If I'd been organized enough to have a to-do list, it would've looked like this...

Go to orientation.
I tagged along with the giant gang from Boston College, which includes my roommate and several other people I'd met already; they'd been to campus the day before, thus I did not get lost. I really don't remember much from the actual orientation, aside from the fact that everyone pronounced schedule "shhedule" and said "em" instead of "um." (And by the way, I'm told people say "I'm going to college," not "I'm going to school," even if they're just on their way to classes for the day.) But the campus is beautiful....Someday, the pictures I've taken will be available as evidence. 


Get cash.
Took care of that at the campus ATM, though on the first try I accidentally withdrew only 10 euros instead of 100. (See, folks, math really is an important life skill.) I then felt very empowered by my possession of cash, and acted on this feeling by buying some towels and cereal (you know, the essentials in life) as well as enthusiastically paying back everyone who'd covered my food expenses over the past couple days. I think I was happier about reimbursing them than they were about getting money.


Get groceries.
Wednesday morning, I woke up early, had some cereal (my first breakfast since I'd arrived) google mapped the route to the Tesco, and made it over there without a single mishap. All the landmarks I'd seen the day before on the way to and from campus (which, at the time, I thought I wasn't absorbing at all) suddenly were familiar and friendly. And just as I was approaching the vicinity of the shopping center, (which entailed going through a little alley-sized street where a guy was playing an accordion), a little boy walking in front of me with his mother exclaimed "Tesco!" so I knew for sure I was in the right place. I even remembered to bring along the required reusable plastic bag to hold my purchases. Of course I could only buy about four days' worth of food, given the size of the bag and the distance I had to walk, but that's normal in Europe, and anyway I'm terrible about buying in bulk because, news flash, I can't plan ahead. At least I'm now past that horrible one-meal-a-day streak I had going. (It's okay, Mom, it's over now...)


Go to classes.
Having returned successfully from my grocery trip, I then set out for campus, via a slightly different and supposedly quicker route that I hadn't taken before. Despite fully anticipating that this decision would end badly, I actually found the campus without any trouble. It was about a 20 minute walk; gone are the days of waking up ten minutes before class and dashing across Grand. But because I had prudently started early, I got there in plenty of time. I only took a wrong turn once, onto a street that seemed to have a suspicious number of empty boarded-up buildings and more graffiti than average (which is saying something), so I quickly doubled back to the fort (yes, my landmark was a 17th century fort--think about that) and got back on the right track. Once at UCC I even found my classes easily, including the one that was a ten-minute walk from the main campus. In fact I flatter myself that, to the untrained eye of a casual bystander, I looked as if I actually knew my way around and had my life totally together. Also, Anna, I saw what must've been the Irish equivalent of a UPS guy humming what sounded very much like the theme from the Peanuts Christmas special. It made me smile almost as much as the car that whizzed past me earlier with "Ridin' Solo" blaring. American music gets played everywhere and makes me feel quite warm and fuzzy.


Observe.
Of the three classes I had yesterday, two were taught by Englishmen. One of these Englishmen was thin and bald and middle-aged, and when he walked into the lecture hall he said, "I'm in the right place, am I? Medieval and Ren-AY-ssance Drama? Brilliant." Now I'd been getting the impression that classes at UCC were going to be chill to the point of inducing a coma, and I was reconciled to that, but this guy was super enthusiastic, and clearly knew his stuff--and as some of you know (cough, Jana), the combination of enthusiasm, knowledge, and baldness is hard for me to resist. At one point, when he was trying to illustrate some concept, he asked if anyone knew any good Christmas cracker jokes. This basically made my life. I wasn't planning on staying in that class originally, but now I happen to be much more excited about that one than the one right after it, taught by a younger and much cuter Englishman who nonetheless lacks a certain spark. (Though he did play us a snippet of a 1950s British radio show, commenting casually that on radio shows "people are constantly giving each other pictures of Queen Victoria to smoke...")


