longer than a month, but this is still going by really quickly.  We’re leaving for Dublin at 10 tomorrow. I still have to figure out what I want to do there besides see Trinity and the Guinness Factory, because they’re basically just giving us a bus pass and turning us loose for the weekend. Suggestions are welcome.

Me, Molly, and Anthony

Nothing Specific/Cliffs of Moher

The old country has been good to me these last few weeks. Classes are good, friends are good, and general craic is good. It’s great here, but nothing incredibly noteworthy has happened, just overall enjoyment of everyday things.

Last Saturday we went to Connemara, which was cool, but the weather was terrible so we didn’t get to hike around too much. I did get to see a couple cool churches and an abbey, plus the Connemara Marble suppliers.

Sunday Molly, Sarah, Katie, and I went down to Monroe’s pub to watch the Gaelic football national finals: Kerry vs. Dublin. We had a great time, even though Kerry lost, and I ate some delicious bangers and mash. I wish they had Gaelic football at home on TV, it was so much more fun to watch than American football. YEAH, I SAID IT. Anyway, I’d definitely recommend watching a game to anyone if you get the chance.

I had to go register with immigration on Tuesday, so I got a new ID card. I’m probably on all sorts of watch-lists now, since I look like a serious threat to Irish national security.

Legal

I decided to join the NUI lacrosse team, so Thursday night I went to the first practice. I haven’t played in about 4 years, so I was afraid I was going to be the worst one there. Luckily for me, lacrosse is virtually unknown in Ireland, so I’m actually one of the more experienced players. If people here see you walking around with a lacrosse stick, they’ll ask you if you’re going fishing. It feels so great to play again, and the people there are so friendly and laid back, I’m really happy I joined. We have a tournament in Dublin in 2 weeks, which should be awesome. There are teams from all over Europe going. Even if we don’t end up having enough girls for the NUI team (which has happened for the last 2 years here- we’re currently at 7 players), at the tournament they put all the teams together then reshuffle them onto new teams for the weekend. They have such a different attitude here about sports, they just play for fun, at any level; it’s great.

Also on Thursday was Arthur’s Day, which celebrates the invention of Guinness. At 5:59pm the entire city (and world, I assume) toasted to Arthur Guinness. The streets were a mess the next day.

Today a few of us took a bus to the Cliffs of Moher, which are definitely the best thing I’ve seen in Ireland so far. I would’ve been more upset that we only got to spend an hour there, but I know I’ll be back so it’s ok. The bus driver was listing off a bunch of movies filmed there. Harry Potter 6, Inception, Princess Bride, and Saving Private Ryan are the ones I remember. We also saw some other cliffs of Doolin, which were smaller but still scary at the edge.

Cliffs of Insanity

I’m getting along great with my roommates, and a few of us from API have an Ireland dinner club at someone’s apartment every week. This week it was at Molly’s and mine, so she made chicken alfredo and I made pineapple pudding. Not very Irish, but that’s ok. Between API taking us to that Italian place and Anthony telling me his favorite food is pizza, I think we’re fine having pasta once a week.

Molly and I

This week API’s taking us out to Monroe’s for traditional music and dancing (and pizza, go figure), then it’s one of the girls’ 21^st birthday so we’ll go out with her afterwards, and Katie and I are making her a Guinness cake. Thursday there’s a lacrosse scrimmage and party, then Saturday API is taking us all to the only place in the country with a Starbucks: Dublin. In between those things I probably have a class or two.

