STUDY abroad

The whole study part of study abroad hit me like a ton of bricks the past week. I have been a real college student again, getting no sleep and spending crazy amounts of time in the library. The way our program is set up, with most of the academic work in the first six weeks, was all fun and games until the last week and a half. All of the sudden I was starring at a lot of assignments in not a lot of time. This taught me a few interesting things about Irish college life

1. there is nowhere to get coffee after 7pm
2. there is nowhere besides your room to study past about 9pm
   
3. there is nowhere to buy food after 5pm
   
4. proper citation is nowhere in essay grading rubrics

That all being said its been a very frustrating and exhausting week. I have my last final in about an hour..3 essays on contemporary Irish society. Which in all honesty is actually a much more difficult class than it sounds like.

One good story from this past weekend:

I was at our local grocery store, starring at all the chocolate bars for a very long time..because there is nothing worse than buying bad chocolate. My friends started to make fun of me and get a little antsy because of how long I was taking. See I wanted to pick I good one and its hard with all the unfarmilar candy here..I said something like this "blahh I just dont even know what all these are" I wasn't complaining but the check out lady sure thought I was distrot. She looked at me and my friend and said "oh are you from the states? have you been in city centre yet, by Trinity?" we replied yes and yes. She went "well don't worry there is a store there where you can get all YOUR candy. There is Lucky Charms and the cake boxes."

We thought this lady was crazy..but sure enough we found the store. Candy Lab Dublin and yes it is an american import slash candy store. There were Lucky Charms, Oreos, Twinkies, GRAPE Jelly, and even betty crocker cake mixes. Also the candy section was weird pharmacy themed and you put the candy you bought into pill bottles and picked a Happy Pills label..not sure how I feel about it but the candy was good.

https://www.facebook.com/CandyLabDublin

Naturally they loved us because we were actually American and kept asking us about if we missed all of these things... and then this picture ended up on FB

Good Life

Today two great things happened:

1. I got a REALLY good grade on a presentation.. Me..apparently a natural public speaker haha jokes.

2. Today at 8am a security guard came and woke up my roommate and started asking where I was. She was confused and said 'I dont know..maybe the gym?" He then went "well we have her wallet..let her know all the cards, ID and cash are there."-- Thats right over a week and someone returned my wallet with all the cards and about $100 cash.. maybe they just wanted to hold it for awhile. Not sure but I'm not complaining except my dad definitely just paid a fortune to speed mail my replacement debit card :(

No worries though just to keep my head out of the clouds I spilled tea over every page of notes I have written this semester..and a few homework assignments. Profs are gonna love this one.

Northern Ireland

We just got back from a three day trip to Northern Ireland. I literally can't explain how amazing the trip was..

So first we went to Belfast.. our professor decided to give us this disclaimer "Belfast, Beirut, Baghdad, and Bosnia were named the four Bs tourist should never go to. I don't want you guys to worry though, people generally view tourism as a good thing and a sign that the troubles are over. That being said, you could get yourselves in trouble here..so just be careful." Now I did a lot of wiki-ing to prepare for this trip and I was a little scared. This warning did not help.

Belfast was awesome. We went to the capitol building first and got to talk to a bunch of politicians, well one from every party. The green guy was my fav. he was nice. Douchiest award went to the super conservative Loyalist..he was mean, avoided every tough question, and kept texting.
After that we drove around the city to see all the murals. This part was crazy..seriuosly we drove through all the gates that separate the protestant and catholic sections.. they are called Peace Walls. Weirdest thing ever.. google it. We saw a ton of buildings that were bombed during the troubles and the whole thing was really surreal. After that we went on a pub crawl. naturally. Cool thing though, the first bar was called the Crown Bar and apparently the husband and wife that owned it were a scandalous couple because the wife was a loyalist and the husband was Irish. When they opened the bar the wife won the naming fight..hence Crown..to honor England..so the husband but this huge elaborate tile crown on the floor so everybody steps on it walking in. Now you know. That night we stayed in an unmarked hostel..I dont like to think about why. Next morning another market..with the cheapest chocolate ever.

Signing the peace walls is a really big deal..be impressed

On Friday we saw a lot of natural beauty. First I crossed the oldest, highest rope bridge in the world to get to a tiny island where you could see Scotland! It was very windy and scary. Then we saw the causeway..which i must admit I fell asleep for the description of so I am not sure of the significance...but it was pretty! Then we went to Derry..or London Derry depending on who you ask. This is the town where Bloody Sunday happened. It was creepy..and really cool..and our hostel was next to a prison. oh and we sang U2s Bloody Sunday and The Cranberries Zombie..no less than 30 times over the three days..

Soo Windy!!

DERRY

Hostel window view..prison.

So the last stop on our trip was this creepy preserved head of a famous catholic guy..it is preserved in a really pretty church.

Yay October!

I finally had my intership interview on Monday. Basically these interviews for most kids are more like meetings with your future boss to arrange details like hours and attire and to give you an overview of what you will be doing day to day. Some companies carryout really intense interviews and actually turn kids down from the job. Mine was pretty much in the middle, some tough questions but overall not too bad. For being bad at talking and pretty awkward in general I am a surprisingly good interviewer! Anywho after we marched past my examples of leadership and strengths and dumb weakness that are secret strengths my interviewer went on to describe what they would like me to do. This is when things got a little fishy..see apparently my 'expertise in statistical analysis' has lead them to believe I will be a great person to spearhead the analysis of results and help design software behind some program they are developing. I don't even understand what that means...but no fear they are willing to do 'a bit of training'. I am going to die.

The overall thing is cool. Basically the school of psychology here is trying to design a software or at least a method for predicting the possibility that someone will have a strong placebo effect in clinical drug trials. They are predicting that certain physiological effect how people respond to placebos. The software they design will hopefully help researchers distribute people that are more likely to have a strong placebo effect in the control and experimental arms of the study. This will help reduce the number of drugs that fail FDA testing because they do not significantly out preform placebos. Super interesting but not exactly what I am studying..at all.

Besides internship drama life is good. We actually have a lot of school work right now so back to the stressful student life boo. Today though we had a field trip in the morning. We first went to a museum all about war and imprisonment..which was interesting because we have spent a lot of time focusing on how the Irish historically haven't fought in many wars...not exactly what I learned today.

Afterrr that we went to St. Michan's church. The church is famous because of these burial vaults under the building. Something about the air pressure and temperature has deteriorated the wood of the coffins and mummified the bodies. So basically we crawled in creepy dungeons and looked at corpses...and by looked I mean touched. Yes, like everything in Ireland if you touched them you got good luck. Actually you had to shake the dead crusaders hand. It was gross.

Creepy

Dungeony

Corpse

The one in the back is the lucky one.

Life Fail

I lost my wallet because I suck. So I officially have no drivers license and no cash..or access to cash for that matter. goood job me. But before that this weekend was nice!

We found delicious sushi downtown on Friday. I ate some straight up raw fish chunks and some yummy cooked ones too. After that we did a lot of city walking..good blisters again! Then that night we just hung around campus..played some very competitive beer pong which I was bomb at. obvi.


The rest of the weekend was full of birthday celebrations and paper writing. Pretty boring actually but we have two huge papers due next week and next weekend we are in Northern Ireland so I gotta get a head start. Also this week I have my internship interview and a presentation. Big week :/