Today was my long day at school. I have four classes, each with a one hour break in between. My apartment is a 10-15 minute walk from campus, so I usually take the day to bum around or just watch people for a while. Ireland is full of interesting characters. I really enjoy my classes here. Mostly, I am entranced by how strange they are. I spend almost as much time stealthily looking around the room, trying to take everything in, as I do actually taking notes. This is quite hard, because although the classes are only an hour, the professors want to squeeze in as much information as possible. Class sizes vary, but all are lectures. Today I noticed that the Professors carry notes with them the entire class that they read off of. Although I do miss in class conversations and the monotony of lectures gets a little hard to sit through, and sometimes I even feel the need to raise my hand, I appreciate the professor’s knowledge and excitement about the subject they are teaching much more than I usually do in the states. Most of my classes are held in huge lecture halls. Although you can usually slip in fairly unobtrusively if you are late, you may not be able to find a seat, since people have a tendency to sit at the seats at the edges of the rows rather than filling in the center seats. By the time class starts, there are very few seats that remain accessible. No one in the classroom ever expects anything strange or interesting to happen. I believe this is because no one speaks in class, so there are no interesting/strange/stupid comments from students, just the professors down to earth speech. Today, a student took a picture. The entire class paused. It sounded as if they paused in their very thoughts. The 200 person lecture quivered on the point of I don’t even know what (perhaps nervousness?) until the professor finally recovered, made a joke, and continued with the lecture.

Opposed to this giant lecture, I am taking a music class where there are only about eight students! And no more than four have ever shown up to a class. Attendance is looked at quite differently here than in the States. I got an information sheet at the beginning of the term advising me to miss no more than two thirds of the lectures. Another of my professors announced to the class that seminars had a new policy where students would automatically fail if they missed five or more classes.

For those of you who don’t know already, I am taking five classes here. Intro to Traditional Irish Music, Irish Language Literature and Culture, Contemporary British Literature and Culture, Celtic Literature, and The Gypsy in Hungarian Music and Politics. I really like all of them!! It’s pretty awesome that I get to take so many classes that are specific to learning about Irish culture.

I took one of my breaks today to sit in the cafeteria/restaurant. There are two floors. The second has different sandwich chains like Quiznos. I have yet to eat there. The bottom floor has three food sections at the back of the room. The first starting at the right is called World Foods. I have yet to see it open, but I would guess this was where one could eat dishes from around the world. The center one is a sandwich bar where you can get one meat and three veggies for 3euro. It’s basically a $5 footlong, but with fewer food options and fresher bread. The last is Traditional Food where I got a stewey thing over rice. It was quite delicious. Much better than anything I have ever had at the Hunter cafeteria, like times 100!