“The only thing I feel good about is that other kids are coming into this test holding Spanish-English Dictionaries.”

Sunday, December 23, 2007

2:44 a.m.

Dublin

So it’s almost over. I had my last couple of exams. One was easy, the other one was eh. But now they’re over. I’ve found that no matter how defeated or excited, relieved or tired, blocks or continents away from home I am and feel after exams, the one constant is that I am always glad they’re over. I’m glad they’re over.

I spent the last week since exams ended like I was actually a student studying abroad in Dublin – going to the pubs, having friends visit, staying up late for no good reason, and sleeping in late.

The night of my last exam I met Dad’s cousin Patrick Harte in the city for dinner with his wife and daughter. It had been over 14 years since I’d seen any of them, and we had a great meal while talking about cousins and Papa and Uncle Jack. I told them I would definitely be back before another 14 years was up and that I would make a trip up to Belfast to see them when I return.

On Thursday afternoon Kevin and Len flew in from London. Ricky and Rory had exams to take on Friday so the three of us, James, and Josh (Liam couldn’t answer the bell) all went into the city to celebrate Josh’s last night. He really had a great time while he was here, and we all enjoyed getting to know him. And, lest we ever forget his impeccable taste in music, he left us all with a CD of all the terrible music that he blasted throughout the house over the past few months that will no doubt remind me of dirty dishes, grease stained Guinness playing cards, and the one lamp that we’ve all been moving around from room to room over the last month or so every time I hear it.

On Friday afternoon Kevin, Len, and I went over to the north side and took the Jameson tour. The tour itself would have been good if the tour guide was not so horrible (every line he’d memorized was forced and awkward, and at one point he even said “Now keep in mind I’m not an expert on Whiskey.” Hmm…) The only good thing about him was that he picked me to be one of the six post-tour Whiskey tasters. Kevin and I were discussing afterwards, and decided that the reason he stared at Kevin for about 4 seconds and then picked me instead was because he couldn’t decide if Kev was 18 or not. However, still sporting the finals beard, I was a definite. Our faithful tour guide was disappointed that I chose the Johnny Walker Red Label over the Jameson in the taste test (they were labeled, I just like Johnny Walker better, sorry). After the taste test the three of us lingered in the tasting bar while everyone else left we realized that the other taste testers had barely touched their samples, never mind their regular helping of Jameson that they got at the end of the tour with everyone else. Needless to say we took full advantage of this fortunate situation. We decided, however, that it would be best if we stayed and took our time and left the Guinness tour for the next day. Probably a good decision.

By the time we got back everyone at the house was pretty much packed up. They were all leaving for the airport at around 6 a.m. and were staying up the whole night, so I decided to stay up with them. Len, Kevin, James, and I went into the city for a little while before coming back to Portobello (the bar around the corner) and meeting up with everybody else. Izzy, Devon, Megan, Danielle, and George (Denver, Denver, Fordham, Bentley, Bentley) were all there with them, and we had a last pint at the regular spot before saying the first round of goodbyes and heading back to the house. Len went to bed, but Kevin stayed up with me, Rory, George, Liam, and James as we talked all about the last 4 months and ate anything and everything out of the fridge. Finally 6 o’clock rolled around and everyone headed out for the airport and I went to bed.

It’ll be an adjustment I’m sure to be not living in such close quarters with all those guys, but that’s for a post-game blog entry and not this one. I will say, though, in case I don’t think of this later, that I think living with these guys was a very different experience than the year I spent on the first floor of South Keyes or living with the 7 other guys in Walsh 806 last year. In both those situations those were the people I lived with. Sure, they were among my best friends that I had around and I hung out with them all a lot, but I always had Orchestra or Church or bOp! or friends from home or any of the other countless groups of people that I associated with on a daily basis. These guys, in contrast, with a few others added in, of course, were the entire scene. Whatever I did or we did, we always did together or in some combination of us. I think for that reason it will be a much different adjustment than the times before. Moving on.

