MacKat in Ireland

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

Our trek to Limerick began at O’Hare’s international airport. Katherine arrived and checked in first. Katherine was asked to weigh her carry-on to see if it met the 13lb. weight limit. She knew it didn’t so she took her laptop out right in front of the ticket agent, handed it to her dad, and then weighed it. It was underweight! She then put her laptop back in and waited for me to arrive. Why do they weigh carry-ons?

I arrived half an hour later, met the checked baggage weight limit, and wasn’t asked to weigh my carry-on. We said our goodbyes and headed through security. But wait, we needed some ice cream to calm the nerves first. Then we headed through security and waited at our gate for 90 minutes.

We got on the plane, our seats were in the second row of the non-fancy section (we could have upgraded for $1,039 each way). Every seat had a little TV in front where we could watch TV episodes of Scrubs, Grey’s Anatomy, The Sopranos, Boston Legal, and others; movies – most of which we had never heard of; play games including sudoku, battleship, and Who Wants to be a Millionaire; and see our trip progress via GPS. Pictures are included below.

Dinner included our choice of chicken and rice or beef and potatoes. Katherine chose the chicken and I chose the beef. Pictures are included but Katherine’s looks like vomit. It tasted better than it looks. She ate my veggies and I ate her cheesecake.

Nighttime came quickly since we were traveling east. After several hours of movies, sudoku, music videos, and random TV shows, we were given breakfast. It consisted of cold ham and cold cheese on a cold croissant. It was less than tasty.

The sun rose (after only a few hours of nighttime) and we eventually saw the shores of Ireland and its extensive greenery. Irish farmers don’t divide their plots with fences – they use trees – and their plots are of every possible shape but square.

We landed in Dublin, sat there for an hour, and made our way back to Limerick. It should be noted that I asked Katherine what she thought of flying several times while we were in the air and her response each time was “this isn’t bad, at all.”

Getting through customs took some time. It took a lot of time, in fact, because all the students at UL and whatever school is in Galway had to wait until everyone else was processed. There are a lot of seats on an Airbus 330 so we waited for a long time. Once half the students were processed another plane arrived and the second half (of which we were a part) waited an even longer time. We finally grabbed our bags and followed the Limerick guides to the bus.

–Mark