9/18/08

I woke up around 9:20 am, which was another early morning. I am not a big fan of waking up, especially knowing that I had two classes. The commute is kind of a bummer considering that I am used to a 10-15 minute walk to class and now I have a 25-30 minute commute, it complicates things. Adam, Derrick, Brian and I all have the same two classes on Thursday, the first one Writing on the Wall was pretty good. The first half of the class we looked at pictures from this famous Northern Irish artist, the pictures were cool, some of them were kind of weird, I am not a big art guy, only a certain type of art appeases me. If I don't like it then it is a bummer and I dislike it. Our professor has a really cool perspective on life (he grew up in the middle of the troubles in Northern Ireland) and give us a different way to look at the situation then you find in the media or in books. After our break in the middle of class we watched the second half of Cal, which is the book we had to read for the class. The movie was awful and did no justice to the book, it cut out vital parts of the story and crunched a lot of different parts together, as it always seems to be the movie did the book no justice. After that class we had about a hour until our next class which was a walking tour of a Dublin neighborhood. Thinking we would need our camera's Derrick and I rushed back to our apartment to retrieve our cameras. It took us a hour to go back, get our cameras and make it to Saint Stephen's Green where we were meeting our professor (I ended up not taking any pictures). So it turned out to be a stressful and wasted trip. For our Irish Communal Identity Class we walked through a Dublin neighborhood, going from the "ghetto" to a very posh area and then back to a less wealthy neighborhood bordering on the Guinness factory. It was a very interesting walk because we went from touristy areas to former drug filled areas in a very short distance. It is amazing that so much money and so much suffering can be so close together. It is amazing that they seem to have invisible lines that aren't crossed. After that class we headed back to the apartment where I had some bread and butter and this awful chocolate milk drink that I bought at Tesco (I should have been suspicious that it was called milk drink!). Then everyone in the apartment ended up taking a nap to get ready for our night on the town. Jake decided to wake me up to start our festivities for the night. To make a long story short, we went to two pubs had an uproariously good time and I ended up waking up the next morning fully clothed with my shoes on under the covers. Which is always the sign of a great night!