After getting a few hours of sleep last night Kevin, Len, and I got up and headed off to Guinness. Len had a good time rummaging through everything that didn’t make the cut when my roommates were packing to go home and took a nice little goodie bag full of batteries, ping pong balls, Gatorade mix, and who knows what else. On the way to Guinness I stopped by the bike shop and sold back my trusty Jeep Cherokee Limited 2.8 bicycle. The back brakes were disconnected and the transmission was in far from perfect condition, but I still got 40 euros for it (I only paid 120 to begin with) and I kept the lock that I got while bargaining in September. All in all I ended up paying 80 euros for the fastest city transportation available instead of paying about 280 euros for 4 bus passes (not to mention the bus doesn’t run after 1030 – the library closes at 12…yeah.)

The Guinness tour was pretty good. Len took a handful of roasted barley and then gallantly started brew 2020 of year 2007 despite the record-taker’s inability to understand his name through the dark-brown grains busting through his teeth. I’m sure it will taste good anyway. We hung out in the Gravity Bar at the top of the tour for a little while and I looked at all the sights of Dublin that I had and hadn’t investigated over the last few months. We had about as clear a day as we possibly could have, so it was great to really be able to see all the sights in every direction from way up there. After we finished our pints we walked back to Dame St. so Len and Kevin could catch the aircoach, and I took a leisurely stroll down a jam-packed, Christmas-crazy Grafton St. soaking in the fact that the trip is pretty much over and that I was now, for the first time in my life, completely on my own in a city, albeit only for a couple of days.

Tomorrow will be a day full of Church, packing, and finishing up some Christmas shopping. John Culliney invited me to have dinner with the family again tomorrow night so that will be a great way to wrap everything up.

I’ll probably write again when I’m stuck at JFK or maybe before that if there’s time. If not, so long from Ireland, and be sure to check up for some looking-back entries, as I’m sure thoughts and stories will come back to me as I settle back into home. In other words: fear not, dear readers, the joegoesabroad blog is not over just yet.

Anyway, it’s pretty late now and I should get some sleep. I’ll talk to you all soon and some of you I might even see before you realize there’s a new post. Can’t wait to get home.

Go Sox.

Later.

3:35 a.m.

8 Days until departure (sound familiar?)

Sunday, December 16, 2007

12:15 p.m.

Dublin

As I’ve said to a few people looking for updated blogs over the last couple of weeks, not much happens when you’re studying for exams. I had two last week that went okay. Not great, but okay. It’s kind of annoying to be surrounded by people who are on pass/fail and only need a 40%, but really it’s just another distraction to tune out along with everything else. I have my operations exam at 3 p.m. tomorrow and my Globalization exam at 9 on Tuesday and then I’m all done. The way they run exams here is pretty crazy. For my first exam they kept us (about 4,000 of us) in a big warehouse type waiting area where we could find our assigned seat numbers on a bulletin board. Then, leaving everything we owned (bags, notebooks for other classes, cellphones, anything) behind us in the open-to-the-public warehouse, they let us in to another massive room where there must have been 5,000 desks lined up. It kind of reminded me of seeing the National Cemetery for the first time…exactly what you want when you’re heading into an exam worth 70% of your grade. There were strict rules and about 80 proctors in the room constantly walking up and down the rows, checking student IDs, and making sure that there were no wandering eyes. It was all pretty ridiculous, quite frankly, and I’m glad I’ll never have to take exams here after next week.

Besides studying and test-taking, the last couple of weeks have been, for the most part, pretty uneventful. Ricky and Rory had some friends of theirs come in for a few days, making the house pretty crowded for a couple of nights. I tried going to the zoo with Ashley (we’d been talking about going since before Robin left – that was mid-September) but it was closed when we got there, which is too bad. Between multiple failed attempts to go to the zoo since I’ve been here and the infamous giraffe picture (the last photograph my parents have entrusted me to take) I’ve decided that the Dublin Zoo and I were simply not meant for each other. I guess there could be worse things. To celebrate Ashley’s going home we went out for Mexican food at a place up near city centre. The enchiladas were okay, but the chips and salsa were pretty weak along with the “heaping portion of rice” that was about four spoonfuls. Needless to say, I miss Anna’s Taq and the Border Café.

