Write It Down

Where does the time go? I realize that I've been a terrible blogger lately (January!?!??! Sorry!)

I don't want to do the whole "well this is what I've been doing for the past three months" thing because... well, anyone reading this has a pretty good idea anyway!!

Teaching is officially finished for the semester, meaning I've got about a month to write my final essays and take one exam... well, by now I have about 2 weeks before the first exam, three before the first papers are due.
I've been having a really hard time being productive lately. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm simultaneously realizing that my time here is quickly coming to and end, that I don't want it to, and that I have no idea what I'll be doing this summer.
I'm waiting to hear back about the internship I applied for... but honestly, I don't know if I'll be able to afford to take it. Augh.

Anyway, more fun topics:

I went to Paris this weekend (not really a weekend, but we'll just pretend for the sake of it) to visit Kelsey and have her show me around her lovely city... oh my goodness, I completely underestimated how wonderful it would be!!!!! First of all, Kelsey and her roommates live in this amazingly beautiful apartment... probably the nicest student apartment in existence and it's in Paris! We spent the weekend walking all over the city, seeing all the sites and popping into a couple of museums. It was tricky to get it all in because I didn't have much time, but I saw enough to know that I will definitely be back at some point in my life!

My birthday is coming up and I have really good feelings about this one :) Mackenzie and Kelsey are both going to be here in Galway and I think we might do a bit of touring around, check out the Cliffs of Moher, the Burren, etc.. fun stuff :) And of course have a yummy birthday dinner and visit a few of my favorite public houses!

I know I say it all the time, but hopefully I can follow through with posting more frequently again... not that anything terribly interesting will be happening over the next couple weeks (work work and more work!)

Unrelated to any of this, but I think when I go home this summer I'm going to try to start this.

I have a really hard time answering questions like, "What have you been up to?" "Do you like it over there? Why/why not?" "Are you having fun?" etc, etc. I understand going on a vacation and coming home to tell everyone exactly what you did: the sights you saw, people you met, food you ate. For me, though, studying abroad (and now that I think about it, going away to college entirely) is a lot more difficult to summarize because it's not a vacation, it's just day to day life. I've talked about this to a few of my friends I made last semester... it's hard to tell people "well, today I went to the grocery store and it rained a lot. I stepped in so many puddles, my shoes and socks were soaked through and then I had to carry home two heavy bags all the way from the store and when I got home I realized that there wasn't room in the fridge and somebody else JUST bought milk, so now we have too much and oh man I forgot the bread" and you get the idea. Life doesn't always lend itself so nicely to being retold. Granted, I have gone on many wonderful trips and I've seen so many things and I do have lots of great stories... it's just hard to recap them.
So, it's my goal (resolution, if you will) to now and then post little anecdotes from my traveling. I've realized it really isn't about knowing EXACTLY everything I've done, but just being able to take a little look.

So, for today, I'll share the story of my arrival in Leipzig, Germany.

Early on in the semester, a large group of us decided that we would all go to Berlin for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall in November. After just a little bit of searching, we were able to find fairly cheap flights from Cork -> Berlin and so we purchased them. There were seven of us all together, and we all had different goals and destinations in mind, so we broke down into small groups. Kelsey, Joanne and I decided to see a little more of Germany than just Berlin and selected Leipzig with little reasoning aside from the cheap hostel we'd found. It turned out that there were a lot of things in Leipzig to see and do, so off we went!
All seven of us flew into Berlin together and after finding our hub (we all agreed to meet up at the same hostel (The Eastener) when we came back to the city) and grabbing a quick bite, we went our separate ways. The three of us bound for Leipzig made our way to the main train station where we were treated with the presence of a Starbucks and a large quantity of pigeons.

Anecdote: train stations in Europe are weird. Most of the ones I've been in are enormous structures with several floors and every store you could imagine, so we had a lot to keep us busy while we waited for our train to Leipzig.