Pictures: http://www.kodakgallery.com/gallery/sharing/shareRedirectSwitchBoard.jsp?token=221632692214%3A470926289

Week 2

It’s been another really long week. I finally got a little time to settle in (yet not quite enough time to write here more often), and it’s easier to get into a routine with classes going on. Sunday was the Ironman, which was really cool, though I got about an hour of sleep the night before, since all the Irish kids came into town that day and were partying all night long in the apartment across the hall from us. They’re crazy here. The students go home almost every weekend, so they party every night during the week instead. It hasn’t been that bad at our place after the first night, thankfully, but the roommates of one kid here were so wild that he had to move to another building. They were two girls who had apparently just turned 18. He said he woke up one morning and there was an uprooted bush in the middle of the kitchen table. Yikes. Anyway, the triathlon was cold and rainy all day, but we had fun. We got there a couple hours before it started, so we were hanging around the bikes and basically just collected the plastic covers off them once the triathletes got there. Once it started we were sent to the tent where swimmers changed into their bike stuff. All I had to do was stand at the entrance and point to where they could grab their bags. I also had to say “good job” every so often. The other girls in my group got the short straw, and had to actually help the people change out of their wetsuits into their bike clothes. So though I was cold from just standing there not moving for so long, at least I don’t have the image of several naked old men burned into my memory. After the race we got back and I crashed for like an hour, then there was an after party for all the athletes and volunteers. Everyone was so tired, but there was free food and drinks, so we all ended up going, and it was pretty nice. At one point I left the group for a second to get a drink and I ended up talking for almost an hour to a couple old guys at the bar who had been at the race too. Being from Texas is a huge conversation piece here. Not only does everyone know exactly where it is, but most people I’ve talked to have been themselves or known someone who’s lived there for a bit.

About an hour before the race started

Classes started Monday, and so far I really like them all. I’m in 2 English classes, one on Shakespeare and one on Theatre, then I have a class called “Society and Social Institutions of the Celts” which is really interesting. So far we’re just talking about kin groups and the how class system works. I also have a class called “Imagining Modern Ireland” which doesn’t actually start until tomorrow, but sounds promising. My last class is a 10 credit Irish language class, which I’m really excited for. In November that class is going on a field trip for a weekend to a Gaeltacht where they still speak Irish and we’ll have to speak it too.

Sculpture on campus

I went to the Galway Cathedral in between classes the other day. The church is huge, it had it’s own bookstore in the corner. The whole place was beautiful. The daily mass was only 10 minutes long, and half of it was in Irish, and for communion everyone went up to rails around the altar. The priest’s name is Peter Rabbitte, no joke. He must’ve had some parents.

There are a few types of pubs here. Some have traditional live music every night, some have a live band that plays cover songs of varying artists, and some are basically just clubs set in bars that play terrible dance music and are deafeningly loud and incredibly crowded. Of course the third kind is the most popular with people my own age, but finally a few nights ago some of my friends agreed to come with me to Taaffe’s, which is known for traditional live music, so I got to hear that for a couple hours at least before they moved on to the Quays, which had a live band playing more popular music, but wasn’t bad since they stuck mostly to classic rock. Actually the inside of the place was really cool. They had illuminated stained glass in parts of the floor, and they had an upstairs with the band on a balcony playing down to the rest of the pub.

Delicious fish and chips before the pub

Music at Taaffe's

Molly’s and my other roommate finally moved in on Saturday. He’s a first year so his classes didn’t start until today. His name’s Anthony, he’s from Limerick but he has an English accent because his dad is from London and that’s where they lived until he was six. He was a real help when Molly and I were going through the inventory checklist of the apartment because he could tell us the differences between dessert, tea, and soup spoons, he knew what the “hob” was (it’s the stove), and he knew how to work the electric kettle. He was blown away when I told him we didn’t have one at home. He’s really nice, and I talked to him for a while yesterday about some of the differences between here and home. The biggest two were the fact that people drink so much tea here and that they don’t like peanut butter. The other is the way college works. Over here you pick your major (module) then take only those types of classes, no general education classes, so they graduate in 3 years instead of 4 for most degrees. International students get to pick classes from any of the modules, so we have a lot more freedom with our schedules (too much freedom for me, actually, since I wanted to take about 10 classes and only had room for 5). Anthony says he’ll probably go home almost every weekend, like most of the Irish kids do.

