Soaking Wet!

Dear readers, have you ever been in a car on a day where the rain is just coming down in diagonally slanted sheets, and you’re driving along, glad you’re inside the car and warm, when a puddle the size of a small pond is coming up and you have no choice but to drive through it? Perhaps you’ve even splashed the water onto some poor shmuck who had the misfortune of walking in that rain with naught but an umbrella and a jacket? Well dear readers, today I was that poor shmuck that you splashed water on. And wearing canvas shoes no less (in my defense it was sunny and still when I left this morning)! However, not only did I have the misfortune of being splashed on once, I had the misfortune of being splashed on three gloriously soggy times on my walk home from classes today. And what to do in such a situation? Honestly, I started laughing. I just walked and laughed at the whole situation. What else can you do? All I could think of was how I just became that poor shmuck without a car and forced to walk in the pouring rain. However, given that this is Ireland, so are about a million other people. The experiences of travel are varied, but I took this as just another aspect of the adventure. After all, it’s just a bit of water, and I am in no way green, so I needn’t worry.

The first day of classes was less strenuous than I had convinced myself they would be. All of my classes are on this area known as the concourse, which means that the 10 minutes given between classes gives me about 7 extra minutes to just sit there and look around. My first class was an archaeology class that looks at castle building in medieval Ireland and includes a field trip (yay!) in October. My European politics class assembled and waited for 20 minutes before we realized that no lecturer seemed to be coming, so we left and I got to have a half an hour of talk time with a very nice girl named Kathy who wanted to know how much America is really like the “Jersey Shore.” A modern Irish history class looks to be very interesting as well and promised an in-depth look into the culture of the American-Irish following the mass migration of the potato famine. All together it proved to be an interesting and wet day and I learned that the Irish students are entirely up to going out every single night here…