The weather here has been so-so for about the last six weeks. Rarely does a day go by when it doesn’t rain at some point, but the temperature’s been staying between 40 and 50 which, as a Bostonian in December, I really can’t complain about. Some of the locals look at me like I’m crazy (and occasionally say something) when they see me walking around in my sandals when it’s 45 degrees outside. I usually respond with something along the lines of “oh it’s not that bad” as opposed to the more-accurate “I’m out of clean socks.”

In sad news that none of you actually care about but that I’ll be able to look back on this and say “oh yeah that was going on then”, my fantasy football team that has been in first place pretty much all year is about to be eliminated in the first round of the playoffs. Your hearts are breaking, I know.

We had a good time around the house laughing at all the mediocre players that were busted in the Mitchell Report. That and the fact that Milwaukee paid 10 million dollars to Eric Gagne to throw the ball towards home plate next season. Pete Twiraga and I decided that if he can get that much, I should be able to make at least 5 mil from some other crummy National League team.

The Pats play the Jets today, and it’s too bad that it’s going to be in the middle of a storm so that Brady can’t just throw it to Moss every time we get the ball and put up 50 points by halftime.

That’s really all I’ve got to say for right now. I have a lot more material to learn over the next 36 hours or so, but in less than 48 hours I will be all done and most likely sitting in a pub somewhere buying a beer for whoever is lucky enough to get the seat next to me in the exam hall.

Go Sox.

Later.

12:43

The Long Awaited “Harveys Visit Ireland” – Part II, and some other things I've been up to.

December 5, 2007

5:15 p.m.

Kitchen, 24 Fortescue Ln., Dublin

The last couple weeks have been pretty crazy. I got my paper and took my Irish History final, so now that’s all over and I may or may not write about it later. For now, though, I need to finish up on “Harveys Visit Ireland.”

I had schoolwork to do Wednesday night, so I took the train on Thursday morning and met up with everybody Thursday afternoon. The next 72 hours were a total whirlwind. We went to Noreen's for a little while before going out to dinner on Thursday. Friday morning we went to the Knock Shrine and then headed into town for a little bit. James (brother James) was out there, so on top of everyone else, it was great to see him again. We visited Eileen and went to the cemetery in the afternoon, and then the highlight of the trip came Friday night, when almost all the Ireland relatives came together in Ballyhaunis for a big party. The spread of food was both awesome and delicious. I felt bad that I had to catch a train around 7:00 to get back to Dublin that night, but everyone made sure that I ate, and I really wish I could have stayed longer to enjoy all the company, stories, and songs that I apparently missed out on. Even so, the hour that I was there was a blast and it was great to, for the first time in months, and in some cases years, be surrounded by family.

Saturday morning the program had a trip to Belfast to go to the parliament building in Northern Ireland and to drive around the city and look at the murals. On the way up, some kid on the bus that nobody recognized asked our professor if this was the International Students trip to Knowth. It wasn’t, but hey we got to hang out with a French kid all day and he got three free meals. Belfast was pretty cool, and the murals were stunning. It was crazy to drive through the city and see the Green Monster – sized fences that separated the two parts. It was like nowhere I had ever been.

That led up to the past couple weeks. My Globalization project was a giant headache, but I ended up getting to know my professor pretty well, and he offered to write me a recommendation if I ever needed one, so that was cool. I think we both got something out of me having a relatively-uncommon political perspective in an Irish classroom, and overall I enjoyed the course. Now we’ll just see how the final goes.

Since I’ve already finished up with Irish History, I only have 4 more exams to go: Organizational Behavior on Tuesday, Cost Management on Wednesday, Operations on the 17^th, and Globalization on the 18^th. Then I’m all done. Kevin and Len, as I’m sure I’ve mentioned, come in on the 20^th, leave the 22^nd, and then I’m out of here on Christmas Eve. I’m sure I’ll make a few more posts over the next couple weeks as I look for excuses for study breaks, so be sure to stay tuned.

