watch that spontaneous falling...

July 7-13: Oxford Week 3

What a week this has been. Things have really picked up with classes; I had two midterms this week. Both required a lot of reading and writing…not something that I am used to! It was pretty cold and rainy everyday, but we all accepted it as part of the Oxford experience. Gwen and I have found that we are capable of getting a lot of stuff done in the two hours that we have between our classes; this week we went clothes shopping one day and grocery shopping the other. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but all the girls in the program have taken full advantage of a store they have here called Primark. All the clothes are extremely cheap. A lot of the stuff could be classified as “Euro trash,” but if you are careful you can find some great deals. I have purchased several long sleeve t shirts and pants for less than three pounds a piece! It’s been a great way to add warm clothes to my wardrobe!

Bible Study went really well this week. We met in one of the student activity rooms and filled up the space with over thirty people! Gwen’s birthday was this week as well, so Liz and I went and bought cheese pizza and breadsticks to celebrate at midnight, at least that was the original plan. Turns out that in England, Pizza Hut is a high class restaurant complete with a drink menu and fine china. It also closes at 10pm, so we had to slightly adjust our plans for celebrating at midnight. Instead we ended up celebrating two hours before, but the pizza was good nonetheless.

The highlight of the week was definitely our trip to Ireland. Aside from the fact that Ireland is one of the most gorgeous places I’ve ever seen, the fact that we planned and organized the trip entirely on our own gave us a feeling of great accomplishment. Had you told me last year that I could put together a weekend trip to a different country I would have doubted you…my travel skills have definitely improved this summer!

The only aspect of our trip that didn’t go just according to plan was Molly getting sick. The night before we were supposed to leave she came down with a horrible sinus/ear infection and decided to take the weekend to sleep and recuperate. Ireland definitely wasn’t the same without her.

We had to leave incredibly early in the morning, even though our flight didn’t leave until noon. Getting to the Galway required a bus ride from Oxford to London, a separate bus ride from London to Stansted Airport, a plane ride into Shannon Airport in Ireland, and then a final bus ride from the airport into Galway. Thank goodness for the plethora of mass transportation offered here!

We left campus at 5:45 am and walked into Galway about 5:00 pm, eleven hours later. The airport experience was different from any other time that I’ve flown…we used a budget airline service that’s really popular through Europe called Ryanair. The flights are much cheaper than other airlines, which mean they cut cost wherever possible. The check-in experience is very unforgiving and they always overbook, so it’s recommended that you get to the airport at least two hours before your flight is scheduled to depart. We did just that, and stood in line for about twenty minutes to get proper boarding passes. Going through security was also quite the experience. I wasn’t wearing anything metallic, but for some reason I set off the metal detector when I walked through so I had to be hand-searched by an attendant. She was nice and apologetic about the whole thing, but it was still an uncomfortable experience. Liz and Gwen both had to have their bags searched, which meant all of their belongings were completely unpacked and examined. I guess we looked suspicious to security…no telling what a group of American college girls could be up to!

Once we were at the gate we sat in the “queue” for another thirty minutes or so before we could get on the plane. Since seats are first come first serve, the earlier you get to the gate the better your seat will be. We were pretty close to the front, so I got a window seat! Boarding the plane you could hear “unobtrusive advertisements” in the background, which got old really fast. Instead of handing out free drinks they sold them, along with a wide variety of overpriced main course dinner. They also sold lottery tickets, which were surprisingly very popular among all of the passengers. We landed at Shannon with no problems, and found bought our bus tickets without any problem. The bus ride was about two hours, and the bus was one of the most comfortable I’ve ridden on so far. Needless to say, I was asleep almost the whole way. I woke up about twenty minutes outside of Galway, and it was incredibly interesting to see the Ireland scenery. It was very much as I had imagined it would be—everything was very green and there were lots of stone fences everywhere. The suburbs of Galway, however, weren’t all that different from American suburbs. The houses were smaller but they were still grouped in neighborhoods like we have.

Arriving in Galway was very exciting. We had received explicit directions on how to get to the hostel from the bus station, and we found it without any problems. We had also check out an “Exploring Ireland” book that came in very handy throughout the weekend. Our hostel was in the dead center of town, right in the middle of a long line of pubs and restaurants. It was a great location…a little loud at night but we were so tired that noise wasn’t an issue. After checking in and dropping off our luggage, we headed out to find some dinner.

If you made it this far in this entry, then I am very impressed! I just did a word count in Word (where I've been typing all these entries) and so far I've typed over 46 pages...approximately 26,000 words! If you made it this far leave me a comment, I'd love to see who is actually able to get through all my ramblings!