In response to "Woman! Update your blog again!"

As you wish, Lauren...though I've been putting this off because I promised my posts would get more exciting, and even though each day continues to be an adventure for me, I doubt recent events will make for riveting reading. But, as many a wise person has told me, life is made up of small, simple things along with momentous and dramatic ones. So here are a few of the small, simple highlights from the last week or so.


The lough. Pronounced "the lock," which, like a loch in Scotland, is pretty much a glorified pond. There's a large and beautiful one near the UCC campus, where American girls can go and sit on benches and be stared at by nearby Irishmen and see little kids playing with their families and be accosted by geese and swans (SWANS!!!) who expect to be fed. I always joke that there's no nature in Indiana, and although there's certainly an abundance of nature in Ireland, all of it beautiful, the artificial stuff is pleasant to look at too, especially when one has random hour-long gaps between classes that have to be spent near campus. (And there's nothing artificial about a baby swan!)


Sunday's Well. Speaking of beautiful sights, the hilltop road that runs along the northern outskirts of the city offers a lovely panoramic view of Cork. We spent a few hours last weekend just wandering around up there, savoring the 70-degree angles of some of the side streets, the cute houses (there was even a purple one!), the ubiquitous rock walls, and the sub-freezing weather (okay, maybe "savoring" isn't quite the right word for that last one). And then we found...


Cork City Gaol. You'd think that only a history nerd like me would get excited about an old jail, but actually all of us were eager to check it out. The building (designed by the same architect who was responsible for the picturesque structures of UCC) looks like a castle from the outside, until you walk through the front gate (underneath an arch that once served as the gallows) and see the barred windows everywhere. Inside, we were greeted with a "How are you?" which we answered with "Good," only to be told, "We can fix that." We were promptly provided with headsets for an audio tour that took us through the whole jail. Many of the cells were populated by life-size wax figures with heart-wrenching backstories, and toward the end there was a whole cell wall covered with the scrawls of past inmates. Between 1828 and 1927, the jail housed everyone from petty thieves to prominent political prisoners (Maren: Countess Markievicz!)...which made it a better snapshot of Irish history than my "Intro to Irish History" class (from which I've learned nothing so far, except that that average working Irishman in the early 1800s ate eighty potatoes a day). By the time we left, the sun was setting, my brain was on story-idea-overload, and it was even colder than before. So we booked it home and had some Cadbury drinking chocolate to warm  up. As one always does after sobering educational experiences.


The UCC library. Hi, my name is Amy and I'm a nerd. Because the UCC library is considerably bigger than the Macalester library, I've been having fun exploring it in between classes. It's equipped with self-checkout stations--just like at the grocery store, only for books. And the special collections section in the basement has all sorts of cool (ahem, "cool") things in it--like stories written down by 1930s Irish grade school students, who were enlisted by the Irish Folklore Commission to collect old tales and traditions from their elderly relatives and neighbors. They mean business down in special collections; you have to fill out paperwork and leave your bag in a locker with a key, and the use of pens for note-taking is strictly forbidden. (Jana: "This is a weapon, Oren!!" Wow, did I really just quote myself? That's embarrassing.)


Getting registered with immigration. In order to legally stay in the country (or at least be let back in if I leave, say, for a weekend in Belfast) I needed to get a yet another spiffy ID card, this one from the garda (aka police). The garda headquarters happens to be right across the street from my apartment, but I couldn't register until I could prove that I had medical insurance, sufficient financial means, and a Hawaii birth certificate. (Okay, just the first two, but satisfying the specific requirements was a lot harder than it should've been). At last, after much travail involving multiple bank accounts, MIA ATM cards, deceptive letters from Macalester staff, and international mail (which apparently is faster than mail between Indiana and Washington, DC), I finally had all the necessary materials. I came, I got fingerprinted, I conquered.


The theater. Or "theatre," as they say in this part of the world. Tickets to see a production of Oscar Wilde's "Lady Windermere's Fan": seven euros. ("That's, like, two pints!" said our professor when encouraging us to go.) Cadbury chocolate bar consumed while waiting for the play to start: one euro. (Except I didn't even pay for that. Grrr, Claudia!) Beautiful Victorian theater, entertaining performance (though Lady Windermere was in desperate need of a sassy gay friend), cute British boys sitting next to us who volunteered to take a picture of us (and who sat down right after Ian asked over the phone whether I was seducing the guy sitting next to me, and I looked at the then-empty seat and said "Yeah, this is the kind of guy I always end up seducing")....Priceless.


Photography society. Here, "clubs" are sports and "societies" are other groups/organizations. I plan to try out archery club in the near future (and now that it's in my blog, I'm honor-bound to follow through) but in the meantime I decided to sample the society realm as well. My camera isn't equipped for most of the snazzy techniques we were being taught how to do, but looking at pretty pictures of Ireland is never a waste of time (as I hope those who've looked at my Facebook albums will agree).


Girls' Night. Nothing says "classy" like a drink called "Death by Chocolate," chips and salsa on the house, and several rounds of trivia (with many answers covertly supplied by a friendly bar employee). Does the average Irish person really consider "the names of the handmaidens of Odin" to be "general knowledge"?


So nothing earthshattering to report this week...except perhaps...Nutella. OH. MY. GOODNESS. Where has this stuff been all my life?


In Ireland, clearly. Along with all kinds of other amazingness. I'm just starting to scratch the surface.