Later.

p.s. I hope the Red Sox get Santana. Even if it means trading Jacoby Ellsbury. This is Johan Santana we’re talking about here. I mean come on.

5:42

This is my second double chocolate muffin in the last hour

Friday, November 23, 2007

Quinn School Study Louge, UCD, Dublin

3:52 p.m.


I know I know I owe you a post for the second half of "The Harveys come to Ireland", but that will have to wait for now. I've gotten about 7 hours of sleep since I woke up early Tuesday morning, but the end is in sight. I have a group paper due on Monday that has been taking up most (see: all minus meals and biking back and forth to the library) of my time, but hopefully it will be finished by some reasonable time on Sunday evening. But probably not.

I have a group meeting in 6 minutes, but I thought it was supposed to be at 3:00. It was nice to have the feeling of an "extra" hour as opposed to that "what the heck what happened to the last six hours" feeling I've had all week. After 50 minutes of editing attempted English sentences, I decided to give myself a ten minute break and do a quick update - just a few little news and notes things. My apologies if it's not polished.

For Thanksgiving a bunch of the kids in the program went out to TGI Fridays through some sponsored thing where we only had to pay 5 euros for a meal. We had chicken and mashed potatoes. That's all I have to say about that.

Ashley is cooking a Thanksgiving dinner (she even found a turkey!) for Red Sox Nation, Dublin on Saturday afternoon (tomorrow). If I can't go because of this stupid paper I am going to cause serious harm to people and/or objects. If I can make it, it should be a great time.

Arndt is in town. Depending on how things go at this group meeting, I might try to meet him for a soda pop in the city really quick before I go back to work. Another wild Friday night in Dublin (hey at least I haven't spent much money this week!).

I have my Irish history final exam on Tuesday. So that means as soon as I finish this paper I will start in on that. Our prof gave us a pretty good outline of what she will most likely ask, though, so it shouldn't be too hard.

Wednesday is my last day of classes. After that I am off until the rest of my exams, which are on Dec 11, 12, 17, and 18. Kevin and Len are coming to visit from the 20th to the 22nd, and I fly home on the 24th.

Okay, group's starting to show up. Look for more next week after I finish my exam and get about 20 hours of sleep.

Later.

4:03

“Your gut isn’t as big as I thought it would be” – The Harvey Family visits Dublin, Part I

Monday, November 19, 2007

James Joyce Library, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

3:38 p.m.

(unedited)

The last week was pretty eventful. I’ll start at the beginning. I flew in from Dublin last Saturday night and was greeted by Stephen, Mom, and Dad, whose second sentence after seeing me is honored by today’s title. Stephen, who was awesome about driving Mom and Dad and everyone all week, dropped us back at the hotel where M&D showed me the duffel bag full of sneakers, Sports Illustrateds, granola bars, bike lights, hats, Sox World Champs banner, and chewing gums that they had brought all the way across the Atlantic for me. Awesome! I changed out of my standard “wear something Belmont/Boston” shirt that I wear whenever I’m flying (this flight got Coco Crisp) and the three of us headed downstairs to meet up with Kathryn and Brian. K&B had brought me a 2007 Red Sox World Series Champions shirt (again, awesome), and we all caught up on everyone’s various adventures.

The next morning we met up for church and I showed everyone around the chic downstairs of Fortescue Lane. We caught the bus down to school and I did my best tour guide impression as the weather turned from sunny to cloudy to rainy in about 10 minutes. After the tour ended we all headed into town and grabbed lunch at the Porter House. Brian and I had milkshakes that looked like they belonged on a culinary school brochure and tasted pretty good too.

Later that night we started the beginning of what was, for me, eating like absolute kings. We had a great meal at a little Italian restaurant. Mom said she felt bad when she realized that all I’d been eating for the last two and half months was pasta, but I assured her that the meal in front of my had absolutely nothing in common with the Dunnes Stores ziti and microwaved Roma pasta sauce that I’ve mastered since being here. Either way, she said steaks were in order the next night and as soon as I finished one delicious meal I immediately began looking forward to the next night’s.

