Greetings From Ireland!

Well I made it out here! My flight did take off, the snow storm only delayed it an hour because they had to de-ice the wings, though we ended up landing in Dublin only about 20 minutes later then scheduled. The past few days have been so mind blowing, I still can't completely believe that I'm here. The jet lag hit me HARD which surprised me since I got over it quickly when I went to London in May. The first few days that I was here I was at orientation for both API study abraod as well as study abroad students for the University College Dublin where I am living at and studying at. University College Dublin is about a 20 minute bus ride away from the main city center. On a couple of occasions when I've been taking the bus I've made a huge fool of my self trying to pay the bus fare searching around my purse for all the different euros.

The University College Dublin is a huge campus, which will be something for me to get used to since my school Lesley is so small.

Besides going to different orientation meetings I've been going around and seeing Dublin a lot. On Saturday I went to Kilmainham Gaol prison which is located on the outskirts of Dublin. It's an old shut down prison, I got to take a tour of the museum which was a really nice way for me to get a sense of some of Ireland's history. There are many other Dublin museums that I want to go such as the Leprechaun Museum and the Dublin Museum of Modern Art, which is free!

I got to do a lot of exploring both on Saturday and Sunday, I walked all around the city, mainly in the touristy parts such as by Trinity College, Grafton Street, the River Lifey and by the Dublin sphere. When I was in one book store I found this book with about 100 recipes for cooking potatoes, it definitely made me feel like I'm in the right place with my love of potatoes. Then today me and two other people actually took a bus just to a random place to allow us to get lost a little bit, we ended up in this suburban areas. The houses were so pretty. I really like the architecture here.

So far I'm really liking the city of Dublin, I can't wait to explore it even more as well as other parts of Ireland. I don't know if it's the often cloudy and rainy weather but Dublin really reminds me of Seattle. It's much warmer here then it is back home which is really nice. It's sort of too warm for a winter coat, but to cold to be without one. I invested in a rain jacket yesterday.