First day in Dublin!

Hello everyone! Today was a pretty good day, though I'm super tired now. I went to mass at 12:30 today. It was raining, and my host mother and my roommate walked down with me. It's a small church but there are a lot of masses; the earliest Sunday mass is at 9:00 and there's even one at 6:oo PM. The priest was african, with a fairly heavy african accent. He had good speaking presence, and I liked him a lot. I found back to the house after mass all by myself, and I was very proud.

Caitlin and I decided to go into the city this afternoon. We took the bus to Grafton Street, which is a nice shopping district with cobblestone streets that's blocked off for traffic. We had a good time wandering around and watching street performers. We actually ran into a few of the guys from our program, and walked with them for a while. We found a bookstore, and I bought a book to read while I'm here. Grafton street is right by St. Stephen's Green, which is a park. We walked around there for a a while, and sat and listened to a traditional Irish band that was playing in a pavillion.

We were both pretty tired, so we decided to head back home. Good thing we left a bit early, because we got on the wrong bus. 46A is the one that goes by our house both ways, so we thought if we got on 46A anywhere it would loop back around, and go back through Stillorgan (original Gaelic is Stigh Lorgan:)). This was not entirely correct... We were the last people on the bus, and the driver told us we had to catch it at another street. So we started walking, and for some reason walked right by the right stop... and farther down the street there were a lot of bus stops but none of them said "46A". This was where we met the drunk Irish boys:-p

There's a world cup game tonight, you see, Spain vs. Germany. So there were a lot of people walking around in football (that's soccer, you crazy Americans) jerseys, coming out of pubs and the like. There were about five of these guys, and they started talking to us... we didn't quite realise how drunk they were when we asked for directions. They had no idea of course, it was rather amusing. Then they asked how long we were staying (having already ascertained that we were Americans) and asked for our numbers. When we explained that we didn't have cell phones, the most coherent of the bunch said, "Tha's alright, you can take mine. We'll give you a ring tomorrow." Then he takes a rather nice and shiny cellphone out of his pocket, and tries to give it to Caitlin. We explained that we had class, and left to find our bus stop. And that, friends, is how we passed up a free Irish phone:-p

We got on the right bus eventually (after running after a 46A bus for half a street, and asking someone sober for directions) and actually ran into a couple girls from our program on the bus. There was yummy chicken with mushrooms, onions, and potatoes waiting for us when we got home.

So, I was gonna upload all the photos I took (there's even one of me, so I can prove I'm actually in Ireland and this isn't an elaborate hoax) but blogger doesn't seem to want to load them. I'll figure out a way to get them online soon, but for now you'll have to content yourselves with text. Tomorrow's our first real day of scheduled stuff (orientation at 9!) so I'll probably be turning in rather soon. Goodnight!