Try the bagel place on campus.
It was highly recommended, and rightly so. They were very generous with the cream cheese. I also got a smoothie, though it didn't hold a candle to Jamba Juice, which they don't have here. (They also don't have chocolate chips here. Or Reese's. Or cocoa powder. People are apparently too busy getting drunk to crave chocolate things. Speaking of getting drunk...)


Have a Bulmer's for Maren.
I went with my suitemate and her friends to a pub that plays traditional Irish music, which always makes me happy even when it's not being played in Ireland. I had just paid her back for a meal, so she promptly used the money I'd given her to buy me a drink. I managed to finish the bottle in two and a half hours, which I think is record speed for me. Maren, it was quite tasty. And it comes in multiple flavors, did you know?


See Cork/Meet Irish people.
This morning after class, I went to the computer lab to check my email but couldn't remember my password to use the UCC computers; the sheet I'd written it on was back in my room. So I thought, "Okay, I'll head back to the flat and take pictures as I go." I'd been meaning to do that anyway. I always feel a little awkward taking pictures in a blatantly sight-seeing way, perhaps because of a movie called "American Dreamer" where the main character gets mugged while trying to take a picture in Paris, with disastrous results. I didn't get mugged. Instead, when I was already almost back to the flat, I was taking a picture of a little monument, and suddenly an older gentleman came up to me and said, "Have you seen the cannon?" I said, "I haven't," and he proceeded to show me part of a cannon sticking up from the ground, leftover from back when the area we were in was all underwater and part of a canal. This gentleman, whose name was Pat, then spent the next hour and a half showing me around Cork and giving me a running commentary of historical background--which, alas, I retained only in fragments because he shared so much information. (Perkin Warbeck was barely a footnote, Maren.) He kept saying "You're not in any hurry?" and fortunately I wasn't, because it was fascinating. He showed me the English Market, which was exciting because now I'll know how to find it when I want to go there for fresh produce and bread. And he showed me the oldest part of the city, where the widest of the original medieval streets was about five feet across, and we went past the art gallery which used to be the customs house and got a bunch of replicas of famous sculptures from the British government (which didn't want them because they'd been gifts from the Pope), and we went into the Cork Museum which was inside one of the two oldest churches in Cork, and we saw the other oldest church too, and everywhere we went he'd explain what each particular street used to look like, whether it had been underwater or marshland originally, how old the buildings were and which ones had burnt down in various fires and which ones had been restored, and why the streets were named as they were (Cork's Washington Street, he said, was the first street ever named after George Washington, done as an act of defiance toward King George--"To give him the two fingers, as we say")...Anna and Katherine, Rick Steves would've adored this guy. I asked if he'd lived in Cork his whole life, and he said, "Since I was about six months old. And I'll be sixty-eight come Saint Patrick's Day." He said his grandfather used to take him around the city when he was a boy and show him everything; I'm sure that's where he first heard a lot of what he told me. "To me, Cork is like an older lady who used to be very beautiful and charming in her youth, and then as she got older, still has an elegance about her, but she's just got a bit shabby." I said that a lot of places are like that, to which he replied promptly "But especially Cork!" He's very, very fond of his city--I can't count the number of times he said "I love this place, you see"--and I can't believe my luck at having run into him. Just think--if I'd remembered my password for the UCC computers, I would've missed out on so much!


Experience Thursday night????
Young people go out drinking pretty much every single night here, but Thursdays are the biggest nights. Past highlights for study abroad students going out on these nights include having a toe pierced by an Irish girl's ill-placed stiletto, losing such trifles as passports and immigration cards, being traumatized for life by how little the Irish girls are wearing, and receiving various levels of sketchy attention (all the way from 3 to 9, I'd say, Becca and Anna) from Irish guys. I haven't decided yet if I'm ready to brave this insanity. But in any case I know I have a lot to look forward to. (Like revisiting the remains of one of the only two Huguenot cemeteries in Europe...Pat made sure I saw that too.)