the world spins madly on

This weekend I moved into my permanent housing and went to Ireland.

Trinity College


Dublin.


They just set up this new super-cool bike-renting stuff all over the city.


Guiness Factory.


Nighttime Dublin


Design outside the Holyhead rail/ferry station

Ireland was really fun. I got a really cheap flight from Bristol to Dublin, and then I took a Ferry to Holyhead in north Wales and caught a train down to Swansea. Coming back took all day--three hours for the ferry and six hours for the train/bus. I got to see my friend from Seattle who is spending a semester in Galway. We met in Dublin, stayed in a really nice hostel, and wandered around the city for a couple days. I'm definitely planning on going back, and maybe going all the way around the island. I have a three-week (or so) break in the spring, so perhaps I'll go back then.
Classes officially start on the 28th, which is also when the paper for my pre-session class is due. I've signed up for: The Picaresque Novel, Anarchy & Order: Issues in World Politics, and Genocide. I think it'll be an interesting semester. This week is called freshers week, and there's a bunch of stuff going on on campus--fairs (fayres) and such. The house I'm living in is nice--I'm on the second floor, and there are (as far as I can tell) three other girls and four boys. A lot of the people I had the pre-session with are living really close by, so that's nice too.
This upcoming weekend I'll be writing a paper--nowhere interesting for me.

Croeso i Abertawe

I'm not sure I'll be very good at writing about what I'm doing here in a blog-y fashion and to everyone's content, so I think I'll be mostly putting up photos.

first: New York City.
Coney Island



second: London.
CCTV!


Phone Boxes! Red ones!


and now: Wales.
Rhossili


Sheep


St Fagan's


Millennium Centre

as for classes...right now I'm in a pre-session about British culture and politics with about 30 other people from the US. it's really fast-paced but interesting, but I'm definitely ready for real classes to start, which doesn't happen for a couple weeks actually. This upcoming week is the last week of pre-session, and then comes freshers week, and THEN classes start. I don't actually register (enroll, they call it) until freshers week, so at this point I have no idea what I'll be taking.