I had to spend most of the day Monday at school doing work, which worked out because M,D, and K went up north with Stephen to see Nan. I felt bad about having to cancel going to the Jameson with Brian, but felt like the combination of me having an uncharacteristically large amount of schoolwork, being sick, and drinking whiskey early in the morning was just not a good idea. That night we went to Eliza Blues, a little steak place on the Liffey. My meal was incredible, and we talked to the owner on the way out who told Mom about how people get blown off the Cliffs of Moher all the time by doing what I did. This was shortly after I told her I was going back there when Kevin and Len come out. But hey, at least the steak was great.

Tuesday I had school again all day (I know, school? what the heck?) We finalized plans for the trip out west, and I spent at home getting work done. I had a presentation Wednesday morning in OB, went home, did work, got sleep, woke up, and caught the train out to Ballyhaunis.

Back to work for now, I’ll write more about the rest later.

4:58

It’s been so long since I’ve updated that my Firefox history didn’t remember this website.

Tuesday, November 13, 2007

UCD Quinn School Study Lounge

4:30 p.m.

WOW so it’s been a busy few weeks since I was at the Cliffs of Moher with the guys. Halloween came and went (I was K-Fed, yeah…). Strangely, Halloween happens to be the big fireworks holiday in Ireland, and while there are a few big displays, most people stick to walking out their front door and setting off a couple store-bought or home-made fireworks and hoping they don’t blow their heads off. We did not take part in this tradition.

Lyd came to visit me from Nov. 2 through the 5^th. We went to a rugby game with a few of the other kids in the program; it was really cool. Leinster (the part of Ireland that Dublin is in) played against Cannucht in a match that featured about half the Irish World Cup team on one side or the other, so that was great to see that high level of play (although it was probably wasted on us, since the best of us only knew about 80% of the rules.

Lyd flew back home on Monday afternoon, and then on Thursday I flew off to London to visit Kevin. Kevin is in London for the year studying at the London School of Economics, and his dorm is about a 10 minute walk away from campus, which is right by Trafalgar Square. I got to his place at about 6, where we had dinner and then met up with his friends to go on a pub crawl. Later that night we went to some club that Kevin’s friends were going to, and in the roughly ten minutes that we stayed I ran into Gautier, the French kid from my Globalization class at UCD. Crazy stuff.

The next night we hung around with Kevin’s friends in the big lounge in his dorm, and then, after a failed attempt to meet up with BC/UCDers Dave and Chris, we walked over to Picadilly Circus and met up with Nicole (Belmont) and some of her friends from BU who were studying in London. Since I was flying out the next evening, we decided to call it an early night on Friday so that we could get sight-seeing first thing in the morning.

So one of the great things about studying abroad is that often times your friends, like Kevin, are studying in other cities, like Kevin was, and you can stay at their dorms or houses, like I was doing, and they can give you the personalized tour of whatever city they’ve been studying in for the last few months. Unfortunately, my two previous short trips to London put me in a much more expert position on London tourist attractions, as Kevin revealed that he was really yet to explore the city at all. Great. If anything, I guess, it made the two of us setting off into the city with virtually no money and a desire to “Do London in 3 hours for free” more of an adventure. We first walked down to the Mall, checked out Green park, and went and took picture in front of Buckingham Palace, which was buzzing with people even though there was no changing of the guard that day. We then walked back through the park and over to Big Ben and the Parliament building, where we ran into a huge group of livid Somalian protestors upset over Ethiopia’s “genocide” in Somalia. I think Kevin, who is as globally minded as they come (he’s the president of the Boston College Model United Nations) was more upset that they were standing in front of the statue of Winston Churchill, which means he couldn’t get a picture with it. (I guess he’ll have to walk down there again sometime before next July…) From there we wandered down to Trafalgar Square where we looked around a little and expressed mutual sadness over having just missed the 28 foot tall blow up statue of Jason Taylor, the best player on the worst team in football. (Miami played a game in London a couple weeks ago, that was part of the promotional stuff.)