On Saturday our whole API group decided to go to the Aran Islands for the night. We took the ferry over to the big island, Inis Mór, in the morning, and explored all day. The whole island is only about 9 miles by 3 miles so we rented bikes and rode all along the coast. It was beautiful there so I took it slow and saw about half the island, thinking I could see the rest the next day, but when I met back up with my friends for dinner they told me that a hurricane was coming in and all the afternoon ferries would be cancelled the next day. If we didn’t leave on the 8am then we would be stuck there until Tuesday. I had been thinking that the torrential downpour and gale-force winds were typical Aran Island weather, but with the reports of the hurricane we all agreed it would probably be best to leave early the next morning. We still had a lot of fun out that night at a pub who’s name I’ve forgotten, and at our hostel that had giant roosters and crazy stuff painted on the walls. Maybe I’ll be back again sometime.

Not the bar we went to

World's smallest church

Us inside

This one's for Gail

This morning I woke up to the sound of 90mph winds against the window, and got to walk straight into them the entire 2-mile trek to campus. Thank goodness there was no rain for once, because I’d have been caught like a kite if I’d had a raincoat on. Thanks for a fantastic reminder of home, Hurricane Katia.

This week I basically just have classes, then we’re going to Connemara for the day on Saturday, and I think the All Ireland Gaelic Football Final is on Sunday.

Here's a link to more pictures, I didn't want to bombard you with them all here.

http://www.kodakgallery.com/gallery/sharing/shareRedirectSwitchBoard.jsp?token=450701582214%3A2094034089

Week 1

It’s dawned on me that writing on this once a week may not have been the greatest of ideas, if only because I’ve done so much in this last week that any blog post will be obnoxiously long. Oh well.

First thing’s first, I love it here. Love love love love love it. The city is so nice and clean, everything’s in walking distance, and API has kept us super busy all week so I haven’t had any time to get homesick. Our API Galway coordinator’s name is Fionnghuala (finn-oo-la), and she’s awesome. She and her husband Kevin (who’s actually the co-coordinator) live in Galway, and are basically here to help us with whatever we need this semester. Finn’s a huge traveler herself, and apparently has lived on 5 continents and worked in 4 of them. She gave us a tour of the city and has been pointing out all the good places to go and is just really excited to have us here. Along with the 4 trips API planned for us all to go on, she has a bunch of ideas for places for us to go if we want, and said she’d help plan with us anywhere we want to go. She also scored some tickets to the Riverdance for us for Thursday, and got us signed up to help out at the Ironman race tomorrow (Sunday). Anyway, I’m really glad I’m here with the API program, especially since seeing the kids at orientation and around campus who are just here on their own, they look really lost and aren’t sure what to do at all. There are 15 other students in my API group. Almost all of them are juniors too, but there are a couple seniors. One of the seniors is my roommate Molly, who is really cool. She has flaming red hair, so she says she’s happy to be somewhere that she doesn’t stick out so much. Everyone in the group actually gets along pretty well, and we’ve gone out together every day so far, just to different places around the town. I’m sure part of it is the fact that we’re all desperate for friends, since we don’t know anyone else here, but I genuinely like a lot of them, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be hanging out with them all the way up to December. 

Our group

The one bummer so far is how expensive things are here, which I knew, but I guess I was thinking that other people were exaggerating. They weren’t. Luckily there’s a store called Dunne’s right across the street from our flat, which is kind of like Walmart. So the first thing I got was peanut butter and jelly and crackers, and a loaf of soda bread and Irish butter. Finn’s always apologizing for the food here, but I couldn’t be happier. We’ve gone out a few times as a group, and usually I get seafood chowder, which is delicious. Funnily enough, our “welcome to Ireland” dinner, courtesy of API, was at an Italian restaurant. It was really good, and for dessert I got this thing I’d seen on the menu at a pub the night before called “banoffee”. I asked Kevin and he said it was really popular there. Basically it’s a toffee cookie with banana and cream on top. Delicious, I can see why it’s so popular.

