Room, Roommates, and School

Unless the LORD builds the house,
       its builders labor in vain.
       Unless the LORD watches over the city,
       the watchmen stand guard in vain.
                    Psalms 127:1

Over the next few days after arriving, I got settled into my new room, met my roommates, and went through University College Dublin orientation.  This is really a pretty nice place, especially when it’s sunny and the sky is blue, which does occur every few days.  See, I took a picture to prove it!

The accommodations are extremely nice.  I have my own room and bathroom, and I share a kitchen/living room area with five other girls.  The dorms are co-ed by suite (gasp!  Notre Dame would be horrified).  Here are some pictures of my room…
The bathroom is rather strange.  It technically has a shower, but it’s really just a shower head sticking out of the ceiling, a mildewy curtain, and a drain in the bathroom floor.  It’s not sectioned off at all, and the water pressure is fairly non-existent.  Taking a shower is quite a skill.  Pictures below are of my room, my dorm building, and the view out my window of some quite beautiful and noisy construction.

My roommates are: Allison, who is one of my good friends from Notre Dame; De and Kelsey from Australia, and Anne-Ceceil and Marie-Meige from France.  We all get along pretty well so far.  Kelsey and De are fairly horrified by the weather, find it amusing when we eat things involving peanut butter, and use shortened words, like “uni” for “university.”  Allison and I feel fairly out-matched when it comes to cooking (though mostly we cook for ourselves).  The other girls cook more at home, since they don’t live in dorms and eat in a dining hall for all their meals.  Here’s a picture of most of us at a pub (Marie-Meige hadn’t arrived yet).

University College Dublin is a campus with a lot of concrete, but also a lot of very nice plants.  They have plants growing in their pots even in the midst of January, and they grow whole gardens, complete with trees, in patches of dirt inside the buildings.  The sculptures, such as the mysterious egg, are also pretty neat, much better than Notre Dame's odd piles of "modern art" scrap metal that they pile around the quads.  The picture below looks like a little zen garden, but it’s not little at all: that big rock is probably longer than I am!  I took the picture from a ways above the garden.

There’s also a “lake” (really just a big fountain) in the middle of campus.  It has lots of seagulls and ducks, and a family of swans.  It’s a very bird-friendly place, as there’s a little island in the middle of the lake, just so the birds can have a place to hang out.  The swans are my new friends.  They like me a lot, and even followed me as I walked along the lake’s edge.  The mother swan will eat grass out of your hand.




My classes are fairly normal.  The lecture halls here are steep: it takes a little getting used to.  The professors don’t necessarily encourage you to buy books, but you can check them out from the library.  They also sometimes don’t encourage you to take notes, but provide the notes online and just ask you to “listen.”  There is also a lot of students who smoke here, much more than I am used to.  People aren’t allowed to smoke indoors, but they can smoke as close to the door as they want, so smoke still gets in sometimes.  Also, they have little colored lines on the floors to tell you how to get to your classroom.  They're very useful, if you start at the main entrance where the labels are.

One odd consequence about cars driving on the left side of the road is that I’m never sure which side of the sidewalk I’m supposed to be walking on.  I’ve been trying to train my body to dart left every time I’m confronted with a passing person, and it’s been quite difficult, especially since Irish people sometimes aren’t consistent about which side they will pass you on.  I had one frightening encounter with a bike as I was walking to class.  I looked up, and the bike was streaming towards me at full speed.  I quickly darted to the left, and the bike made a slight turn and flew past on my right.  If I hadn’t gone to the left, though, I would have been toast.  It was a good thing I had been thinking about it so much.

That is the story of my basic living situation.  Maybe next time I’ll write about some more adventurous things.