Anywho, we eventually got on the train and grabbed seats next to an old lady, who quickly adopted us even though she couldn't speak English and none of us had any German beyond "bier" and "danke." So, our Leipzig grandma gave us candy and offered to buy us hot chocolate, which we politely declined, and we made wild hand gesture conversation for a bit. It turned out that she was going to visit her grand daughter who did "tourism" in Leipzig.
We arrived to the city without any hassle and after several confusing explanations from less-than-helpful train station employees, we found our way to the light rail which would take us to our hostel.
This is where the story really gets fun. We had found the place on hostelworld.com, which is usually reliable and provides pictures, ratings, directions, etc. The info we had read about the Leipzig Guesthouse was that the owner was a real nice guy who left chocolates on your pillows and that you rooms had cable TV and all of this for 9 euro a night! What a bargain! After a long day of travel, we were quite tuckered out and looking forward to resting our heads on the chocolate laden pillows. When the lightrail train pulled up to our stop, we were hesitant to get off - we'd pulled into a heavily grafittied, under construction SUPER sketchy looking neck of the woods. Even better, when we got to the hostel, we found the door locked and all of the lights off. Luckily the owner had been gracious enough to leave us with his phone number. Being the silly American that I am, it took me a while to include all the proper zeros and country prefixes necessary to connect with Daniel (the owner) and by the time I finally got through to him, I was more than a little frustrated. The following is a rough transcript of our conversation:
Me: Hello, I booked a room in your hostel for tonight... can you let us in?
Daniel: Where are you?
Me: We're at the door...
D: Are you at the hostel?
Me: Yes, look... we're right out front
D: Do you have a car?
Me: No?
D: Did you take the tram here?
Me: Yes. Look, I don't see why this is important... can we come in?
D: PLEASE TRY TO UNDERSTAND. I will put you in a private apartment tonight. Stay where you are.
Me: What do you mean a private apartment???
D: Just listen very carefully. You will stay in a prepaid private apartment. Stay where you are, I will send a taxi.

End call.

I'm a big fan of horror films. I love being scared but with the assurance that it's all fake, nothing bad can happen to me - it's just a bunch of actors and special effects tricks. However, I've seen enough scary movies to know that being told to wait on a dark corner in a foreign city, surrounded by amateur graffiti, for a taxi that is taking you to an unknown "private apartment" is generally NOT a good start to things. I relayed the phone call to Kelsey and Joanne, who had only heard my half of things and the rise of panic and confusion in my voice. We waited in front of the hostel for about five minutes until a taxi pulled up, the driver, we were relieved to see, was a woman and she helped us put our bags in the trunk. Sitting inside the car, I tried to make small talk - and sense of the situation - but the lady didn't respond to anything I asked her. I was feeling pretty freaked out by this point, certain that we were being driven to some torture site and that we would die at the hands of a stoic, frighetening German frau.

Obviously, though, I didn't die - neither did Kelsey or Joanne, for that matter. The taxi driver pulled the car into the parking lot of a 4 star hotel where posters on the front door advertised a convention for Irish ex-pats in Germany. We found this very odd. The concierge was angry on our behalf when the taxi driver explained to him what exactly had happened (I would have liked a similar explanation...) and he began to yell, "THIS IS NOT NORMAL! THIS SHOULDN'T BE HAPPENING. IT IS NOT NORMAL AND IT SHOULD BE NORMAL!" By this point, the three of us were travel-weary, confused and more than a little uneasy and his fit made us chuckle a bit at the absurdity of the entire evening, which only caused him to say "YOU SHOULDN'T FIND THIS FUNNY. I DON'T THINK IT'S FUNNY AND YOU SHOULDN'T EITHER!!" We zipped our lips.

In the end, it turned out that Daniel hadn't enough reservations in the hostel to justify opening it for us, so he put us up in the 4 star hotel for a night before having us check in the next day. I wish I could understand the logic behind that, but hey, I'm not complaining too much - I had a nice bubble bath and slept in an enormous, incredibly comfortable bed.

Hip Hip... Hooray!

Last we saw our heroine she was headed up north for a quick visit to Dublin. Now, the trip began perfectly. I found the train station without a hitch and made it in time for the good ol' 9:30 service to Dublin. Unfortunately, I had a bit of a cold, which was only exacerbated by the fact that the cars didn't have any heat that morning. So, the trip was a little sniffly but nothing too bad; I had Neil Gaiman's American Gods to keep me company so all was right with life. Aside from the crazy crackhead lady behind me who kept yelling, "How far now!?" and the oddball old man across the aisle who would respond "Ah we've just passed ____, so."

