Cooking and Protesting!

Gonna write more about the university fees protest/march I did yesterday (yay activism!), but just wanted to gloat a bit and tell y'all that I cooked THIS (wrapped up as a bfast burrito with cheese and a fried egg) and it was frickin' delicious.

A Wee Revelation

So on getting off the bus back to Dublin this Sunday night (went to Coleraine/P'Stewart with the beau, which was wonderful) I had a bit of a revelation. I'm going to be here for at least a full more 11 months. Strange that that hadn't sunk in yet, but apparently it hadn't. I realized that this room at UCD, in Belfield, a Dublin village, in the Republic of Ireland is actually going to be my home for the next year. Whoa. How awesome is that? It's not like before when I was abroad in Belfast, because I always had the knowledge that I'd be going to back to Austin and Bryn Mawr in a matter of a few months. It's a whole different ball game now. So I decided, right there on the street in front of the Busaras, that I'm going to get to know this place. I'm going to try to make this city mine and get out there and see what I can see. Slightly weird I hadn't made that decision before, but now I've made it conscious.

So I went into town today. Visited the George's St Arcade, the Cultivate shop, an Oxfam Ireland shop, and Hackett's Garden Centre. Verdicts? I loved George's St. Arcade, it had a fabulous mix of high/low fashion, little veggie organic cafes, bizarre knick-knack shops and a secondhand book stall! Cultivate was cool, I bought some organic pasta, tahini and a little bottle of Dr. Bronner's tea tree soap (I've wanted to try that stuff for ages). I'll certainly be going back there. This Oxfam shop wasn't as great as the one in the Student's Union at Queen's in Belfast, because the clothes were kinda lame; but I was able to find a pretty scarf for only €4. And Hackett's is a lovely teeny tiny garden centre with walls of seeds and bulbs. That earthy growing smell was too much to resist, so I got a smallish lavender for my room and a rosemary plant for cooking!

Moral of my story? I'm feeling adventurous, promising and determined ... woot :D

Irish Bureaucracy Hooray!

Hello! So like I said in my last post, I've gotten my Garda card! I first showed up here on Monday at about 4pm, but guess what?? The office is open until 10pm but they had stopped issuing numbered tickets hours beforehand, meaning that enough people to fill up 6 more hours were already waiting!! So on the advice of the surprisingly nice front desk man, I came back the next morning at 8:30am to get in the special student line outside. Even though they don't start paying attention to that line until 9am. And the line was already around the block. For reals. All I've got to say is thank god it wasn't raining and that I had had the foresight to buy a breakfast crepe to eat in line (thank you breakfast crepe girl!). It wasn't that bad actually, I got my ticket - wooo #284 - and the lady told me to come back at 12:30. So I walked around downtown a lot, went to the Hugh Lane Gallery that I hadn't gotten to see a few weeks ago, read my book on a bench by the Liffey and window shopped.

Got back at noon and guess what number they were servicing? Why it was 140! Awesome. So I walked more, window shopped more, read more. At about 2:30 they were finally at number 220 so I figured I ought to just stick around there. And seriously, GNIB, you would make so much money if you had a cafe. And you could charge whatever you wanted! You've got a hungry, anxious, captive audience, why not make some serious clams AND chill out the people in the waiting area? Also, my uniformed friends, you have got to make a child play room. It doesn't have to be awesome or anything, just a room with some lame doctor office toys, books and changing table. There were understandably loads of small children there with their parents, and these were some bored and frustrated kids. I felt for them, if I didn't know how to talk I'd have been crying and whining too. And another thing, why in the world is the entire bathroom area lit with blue flourescent lighting? It gave an almost black-light quality to everything and was super unsettleing. That's got to be a hazard in terms of inducing seizures.

What I don't get are the people who waited there the whole day. I was stressed out and uncomfortable enough from just the 2 hours I spent there, I could not imagine how I would have felt to sit there for the entire 7. And I was just getting my student registration done and was relatively secure that my documents were in order and that I would be approved, and English is my first language. It must have been awful for the people who weren't secure that everything would work out. Sitting there I realized that my privelege as a white, educated, English speaker must have reduced the stress level considerably. So way to go fellow immigrants, you've got my respect!

My First Trip Into Dublin

This is slightly out of chronological order from the last post, but I made a video from my first trip into downtown on Saturday the 6th. It was a nice foray, definitely a museum kind of day because of the weather. So I went to St. Stephen's Green, had an awesome little lunch in a cafe, visited both the National Museum of Ireland (Archeology & Ethnography site .... of course) and the National Gallery of Ireland. Then I walked up O'Connell St to the Hugh Lane Dublin City Gallery (a contemporary art museum) but... it had just closed. For another time eh?

Highlight of the trip would definitely have to be the 3 MUMMIFIED Irish Kings on display in the National Museum. I had no idea bog preservation was that awesome, you could still tell that one of the kings had had red hair! Oh or maybe the sad person who's job it was to wear the leprechaun suit plus giant papier mache head. That dude was still there four hours after I'd first seen him while walking towards the river. Talk about schadenfreude, just seeing him made me glad I was sitting on a smelly bus out of the rain.

On my first night out in Dublin, or "Whoooo COPPERS!"

So night before last I had my Irish initiation to a 'country' bar. It was called Copper Face Jacks (more affectionately known as Coppers) and this link's comment section says it all and more. PLUS it was the night after the All-Ireland Hurling Championship (the Super Bowl of hurling in Ireland if you will) so the place was awash with Counties Kilkenny and Waterford fans. The DJ had an almost wedding dance style of mixing, playing a few rap tunes, then a Jackson 5 and Blues Brothers, then a Cotton Eyed Joe-style "Everybody knows the step but Katie!" song. Essentially it was a dance your heart out, laugh at the creepy dudes and sing along at the top of your lungs party, and it was frickin' awesome. Oh and don't worry, I picked the steps up just fine :)