Gears, Grand & Green

It truly hasn't really hit that I am living here in this beautiful country for the next 5 months. Today we had orientation bright and early at 9:30am. Okay for those of you who know me well are thinking, bright & early? What is she talking about, she is often up for 5 hours by that time! However, this is quite the adjustment. My body is going to hate me, but when going out to the pub the Irish don't even leave until 10-10:30 and if going to a club even later.  This is obviously not my ideal time table, but such is life, I will learn to adjust and hopefully have fun out at the pubs, but also have a few of my treasured 5:00am early mornings to myself. I am most looking forward to seeing the Irish countryside. Our 1hr. 45 min drive from Shannon up to Galway was absolutely marvelous. Unfortunately the ride came at hour 22 of traveling so as much as I wanted to take in the beautiful scenery my eyes were like cement.
     Brian, my program director, gave us a ride in his car. What an experience that was. Driving on the wrong side of the road, ridiculously fast, stop and go jerking all over the place. They call stick shift vehicles "gears". Today during orientation I found out that is actually legal for me to drive here, but I would rather not die. My goodness it's mad over here. Pedestrians do NOT have the right-of-way.
     My heat is working! Hooray, I love to be warm, however it's still chilly over here. In the grand scheme of things it's like living in the tropics. Coming from a cold snowy wisconsin to a green lush Ireland is quite the transition. About the time I start complaining of being cold I stop to think of the blizzard that just dumped 20+ inches of snow on us back in Wisconsin a couple of weeks ago...okay so maybe it's really not so cold over here. Not to mention they told us that last month was one of the coldest months they've ever had in Irelands history. It's January so it can only warm up from here!...I hope :  /
    A few quirky things include the use of the word grand. In the U.S. we use words such as "like" or "um" to fill pauses in sentences or just throw them in unnecessarily. However, over here they use the word grand. It's thrown into sentences all over the place. Brian told us you can basically use it whenever, but you're likely to use it wrong at least once or twice and look like an idiot. Oh well, I'm sure there's already plenty more I'll do that'll look foolish.
     During orientation one of the language professors spoke to us about taking Gaelic during our semester at NUIG. The University is a bilingual university posting all signs in both English & Gaelic. At the conclusion of his presentation he taught us a few phrases such as hello- dia dhuit and your reply would be dia is muire duit- I am doing well. He also taught us how to order a pint of Guinness. The last item of his presentation was a song. It began a little bit corny and I wasn't sure how warmly received it would be. Before long everyone was clapping and singing along in Gaelic, my eyes began to tear up. The atmosphere of the room was just unbelievable; again I had the indescribable internal feeling of 'this is why I'm here!' More to come later :  )

Goodluck! (goodbye)
Abby