The Burren

So, things have been going pretty well across the pond! I've taken a few nights off from going out to let myself recover. I've had small bouts of homesickness as far as that goes, but I've also had a couple fun evenings in. Wednesday was the Societies fair and I joined a few. I think the ones I am most excited about are Photography Soc and FanSci. I haven't done anything with Photo Soc yet but they seemed very nice and they liked my Nikon. I guess they do photography trips and have like little photo challenges for different weeks, where you have to like take a close up picture of hands or something specific like that to practice your technique, and you can put your pictures in your own little online gallery for the soc. It seems cool and I've been getting pretty serious about photography since I got here. I went to a meeting of FanSci on Wednesday night, which is like the Science Fiction and gaming club. They were awfully fun, I played some games with them and it was a great time, and this one bloke wants to run a game of Dungeons and Dragons next week and he invited me, I'm pretty excited. Last night I also just stayed in and had a girls night with Melissa... we ate pizza and chicken fingers and just sat around and talked about boys and, y'know, stuff girls do haha. It was really relaxing and we're gonna try to do it once a week. My classes have also been pretty good, although only half of them have started yet. Celtic mythology in particular is going to be really awesome. We're learning about all the classic Irish legends and the popular folklore here, like fairies and the banshee. I am so interested, I can't wait to start reading the book and everything.


Theoretically, though, this blog entry is supposed to be about my vacation adventures! I've started exploring the country of Ireland and it's absolutely beautiful. Nicole and I don't have classes on Fridays, so we're trying to spend some of our Fridays doing mini trips around Ireland. Today we took a tour through the Burren, which is an area around Western Ireland in County Clare that's very rocky and it has all these rocky mountains. They're all made of limestone because apparently like 4 million years ago, the entire area was underwater and it was like a huge tropical sea! I think that's so cool. It made me wish that I had a way to go back and see what everything here was like back then. (Where are you, Doctor??) But anyway, it was really pretty and we stopped at some pretty impressive places. The best one, obviously, was the Cliffs of Moher. It was just breathtaking. I felt like I was literally on the top of everything. It's difficult even to describe, but I took some awesome pictures. I was told that like everyone hops the fence to get a closer look at the cliff, so I did it. I got really close to the edge, like a few inches away, and it was amazing. (Can't yell at me now, I already did it and I didn't die! When I told Gabe about it, he commented that you don't normally hear the phrase "I could have died today! It was awesome!") We also went to the top of O'Brien castle, it was so windy I felt like I was just gonna blow away into the ocean. It's probably good I didn't, but it just felt so alive to be up there! The cliffs were so tall and the moss was so green and the sun was so bright and the ocean was so, so blue... the bluest blue ever. And the whole trip got me to thinking about how old things are. We went to a Stonehenge-esque burial ground called Poulnabrone that was 5,000 years old. And in the Aillwee Cave, the stalactites had been forming for about 10,000 years. Let me say something about the Aillwee cave also. It was pretty impressive... not really because it was impressive to look at, after seeing the cliffs being in the cave was almost like "why are we here looking at this rock." But I went from being inches away from a cliff face 400 feet above the ocean... to inside a mountain, standing underneath 370 feet of solid limestone. Actually I was probably at around ground level and it was a mountain above me, but it just felt like I was standing in the center of the earth. The whole thing was just... something. It made you think about how old things are. And it was gorgeous. I'll be anxious to put up a few of my pictures once I finish going through them all.