All 40-or-so of us international students (mostly Americans) were treated to the local radio station playing the same Kid Rock I get to here in Iowa, got off the bus, and checked in at our various villages. Most of us are staying in Kilmurry Village, which is the collection of buildings in the northeast corner of campus. Katherine got house 52 and I’m in house 53. They’re right next door rather than down the hallway so we can’t share as many things as we had hoped (voltage adapter being chief among them). Our rooms are up a winding, skinny staircase at the top of which is a bathroom and two doors. Behind one door was a kitchen and living room and behind the other lies a dark hallway where you can find our rooms.

The rooms are rather small, but we’ve both got sinks in our rooms and enough storage for all that we brought. The stains on the comforters in our rooms are of many different colors and the pillows leave a bit to be desired. They did give us some sort of sheet with snaps on one side – we were rather confused as to is purpose. More on that later.

We unpacked our stuff and walked around campus, looking for a bank to deposit our travelers’ cheques. Both the Ulster Bank and AIB Bank have loads of students in brightly-colored jackets badgering people into setting up accounts with them. One gives us a free travelcard, the other gives us free money. Both require a university number we don’t yet have. Tomorrow is our first day of orientation so we should be set by Friday.

Our next stop was downtown. Katherine’s friend Kristin recommended several stores downtown to buy sheets, pillows, and food so we got on the bus, hoping it would drop us off close by. The two guys sitting next to us speaking a funny language wanted to know if this stopped at Williams Street. I told them we’d only been in the country for 12 hours. We followed them off the bus – I’m not sure why – but did find the stores we needed.

We found cheap sheets, towels, and pillows at Penney’s and went next door to the supermarket-in-the-mall. After counting the amount of cash on us and making the most fiscally conservative choices possible we paid and waited for someone to sack our food. Nobody did, and after the lady behind us pulled out her bag and left I remembered forgetting my nice bags in my room. Katherine had her tote and between her tote and the Penney’s bags we were able to carry everything.

We had some disagreements as to how to get on the bus and ended up walking for over an hour and making no real progress. After walking back to the mall we found the bus stopped right outside. We ran to it and then waited for five minutes before it left.

Dinner last night was gross. We bought a noodle pouch which had powder/sauce in it, but a) I boiled way too much water and b) we didn’t have any butter so it turned into wet-noddle soup. Combine that with the 2-liters of “Cloudy Lemonade” we bought (which were also gross) and we were ready to call it a day.

-Mark