A little Irish rain never killed anyone

8:30 am Limerick

2:30 am St. Louis

1:30 am Spearfish

Ohhhh my gosh do I have stories to tell.  Unfortunately the best ones should not be told here.  So I will save them.  Ask me sometime.  [Please note: by "best ones" I do not mean scandalous things that I have done.  I still don't do scandalous things.]

Ireland has been delightful so far.  It’s so wonderful being able to stay in a house!  I can do laundry, cook my own breakfast, shower in a reliably clean shower, and shut the door behind me when I go to bed.  It makes me even more excited for my own flat this semester, because although it’s a house, it isn’t my house, and I remain the novel American visitor in a house of a surprisingly large number of young Irish.  Also, I think everyone living in this house smokes.  Fortunately it’s against their rules to smoke inside, but still.  I can smell it when I go to bed.

[Side note: the one thing about smoking over here that I do like is that it seems to be required that tobacco companies post an accurate warning on their cigarette boxes.  Hence, most of them read quite prominently on the front: SMOKING KILLS.  I like it even better here in Ireland, because virtually all signs are written in both English and Gaelic (traditional Irish), and this includes these cigarette warnings.  Hence, the box next to me on the counter right now reads: Toradh caithimh tobac-bás – Smoking kills.  Hahaha.]

Yesterday I explored Limerick city centre.  (As far as I can tell, “city centre” = downtown.)  It was actually mildly disappointing – the city is way more city than culture.  Limerick is coming up from an extremely bad reputation (“murder capital of Europe”), and they’ve clearly improved, but they’re still working on it.  So anyway.  Lots of chain stores and pizza restaurants (slash Subways??  There are Subways everywhere here), not a lot of independent, local-type stores.  Oh, well.  I also saw King John’s Castle, which dates back to AD 1200 and was very cool.

Today is a tour to the Cliffs of Moher, which I’m very excited for.  I’m quite hopeful that the advent of September has cleared out most of the tourists, because apparently it’s notoriously flooded with them usually.   (Obviously not that I can speak out overly against tourists in general – I am one.  It’s just the floods I don’t like.)  The tour will also take us past a couple of other ancient historical sites.  I’m very excited to get out and see more of Ireland.  Tomorrow is still fairly up in the air, but theoretically we’re going to go BLACKBERRY PICKING OMG and hopefully to Galway, which is supposed to be a very “hip” city.  Suh-weet.  Thursday sometime I will leave to train/ferry back across to Edinburgh, arriving via overnight train early on Saturday morning for move-in!

True to Irish form, it’s raining outside.  Off we go.