oh hey, dublin. i think we will be friends.

ohmygoodness. i made it to dublin. holy smokes!! getting on the plane was surreal enough, but actually seeing everything - the river liffey, all of the cute brick buildings, the double-decker buses that drive on the wrong side of the road - woah. i'm a little bit in love!! still in vacation mode for sure, and i'm really not looking forward to getting smacked in the face by reality when classes start next week. i am very excited to not live out of a suitcase though, and finally see what this little suite/apartment thing looks like. all of the ifsa-butler kids are living in one 'house' on campus in merville, i think there's only like 25 of us, so yay for all being smushed together. it's kind of comforting, and as cool as it would have been to live with a real irish person, i think i like this situation. we move in thursday i wanna say? maybe wednesday. should be a good time!

well anyway, back to the beginning. yesterday we arrived around 10am, and our wonderful advisors told us that whatever we do, just don't nap. we'd be messed up for days apparently. so my roommate at the hotel and i decided to go on a little adventure, and we just started walking up the road. we walked forever, not really looking for anything in particular, and then it started to smell like the ocean. um oops, we walked to the bay - a good 4km away. it was kind of janky and smelly, but it had a cute dog park. people also like to tailgate there i guess - we saw a bunch just sitting in the back of their cars and hanging out. we found a map at the park, and figured out the general direction of where our hotel was. we walked through some super cute neighborhoods on the way back and eventually saw the beacon of light that was our hotel. hallelujahhhh! nothing like starting the day in ireland with a little 8k. we all had dinner here when we got back and man, i have never been served so many different kinds of potatoes in my life. seriously, i understand why the famine was such a big deal - they love 'em. after that, a group of us all went to a pub and i had my first pint of real irish guinness. the bartender even drew a shamrock in it. sadly, the shamrock did not make it taste any better - that stuff is roughhhh, and i don't think i'll be a fan. we'll see though.

today was a ton of 'welcome to ireland, this is what we do here' type of meetings. and then we went to see the rivals, an r.b. sheridan play, in the city centre. it was great, but i snoozed for a bit and definitely missed the first 10 minutes. it was a little hard to follow after that, but i got it eventually and it was really pretty funny. a couple of girls had missed dinner tonight before the play, so we went together to find something quick and relatively cheap. after looking around for a while, we saw the 'thunder road cafe'. ohmyGOD i am so happy we ended up here - it's chock full of strange and stereotypical american things like the statue of liberty wearing sunglasses and an american flag, harley's, creepy-weird rock records, and tons of old posters (including 4 miami dolphin ones...). oh, and it was totally empty. haha i think it's like ireland's upscale applebee's, but who knows. tomorrow's full of more meetings and orientation stuff, but the people are all really great, so i can't complain about hours of being talked at! bring it onnn :)