It's Been a Long Time...

It's been a couple of days now, that I haven't posted anything new, but a lot has happened. So, here's to hoping I remember to include everything!!

I would like to start by saying, we met Harry Styles. That's a lie. But we did meet a kid who looked exactly like Harry Styles! In fact, we met two. There were these brothers, who looked very much alike, and who looked very much like the 1D crooner. (to be honest, I've always wanted to use the word crooner in a sentence, it makes me feel very US Weekly) The point is, Chelsea, our new friend Hillary, and I were wandering around this pub called The Front Door, and we bumped into a group of guys. We asked them, in our American innocence, what they were drinking. What's good? When we said we were not Irish enough to handle the Guinness they each had, they suggested Smithicks. I'm not much of a drinker, and after having tried Guinness - when in Rome - I am definitely not much of a beer drinker. So, I refrained from taking their advise, but I did have a nice long chat with Harry Styles Senior. He told us that, as Americans we all sound like JWoww. I mean, he didn't call out the Jersey Shore cast by name, but the American girl impression he did was pretty....JWoww. He also said that if guys danced at a club in Ireland the way they dance in America, they would just get hit. It was about that time that the Styles' cousin came around. Again, I don't know his name, it might have been Luke. I also just called him by his celebrity doppelganger - Macklemore. As the boys headed out of the pub, they said they were headed to carbon (the club Chelsea and I went to for New Year), and they hoped to see us there. Before they left, though, something strange happened. They kissed each of us on the forehead. What? We were really confused by the gesture. Is that an Irish thing, or were these boys just forward? Is a forehead kiss considered forward? I guess we'll never know for sure, seeing as though we didn't really see then again.

The next morning we started off the academics right, and slept through our second day of orientation. Let me tell you, this whole time adjustment thing is a pain. I have now been in Ireland for over a week, and I still don't feel fully adjusted. I'm usually lethargic and ready for bed by 6 (a side effect of the constant rain, I think). Some nights I give in and fall asleep, which then results in a couple hours if napping. Some nights I force myself to stay awake, which results in a serious second wind, and I don't end up falling asleep until the early hours of the morning. Either way, my nights are typically not spent sleeping. I've tried everything to find sleep. I've counted my blessings, read a few books, and even taken Tylenol pm. Nothing seems to work! I'm just hoping that once school starts, and my life falls into a routine, my sleep pattern will even out too.

I guess that leads me to the other thing I've been doing lately: school. As I said, I had two days of orientation (one if which I attended) and then a walking tour of campus. I did attempt to go in the walking tour, but our tour guide must have been raging the night before because he could barely keep his eyes open, and he mumbled so badly I could not hear a damn thing he said. Because of dear Andrew's lack if enthusiasm, a couple of us dipped out about half way through. We looked at the gym on our own, and then we found our way to the international affairs office, where we asked for an update on what we'd missed that morning. Overall, we felt like we had a pretty good grip on what we needed to know. Wrong! Haha I guess we were just being typical Americans, with an unearned sense of confidence (yes, we have been told by two sources that that is how we're seen) because when we showed up at school on Monday, not only did we not know where to go, we didn't even know if we had to be there. I hadn't even made my timetable yet!

What, you may ask, is a timetable? Well, I may answer, it is a piece of paper where you are meant to write down your classes to make sure they don't overlap. Sounds easy enough, sure, but when you have to walk to the department secretaries of every subject area in order to find their listing of the classes offered, and then sort it all out on your own, it is a surprisingly tricky task. This level of difficultly increases when you add in the fact that visiting students are only allowed to take certain classes. And, the times of classes are downright loony! At home, classes are generally something like Monday/Wednesday/Friday 10-11 or Tuesday/Thursday 9:40-11:10. Here, classes are like Tuesday 5-6 and Wednesday 9-10. Not to mention that fact that every English class I was interested in taking was offered at the same time. Well, I can't very well take 3 classes at once! So, I worked on my timetable, and after an hour of sitting in the - what should I call it, eatery? - the eatery, and cycling through the group of guys, the group of girls, and the mixture sit across from us, I figured out my schedule and got excited about the coming semester. I felt, for the first time since getting here, that I had a direction. I knew what I was supposed to do, and I knew how I was supposed to do it.