Tangent: I love the way Irish people use the words "now" and "so". I can't really come up with a comparison in "American" but nows and sos are usually tucked into sentences as space-fillers, almost. I suppose a bit like an American like, but still a bit different. Example Scenario: You're at the local Tesco, just running in to get some OJ and eggs - the usual purchase, of course. You run it through the line with a clerk because the self check out lines are just out of this world and your friendly Polish-Irish hybrid says "Now, tree euro, so!" It's just so gosh-darned cute. /Tangent.

Anyway, so the train trip was fine going up. I made it into the city without any trouble and took the Luas (lightrail tram) to the stop nearest our hostel and met up with Anna. We decided to make the Guinness storehouse our first stop (naturally) and picked up some cheap chips en route, having not eaten for the better part of the day. The storehouse was fun, even though I'd been before. This time, all of the computers and things were working, unlike last time when half the exhibit wasn't functional. I also got to pull me own pint this time, which was fun, and mine didn't turn out half bad!

After the storehouse, we wandered a bit and found a nice place to have dinner and it was after dinner that I really began to feel like crap, so we wandered back to the hostel and bought copious amounts of Halls cough drops, OJ and and kleenex, ready to tuck in for an early night. Or what we hoped would be an early night.

We were wronnnnnng. We had decided to book a shared dorm style room at the hostel, 12 beds, mixed gender. NBD, right? We'd just be sleeping there so it's not like we were too invested in who our roommates would be. Well, when it turned out that our roommates were loud, drunken Italian men in town for the big match, it mattered quite a bit. There was a bit of a bed fiasco (everyone in the wrong beds because the first people to arrive had put their things in the wrong spot, etc, etc. not that it really mattered - there were enough beds for everyone). So of course the drunken Italian men and the high maintenance English girls had to have it out at 4 AM. Of course. After much yelling and miscommunicating, everything sorted itself out.

The next morning, we went to the Hugh Lane art museum, which was AMAZING. It was free (woo!!!) and had a great collection of mostly impressionist paintings. There was some more modern stuff, too, one of which is my new favorite painting of all time, I think. It's called Garden Green by Norah McGuinness. That link is a terrible image and hardly displays the completely vivid greens and the contrast of the bright white... It was just gorgeous!
After that, we met up with the other BC kids in town, ate lunch and then I decided that the best choice for my health would be to stay in bed instead of explore more of Dublin. Plus, the places my friends wanted to go were places I'd already been when I went in March. So, I spent another lovely night in the hostel bed, sneezing and coughing and sleeping off and on. Talk about fun trips.

Since I've been back in Cork, I've pretty much fully recovered. Both of my roommates were gone for the weekend, so I spent it cuddled up on the couch with my lovely giraffe blanket and a stack of books about yea high. I finished American Gods, Kiss Kiss by Roald Dahl (a really good collection of short stories. Pretty creepy, though), My Left Foot by Christy Brown and Of Mice and Men by good ol' John Steinbeck. All in all, a good weekend - much better than the one before.

I leave Cork tomorrow night for an evening in the Dublin airport and then off to Italia! I'm pretty excited and a bit nervous too. The website for the Italian train system is complete crap, so Laura and I have just decided to wing it and buy tickets as we need them. We found a nice enough looking hostel in Florence, where I'll get to see some friends from high school! It should be a nice week away, and hopefully a little bit warmer than Cork, which shouldn't be too hard to do.

Look forward to some photos and Italian tales!

The past couple of weeks have been an absolute blur.

I go to class in the morning, from 9:30 - "12:30" but we're usually let out early, so I do my grocery shopping for the day. It would be nice to not have to shop every day, but the mini fridge makes that difficult. Also, I'm running out of ideas for meals that can be easily and quickly prepared with little space and few tools. Ideas, anyone?
I'm really happy with the group of friends I've made here. Most of us are in the same early start subject and live in Leeside, so we've been doing something of some sort most nights, whether it be chatting and getting to know each other or going out to some overpriced, overcrowded pub.

Our apartment building is located pretty centrally, so that's nice. It's a bit of a hike to school in the mornings, especially when it is pouring, but that's what wellies and brellies and anoraks are for! I prefer our proximity to the grocery stores, at least we don't have to walk a billion miles whilst carting our bags of food.

