Galway!!

     Sorry for the wait! This was my first chance to post anything since the internet here is awful! So far it's been a pretty great trip. We arrived at Shannon Airport at around 6 in the morning, and it was freezing! I, of course, was wearing shorts because it was 80 degrees in Jersey.

After we landed we took a coach (bus) to the National University of Ireland at Galway. It's a pretty small campus, and we are all staying Corribe Village, which is basically a village within the campus, in these small buildings, each with 4 apartments. There are 4 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms in each apartment, so we all get our own rooms (and I get my own bathroom)

This is my bathroom

Here's my bed and desk 

We even get a kitchen! 

There's the other side of my room, we got our own TV!

After we all checked out our rooms, we went into the city to eat lunch and look around.  It's about a 10 or 15 minute walk from Corribe Village. A few of us stopped in a bar called Kellys for lunch. I had a garlic chicken melt, which was fantastic, and my first legal beer!

  I contemplated getting a Guiness, but instead I had a Bullmers, which was delicious! We were all pretty tired, so we took a shuttle back to Corribe, and I ended up taking a 5 hour nap, since I had been awake since 9:00 the previous morning. Around 9:30 I met up with some of the other people on the trip and we headed back into the city to check out the night life. We spent most of the night at a bar called Quays, which was really fun. We headed back around midnight, so that we all could get a good nights sleep for orientation the next day.

(Clockwise) Nick, Ryan, James, Kat

The next morning we woke up around 8:45 for orientation at 9:30. We mostly just went over the syllabus and the expectations for the class. Then Professor Welsh put on this movie called The Field, which was really, really weird. After class a few of us went into town again to get lunch. We ended up back at Quays, and I had really really good seafood chowder. It was fantastic! After that we took the shuttle back to the village and did most of our reading for the next day. Later we decided to all meet in the courtyard at 6:30 so that we could go out to dinner. One of the boys on the trip made a reservation for us at a place called An Pukan (I think). There I had chicken wrapped in bacon (which was really ham) with mashed potatoes and a side salad. I also had a rum and coke, and it's a little bit disappointing that no one ever gets carded here. Even though we're all over the legal age, I sort of wish I was carded more often. 

Cara, Karen, Caitlin

Casey, Mary, Abby, Scott, Emma, Kelia, Sara, Rebecca

James, Connor, Ryan, Karen, Cara

This was a band that was playing at the restaurant we were at for dinner.

From there about 10 of us went to another bar which I don't remember the name of and listened to another   band play for a little while. 

We also had some tequila shots :)
 

Karen, Me, Cara, Caitlin, Jill

Then we moved on to Quays again, which seems to be our favorite bar for right now. Eventually we left around 1 or 1:30am, and I went to sleep right away.

Awesome photo bomb
Karen and Katie

I'm going to add names to these pictures once I am absolutely sure of everyone's name. I don't want to get a name wrong and offend anyone. I'll post more tomorrow hopefully, if I have internet. Hope you all are having as great a summer as I am!