The campus is beautiful, with ivy and stuff all over the buildings. I’m dreading walking around anywhere with Erin because I know she’s going to be taking pictures literally every 10 yards. I’ve been trying to take as many as I can this week because the Irish kids don’t get here until tomorrow, so I can get all my tourism out of the way by then.

The Aula- main building on campus

Molly and another girl, Katie, were at our apartment last night planning a bunch of trips they want to take while they’re here. There are a lot of places I want to see: The Blarney Stone and castle, the cliffs of Moher, the Book of Kells, and just some other small, rural towns in the country. Not to mention any other countries I would see while I’m here. Italy would be great, Oktoberfest would be really cool, and I’d love to see Scotland. However, I also want to be a part of the city while I’m here, and actually meet some Irish kids and live in Galway. API has 4 trips planned for us: Connemara, Dublin, London, and County Claire/East Galway. Katie and Molly have planned literally every weekend to travel somewhere, with the exception of Halloween weekend and December 3-4, when they’ll be returning from a trip to Italy. I would love to see all the places they’re going, and hopefully I can go with them for a couple trips, but I can always come back and visit those specific places, I can’t really come back and live and fit in here, so I definitely am not going on all of them. I think another part of it is, those guys were a little disappointed by the city because it is a city. It’s not a farm with sheep and stuff. It’s surrounded by farms and the ocean, but where the school is is a modern city. I love it, but apparently it’s not rural enough for them.

It rained for the first time yesterday. Luckily Finn had told us it was supposed to so I had time to go buy a raincoat before it started. I haven’t actually had a raincoat since I was about 6, and that was a pink rubber one, so I was really confused as to why none of the waterproof coats in the stores here had hoods on them, they just had these big puffy collars instead. It took probably 15 minutes of looking through racks before I saw one coat with the collar unzipped, and a hood hanging halfway out of it, when I realized that’s how raincoats must all look. People don’t really wear them at home though, so how would I have known that? Anyway, I got one, and it’s already my best friend.

Tomorrow most of us are working the Ironman, so we have to get up at 3am. It’s over in Salt Hill, which is about a 20-minute walk from campus, and a 40-minute walk from Gort na Coiribe (our apartment complex). A group of us actually went down there today because we all wanted to see the bay there. Nine of us walked down to the docks and halfway out a pier reaching out to a lighthouse (which apparently was the last light of home migrating Irish saw on their trip to America, according to a big rock on the coast), which was technically in Claddagh, not Salt Hill. After the pier, the rest of the group walked back to Gort na Coiribe while I and two other girls, Sarah and Colleen, walked the other direction towards the beach and some big cliffs in the distance. We walked through this great little port town with salty air and a boardwalk called the Prom, which it turns out was the actual town of Salt Hill. We saw all the bikes being set up for the race tomorrow, and a bunch of people in triathlon shirts walking around. We walked past the shops and stuff out to the cliffs and climbed up them. They had the best view at the top; you could see the town, the ocean, and the mountains across the bay. The sun even came out during the rain so we saw a rainbow. Today was definitely my favorite day so far. It was great to just explore and be there. I’m definitely taking anyone who visits me out to see Salt Hill.

Sarah and Colleen on the edge of the cliff

Hopefully for my own sake I can find time to write these more often, so I’m not sitting at a computer for 2 hours trying to remember an entire week at a time, but we’ve been so busy this is the first time I’ve really had to myself. I think it will slow down a little though once I’m in a routine and have classes, which start Monday.

Here’s my address in case you want it:

Megan Hanlon

101

Gort na Coiribe

Headford Road

Galway City

Ireland

Fun fact, there are no zip codes in Ireland, except in Dublin.

Also I have Skype (mh4077) and Facetime (megh@mail.utexas.edu), which are the only ways I can talk to people live.

Sláinte