May the sun shine warm upon your face

Today was a very thorough investigation of Dublin from Malahide castle to Mater Misericordiae Hospital (which I think must translate to Miserable Mother or something along those lines - both because they did a miserable job of mothering me and because relaying the story made my mother miserable). This was a sort of unplanned, backwards rags to riches tour of the city, beginning with towers and turrets and ending among the overlooked sick and homeless in the Dublin 7 ER waiting room. Meaning that no verdict was ever reached about what actually happened, but I'm lucid and breathing once again so nothing seems to be too pressing anymore.

Malahide, on the other hand, was beautiful and (naturally) surrounded by endless stretches of Irish green. My theory about the general sense of happiness in Ireland is that the green ground makes up for the gray skies. Because even on the cloudiest of days, you reel up the window blind and the lawn looks like it's been colored in by a five year old who has never seen real grass and picked the brightest Crayon in the box. And no one can be that upset about anything when the ground looks like a backyard on The Sims (although sometimes people here are about as intelligible as the characters on The Sims - for the most part they speak softly, with varied degrees of accents and incredibly fast).

But a few basics I forgot to mention: I'm living on campus with three girls from the same program (ifsa - butler). The rest of the JYA students from the Butler program live in the same building or just across the lawn, though, so we've seen a lot of each other so far. Our apartment is on the third floor and (to me) feels luxuriously spacious. We have a single bedroom each, a hallway that connects them, two bathrooms, a common room and a kitchen. It's a bit hard to keep food from going bad because everything is so damp here (we came back from a weekend away and the bread was as green as the grass), but we're doing our best to keep things refrigerated (although our freezer melted over the weekend and its contents went bad as well).

The no meal-plan meal plan has been a bit of a rough adjustment and I've been eating mostly PB&J as a result. Not that different from trying to feed myself this summer, although scrounging for food doesn't work as well when you don't have any bosses repeatedly over-ordering for catered luncheons with clients. Anyway, one of my roommates is a pretty avid cooker, so I may try my hand at a non-sandwich delicacy sometime soon.

Also important to mention - Dublin is absolutely beautiful. Despite the fact that it looks like a level 5 maze on Google Maps and the names of the streets change every time they intersect with another street, I've actually been able to orient myself fairly well. It's really a very walkable city and has plenty of landmarks to keep me from getting too far off course. And even in the mist, or the rain, or the occasional monsoon, the city is as historic and beautiful as one might imagine it to be. I still don't understand how their jeans never seem to get wet while mine are soaked to the knee, but I'm working on divining that particular secret. I'm pretty sure it would come in handy in Poughkeepsie next semester.

Off to my tolerably comfortable bed with an amazingly comfortable comforter. Adieu!