After realizing that the National Gallery was free, the two of us became instant art fans and spent a couple hours looking at van Gogh and being surprised at how recently Picasso had died. We both though he was a lot older…apparently we weren’t the biggest art aficionados strolling the halls of the National Gallery that day.

After we had had out art fill we went outside and, getting a prime spot on the balcony outside the museum, took some pictures overlooking the Square. It was getting dark, and fortunately for me they were observing the November 5^th holiday that had just passed with a grand fireworks display over the Thames.

Tired from a long day of walking we went back to his building. I grabbed my bag and headed off for Gatwick, where I got in a fight with the security people who said my backpack was too big (psh, it was fine in Dublin), finally boarded the plane, and headed back to the Dublin airport, where Stephen Mullen, Mom, and Dad were waiting for me. It was great to see them, and we all went back to the hotel and met up with Kathryn and Brian.

So yes, it’s been an exciting few weeks, and I wish I had more space to tell more exciting stories about each of my stops, but I guess I’ll leave the adventurous tales for when you see me in person so that I’m not all out of good fresh Ireland info. I’m sure the Fam’s visit will also be worthy of a couple posts.

Okay, I have to head off to office hours before my next class. Busy time coming up academically, but hopefully I’ll have time to write.

Later.

Go Sox! (Sign Lowell!)

5:05 p.m.

(p.s. a special Hello to Mr. Twiraga, who sent me a Facebook message requesting an update! Hi!)

I had such a perfect title for this post, but blogspot cut me off becuase it was too long, so it is below...

“I don’t want to go to your wake and have your parents look at me out of the corner of their eyes saying ‘He’s the one who told Joe he’d take a picture if he sat on the edge of the Cliffs of Moher.’”

Saturday October 27, 2007

11:37 p.m.

Dublin

I have a paper and a presentation due on Tuesday, so I decided it would be a good idea to take the first two days of this long (Ireland Bank Holiday) weekend and head out to Galway and the Cliffs of Moher. Ricky and Josh had gone to Spain for the weekend, so on Thursday night, when James suggested a west-coast trip that would not include missing any baseball games, Rory had I hopped on board, and added Liam first thing Friday morning. I bought train tickets online for the four of us while James and I waited for Rory and Liam to get back from their morning classes, and then we set off for Heuston Station to catch a 2:30 train to Galway.

We pulled into Galway station around 5:00 and bought tickets for the bus to Doolin, about an hour and a half’s drive south where Rory and booked a B&B the night before. Besides rises and dips and the road that made us think we were going to lose the McDonalds we’d grabbed while waiting for the bus, the ride down to Doolin along the coast was remarkable. The brightest full moon I’ve ever seen hung out over the water and illuminated the rolling hills of the Burren that whipped by us on the other side. We got to the little town and settled into our room by about 8:30 and then headed for the pubs that Rory and I had read about in our guide books.

Our first stop was McDermott’s, where James lost the bet he made to Rory when he said that Rory couldn’t finish the Beef and Guinness and French Fries stew that he got, on top of the double cheeseburger that was already sitting in him. We had read in our books that the three pubs in Doolin were, up until recently, a Mecca for Irish trad music, where people would come from far and wide to play. We hadn’t been in the pub for 5 minutes when we met a guy from Atlanta who had flown to Ireland for the weekend with his banjo just to come to Doolin. We were all pretty impressed. After a few pints and a few songs from both our banjo friend and the house band of the night, we headed down the street to McGann’s. The pubs in Doolin are completely different than those in Dublin, unsurprisingly. There were very few young people around (except for the little kids dressed up in Halloween costumes hanging out at the bar while their parents had a few drinks). We also sat next to the woman who ran our B&B and petted the mutt that was running around that apparently belonged to some dude sitting at the bar. Nobody really seemed to mind (definitely a long way from Dublin). The guy with the banjo followed us in a few minutes later, and before we left he gave us a crash course and even let me play it for a few minutes, which was really cool. I mean, who doesn’t like a guy holding a banjo?

