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