The past two weekends we've gone on a mini trip of some sort. Last weekend I went to Fethard to visit my grandpa one last time before he left for home. It was great fun, the town still has some of its old medieval walls and buildings and things and we went out for a nice meal and music afterward. I came back to Cork to go to the Cork City FC match against Cliftonville, where we were roped into being a sort of US fan club for the Rebels. We joined the crowd of about 50 hooligans in all the chants, including "Barack Obama loves Cork City!" and "U-S-A! U-S-A!"
The next day, a bunch of us went on a bus tour of the Ring of Kerry, which is a road that encircles Co. Kerry. Unfortunately it was terribly foggy and rainy so we didn't get to see all the beautiful views and landscapes, but it was still a good trip. We stopped in a few small towns, ate some delicious stew and brown bread, bought postcards and acted like tourists.


Thursday, our class went on a field trip to Bunratty folk park and castle, where we visited old farmhouses and cottages furnished with their traditional furnishings, which we had been learning about in class. After touring the folk park, we went to a banquet inside the castle. It was fun although a bit hokey. The food was amazingly delicious. We had this creamy vegetable soup, ribs, chicken, vegetables and a berry mousse tart thing for dessert. We came back to Cork yesterday via Adare, Kerry, and Mucros house in Kilarney.

We only have a couple weeks left of the early start program, and then we register for the regular semester. They still haven't published the list of updated modules, so I don't know what I will be able to register for. It is quite frustrating. At orientation, they talked about this crash course in French that I kind of want to take. It's mostly focused on speaking instead of grammatical rules and the like, so it sounds like it would be both fun and useful (social AND functional, as Dr. Humphreys would say!)

We've been trying to figure out where everyone wants to go in terms of European travel. My number one goal is to get to Berlin for the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the wall. There is going to be this ceremony involving 8 ft dominos set up to collapse and I think it would just be an amazing experience. A bit of searching around on ryanair and hostelworld last night tells me that it is highly affordable, so I really want to act now before it gets too expensive. I imagine there will be quite a crowd.
I really want to go to Scotland and England, too. I'm waiting to visit Liverpool until Sarah is there, but I'll probably go over to Bath at some point to visit Laura and Lizzy. I'd like to go to London as well, so maybe I can combine that into one of those trips, or just make it a trip of its own.
Barcelona is high on my list too, actually, I'd like to go all over Spain.
I'm not incredibly interested in Italy. It'd be cool, yeah, but... it's not at the top of my list.
The coolest part about all the friends I've made here so far is that all of them are just as interested in traveling as I am, so we should be able to put together a good little group of people to visit all the places we'd like to go.

I tried to upload some photos to this post, but unfortunately my internet connection is so crummy that the loading times out before it can be published. I'll try again later when it isn't being so patchy.

Let it be known that I have officially survived my first few days here in Cork, and not only survived them but quite enjoyed them! The past coupla days have been a total blur of names and faces and places, kind of like freshman year all over again. It's quite nice because mostly everyone is new, so it is very easy to just go up to people and introduce yourself.

Anyway, the first day we got here was quite possibly the longest day of my life. Grandpa and I left Portland early in the morning, our flight took off around 8:15 AM I believe, and we landed in Newark around 4 PM eastern with just a few hours before we took off for Shannon. Too bad the dummies whose job it was to prepare the plane for a new flight slacked off and had to double back to finish things, meaning we sat on a roasting plane at the gate for about 45 minutes before given clearance to even begin taxiing. Whoa, I don't believe that I have ever spelled taxiing before. Anyway, the flights were both bearable. Quite turbulent but obviously everything worked out fine.

After we landed, we had to wait a bit for Cathy's plane from JFK to land, during which we drank tea and ate biscuits in the Shannon airport Cafe. Laura and Jen both slept a bit but I tried to stay awake so as not to completely ruin my chances at avoiding super jetlag. The drive to Cork from Shannon was very pretty, we saw loads of cows and sheep and cute little buildings. Sitting in the front of a car on the left side is quite a strange experience, especially when enormous trucks come speeding at you around hairpin turns.

We finally arrived in Cork and found our building, wandered inside and met the landlady and were given our keys! The rest of the day was spent shopping and unpacking and running around like crazy people. That night, we had Papa John's for dinner... authentic Irish cuisine.