After a long day of traveling and having put way too much food in our stomachs, we all slept very well in our strange beds. In an effort to make the most of our 24 trip, we woke up early this morning and, already showered and packed, arrived at breakfast promptly at 8. We devoured our meals, talked about crummy jobs we’d had in high school, and watched Liam (who admits to having a slight case of OCD) carefully cut the egg white from around the sides of his sunny-side-up egg, so as to not break the yolk, then one by one eat the pieces of egg white, and carefully place the remaining yellow center of the egg in the “discard” pile on his saucer.

We got a ride down to the Cliffs of Moher from the husband of the woman who’d checked us in the night before, and, happy to see that we were some of the first people there of the day, walked over to the visitors’ center. We had three and half hours to explore the cliffs before the last bus of the day left for Galway, so after doing the officially sanctioned touristy things, taking the “Look I went to the Cliffs of Moher” pictures, and reading in our guidebooks that there was a not-so-safe cliff walk if you jumped the fence at the end of the observatory platform (Rory’s book “strongly discouraged” jumping the fence, whereas my Rick Steves book mentioned how it was really cool to lie down and stick your head out over the edge), we opted to live dangerously, jumping the fence, taking a behind the “DO NOT GO BEYOND THIS POINT” sign, and heading off on the little path along the tops of the cliffs.

I was throwing caution to the wind (literally, the gusts were incredibly strong and the rain was no prize either) a little more than the other guys as I asked them to take my picture sitting on the edge and opted to take the paths closer to the edge when the dirt trail split in two. (Keep in mind when I say “path” I mean a slippery, muddy, dirt ditch about twelve inches wide and 4 inches deep that ran anywhere from 3 feet from the edge to about 8 inches from the edge.) We walked and walked out to what seemed to be the highest point of the cliffs, at which point we were about a mile away from the visitors’ center which had since vanished in the clouds and fog. This seemed to be the point where most fence-jumpers stopped, undoubtedly for a great picture, since the path seemed to get even less official after this. From up at the top, however, we could see a little castle/watchtower about 4 cliffs further out, and that became our new goal. We stopped and took some more pictures on the way, slipped on some rocks, jumped some barbed wire fences, and watched and listened to James inadvertently grip on to an electric cow fence with both hands. Overall, we were making good decisions.

The wind and the rain picked up as we got out there, but once we reached our goal (an estimated four miles from the center) we felt pretty good about what we had done and etched our names in a little rock at the bottom of the castle. At this point we had to hustle back to catch the bus, though, so we took the less-scenic route once we turned around, cutting through some grazing pastures and doing our best to avoid huge clumps of fresh manure. Tired, dirty, wet, a little dazed, but undoubtedly accomplished, we reached the visitors’ center with about 15 minutes to spare. After putting down a celebratory ice cream, we headed back outside and caught the bus that brought us back to Galway. We killed our two hour layover in a pub in the city, and then headed to the train station and came home. From out our front door and back again, the whole trip took about 33 hours and was a great success.

Other news and notes: Thursday night was a long, but very exciting night as a few of us stayed up to watch the Red Sox win game two and watch the little ESPN gamecast box showing BC’s remarkable comeback at the end of the game against Virginia Tech… Zach Friedman, a friend of mine from BHS who is studying in Galway, and his two friends are in Dublin for the weekend and stayed at our place Thursday night, last night, and are staying tonight before leaving for their respective cities tomorrow afternoon… Ashley is stopping by for the game tonight (she watched game 2 with her friend Natalie, and the Sox still won, so that was a relief)… Flag/touch football started on Wednesday. There were about 5 Americans and 30 Irish kids who were very okay with being atrocious at football. We didn’t actually play any games, just ran some drills and put some plays together in hopes of running some scrimmages in a few weeks…Thursday night the program sponsored an “Irish House Party” which was a lot of fun. I’ll write more about that later, I just didn’t want to forget…Lyd is coming out on Friday, and the next few weeks after that are pretty busy, but for now I’m just going to worry about this presentation and paper. I should probably start writing more about Irish history and less about my rompings around the country.

Go Sox.

Later.

12:55 a.m.