Playing Catch-up (Part I)

I'm finally settled into my apartment-style dorm in Dublin, and we have wireless internet in our rooms! It's really exciting. Carleton doesn't even have wireless in the dorms. Way to go, UCD! More about that later, however, because I really need to recap my first week in Ireland before my memories start to fade. The professor who's leading the program, Connie, has asked us to keep journals in which we're to record our impressions of our readings and our excursions and Ireland as a whole. So I've been making sure to write in that one fairly frequently, and I've also got my regular journal/diary, so basically I'm doing a whole lot of writing. Anyway, I'm going to start my big recap. I don't know how far I'll get tonight, since it's already getting late (oops) and I have class in the morning. I'm basically going to record what I've been up to and go light on the "reflecting" and whatnot, but when I get caught up later on, I'll try to give you some insight into my impressions of the program and my experiences here. Also, I'm going to warn you straight up that I write excessively. I apologize, but I can't help it - I'm a wordy person. Sorry!

So! Bonnie and I arrived at the Shannon airport at about 8:35 in the morning on Saturday, 16 June, after a six-hour flight from JFK. Our seats on the Delta flight were somehow up in first class, so we were lucky enough to have the individual TV screens with lots more options of what to watch than what was being shown on the cabin screens. We were pretty excited about that, but as we descended into Ireland, we put our screens away and tried to catch a glimpse of the Emerald Isle through the windows (we were in the middle aisle.) Unfortunately, the island was shrouded in a foggy mist, and it wasn't until we were really close to the ground that we could see the green grass at all. As the plane descended, however, I caught glimpses of sheep in fields right around the airport, and then suddenly the plane touched down with a jolt, and we were there. After we'd gone through customs and gathered up our luggage, Bonnie and I found some members of our group and plopped down on the seats. We had to wait a few hours for Connie to arrive with Jim, another Carleton professor who grew up in Ireland and was going to be with us for our first week in County Mayo, his home. Once they'd arrived and all of the other students' planes had landed, we made our way outside to meet the driver of our coach. His name was Jimmy, and he was a second or third cousin of Jim and another native of County Mayo. We loaded up our luggage into the coach, found seats, and began the two and a half hour drive from Shannon to Louisburgh, County Mayo, on the west coast of Ireland.

Although we were driving through the beautiful Irish countryside, we were all so tired from our travels that most of us slept during the ride. I got a fair amount of sleep and ended up with some fun bruises on my head the next day from falling asleep and banging my head on the window as I nodded off. Once we arrived in Louisburgh, we were forced to wake up and move all of our belongings into our cottages. We stayed for a week in the Louisburgh Holiday Cottages, a small grouping of traditional-looking whitewashed cottages complete with colorful doors, big fireplaces, and complimentary peat bricks. There were seven people to a cottage, and the group took up three cottages, plus the one that Connie, Jim, and his wife Jane shared.

That evening, we walked into town (about three minutes away from the cottages) and were shown the two grocery stores and the multiple pubs and the small library that it included. Later, we all went to dinner at a local pub, which was overpriced and not that tasty. But we were all so hungry and tired that we didn't complain, and getting a good meal into our stomachs definitely gave us all a well-needed dose of energy.

Later on that night, Bonnie, Esther and I decided to follow Jim's recommendation and check out the beach that was about a ten or fifteen minute walk away from the cottages. We probably left around 9:00 or 9:30, and we were amazed that it was still fully light outside. Ireland is so far north that the sun doesn't start to set until at least 10:00 PM. It was also a few days before the summer solstice, so that also helped. Anyway, our walk to the beach afforded some amazing views. County Mayo, and most of the western coast of Ireland, is not flat at all. There are some legitimate mountains, but the landscape as a whole is very hilly. The roads to the beach were for the most part bordered by shrubbery on both sides, and over them we saw green hills sloping upwards. Small clusters of houses dotted the hillsides, and sheep and cows were everywhere, fenced into small pastures and fields by the houses. Along the side of the road we saw the first of many old, abandoned stone cottages - more about those later. We were blessed with relatively sunny skies during this walk, which we would later come to view as something of an anomaly.

Once we reached the beach, we were surprised and impressed with the view. I'm no nature writer, so any description I give you will most likely be inadequate, but I promise that I'll put my pictures online soon and then you can really understand what I'm talking about. Anyway, Clew Bay, an extension of the Atlantic, formed an absolutely beautiful beach in Louisburgh. The grass ended abruptly and dropped off, and suddenly we found ourseves walking on a somewhat narrow strip of sand, split by a large deposit of sand-flea infested seaweed. Small, wide sandbars jutted out into the water, and around us were green-topped cliffs and hills. There were small, sandy islands not very far out, and across part of the bay we could see even more mountainous land. The blue sky and the sun playing on the water made for some beautiful pictures. Bonnie and I, having put our feet in the ocean at Newport and Coney Island in the two previous days, felt called upon to touch the Atlantic's waters on its opposite shores. The water was cold, but we didn't mind. We frolicked on the beach with quite a few of our fellow classmates for some time, and then headed back to the cottages for a much-needed night of sleep as the sun finally set, only getting completely dark around 11:00 PM.

I'm going to stop for now, because it's nearly 1:00 AM. I promise that I'll write more soon, and I'll also, by necessity, have to make an attempt to embrace brevity. Cheers!