Woah

Holy crikey, it has been a long past few days. My travel to Ireland started with five hours of sitting and waiting to check my luggage (The picture above was my view all morning). Highlights from that portion of travel include getting to watch all the Korean Air people check in all morning, sitting next to a little old polish lady who judged people (like clearly judged, she would turn her whole body to stare and look at them, mostly with a scowl on her face), having to pee really bad but worrying I wouldn't be able to take all my luggage to the bathroom with me (in the end, five hours of waiting won against my bladder and it all worked out - the stalls were big enough to fit all my luggage inside with me), listening to three polish teenagers talk in nothing but polish all morning only to have their computer start playing "I kissed a girl," and most exciting of all, coloring pictures in my new coloring book (Thanks Bagel!). While I was sitting I was also waiting, waiting to figure out what it was that I forgot, or what it was that I messed up. At one point I was sitting next to a girl who called home and an hour later a man showed up with her passport, only to find that it was an outdated one, it was moments like that that I was waiting for... but the flight seemed to go pretty smoothly. I got on at 6:50 pm and stayed awake until dinner (there was cheesecake!), tossed and turned for a while, and eventually landed in Dublin at 8:15 in the morning. We then bused to the O'Connell house (a building that ND owns and it acts as our program headquarters of sorts) where we sat for a bit and then took cabs to our respective dorms.
Dorms. This is where the real party began. This is what my room looked like at first:


It may not seem bad, and the room isn't too small, but what the pictures don't show is that we did not have hot water, nor electricity at first, and the showers have clear, glass shower doors (still sans hot water). And those are just some highlights... I'm getting used to it, but I may never stop complaining about the showers...

The rest of the day was mostly unpacking, a little bit of wandering and making our first meal - it was two courses: mac 'n cheese and ramen noodles. (Notice that we only had one pot to cook and eat from, which had to be cleaned with boiling water because that was the best we had...)

The last two pictures are of my some-what completed room... The day ended with a walk to UCD main campus (two miles away) which ended up being a huge mistake because I didn't go to bed until 2 am, and after all that traveling it was not happy. But oh well, today was a new day. And we spent it going into the city, grocery shopping, and trying to learn our way around. To get into the center of Dublin we took the DART which runs along the water for a ways:

And that's pretty much been my trip so far...