The next day we ran some more errands and then made our way over to the university. We got a bit lost but still made it on time for our meeting with our onsite coordinator. He seems quite nice and is a professor of Archaeology. It turns out that the building my first class meets in was built on the same plot of land that used to be home to a prison. Grrrrreat. That evening, all of us BC kids and our roommates hung out a bit and a few of us went out to some pubs. The first place we went to, Preachers, had been recommended to one of us by a friend who had studied at UCC some years ago. So we show up, order our drinks, and it turns out that the place had just been remodeled and it was their first night open! So everything was on the house!

The next day was orientation, which lasted 80109201290129340924 years and was terribly boring. The student government had planned a bunch of stuff for us to do afterward, which was way exciting. We went on a little tour, hung out in the student's club and then went to a movie (I Love You, Beth Cooper) which SUCKED soooo much, I'm so glad it wasn't on my dime. After the movie we went to this pub with a couple of bowling alleys, pool tables and karaoke rooms.. so much fun! A bunch of us did karaoke (spice girls, backstreet boys, grease, etc) and then bowled. Amazingly, I was the best bowler of our group and I got spares in almost every frame! They had us set to go to a night club afterward, at which I lasted only a few minutes.

And now I am way too exhausted to finish talking about my exciting adventures, I'm sure this is all riddled with typoes and makes no sense at all. To be continued!!

A little shot of my Cork countdown widget:


In other news, why the EFF are all the dates for my posts April 17, 2009? IDGI.

Shout out to Auntie Erin who asked "what do you BLOG about???"

Well, it is officially my last day in Tacoma until about... May 2010.

I can't even begin to list all of the things I will miss, so I'm not even going to try.

We had a great little goodbye party here last night, all the neighbors came by and a few friends from high school and work. Mom made tons of amazing food, dad grilled some delicious steaks and there were plenty of snacks and sweets to be had. Quite a good night, all told.

Now I just have to pack my carry on bag then it is bye bye Washington. :(

I promise to never use cheesy song titles as update titles. Maybe. Okay, I can't actually promise that, we all know how much I love cheesy song titles.

Anyway, as said cheesy song/update title suggests, I am living out the last of my days in America for about a year. On Saturday I say goodbye to Washington and a brief hello to Oregon, until early early Tuesday morning. From Oregon it's an even briefer (thank god) hello to New Jersey and then off I go! It's sad to think that the last state I will be in is New Jersey. Gross. All this to say... in exactly one week I will be somewhere over the Atlantic, en route to Shannon airport.

So far I have packed one (1) suitcase, dumped a bunch of clothes in another and I've contemplated a box. I am not a good packer, but I'm getting there. I can't really figure out what all to bring... I know I'll end up with way too much stuff, I always do. I have too many books and too many clothes and shoes and pictures and odds and ends that I just don't want to leave behind. I'm just going to have to get over that.

This summer seems to have gone on far too long but at the same time, I feel like I blinked and now it's over.

Tomorrow is my last day at the zoo, hopefully for.. well, ever. I hope next summer I can do something a little more meaningful than sell crap to people, but who knows what next summer will bring. My boss said she's baking me cupcakes. Very exciting.


ETA: Dang, I blogged a lot in February. Have no fear, dear readers for my new location shall (hopefully) bring many new stories and whatnot.

This week is going to be full of insanity and headless-chickenness, specifically me running around like one.

So, to keep me happy, a list:

• meeting with Glynn today at 3
• US History midterm Thursday
• Haley House tonight and Friday morning
• Regular things (classes, work)
• CVS - travel shampoo, etc. Converter? Disposable camera?
  
• laundry (DO THIS BEFORE THURSDAY. DO NOT PROCRASTINATE!)
  
• pack (DO THIS THURSDAY. DO NOT PROCRASTINATE!)
• sell the rest of my t-shirts

Another list:

• Crabgrass Frontier
• Clothes
  
• toiletries
• camera (digi & disposable? disposable only? what say you?)
• camera charger
• iPod
• fun book
• towel
• journal & addresses for postcards

------------

I feel better now. Also, good news! My package from my momster came today... well, sometime last week, actually. Turned out they delivered it to my old building, for reasons unknown. Also, I got an email from study abroad and I'm approved for the Galway program... which is AMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAZING. Now I can start the application process.