Prom.

Recently NUIM (National University of Ireland at Maynooth) threw what was advertised as an "American Prom!" Needless to say, we got pretty excited about the concept! The whole gang, french, german, irish, american, everyone, went together! Even though the advertised three course dinner wasn't great, there weren't enough chairs so we were all fairly separated, and the 2 live bands turned out to be someone's brother's garage band who only knew two Jimmy Hendrix songs, we had a good time.


Unfortunately, and this isn't accurately captured in the pictures, Ben, my escort, lived the American prom nightmare - he broke his leg the morning of the prom. We all thought he only sprained his ankle playing soccer that morning. He spent the day icing his leg and using crutches. He even managed to take an exam that afternoon, not knowing he'd actually broken his fibula. That night he insisted that he felt well enough to go to the prom, which I think he did because he thought it was important for me. The next morning I was woken up by a phone call at around 8. Ben said he thought he needed to go to the hospital because his leg felt worse, and looked significantly worse. We left immediately, and I spent the next three days at the emergency room where he was admitted as he got surgery on his broken leg and got a cast put on. Poor thing! He definitely gets the award for the most dedicated prom date, both here in Ireland and in my entire prom history!

My 21st Birthday!

My birthday falls the day before St. Patricks Day, and celebrating both in Ireland was incredible! Ben took me to a French restaurant in Dublin for lunch on my birthday, and I tried my first taste of white wine. It tasted different than I expected, but was still quite good. We walked around the city a bit listening to the street music. After I got back Meagan D. and Megan R. made me a nice dinner and birthday brownies. Then a big group of us went out to The Roost, my favorite Irish pub, and, in true Irish fashion, I tried my first pint of Guinness. I had high expectations that it would be a much more glamorous drink than it was. My first sip was captured on video, and my reaction was that it tasted like "dirt" and "garbage in a cup." I stand by that still, but I'm getting used to the flavor of beer. Maybe before I leave it will have grown on me, but for now it's a slow learning curve for my taste buds.


It was absolutely worth waiting to drink until I was 21. I thought when I was younger that peer pressure would make it difficult for me, but honestly I never felt much of an urge to drink until I came to Ireland. If there's one thing I learned in college it's that not drinking made me pretty popular: I could be a designated driver for my friends, and everyone in college is poor, so when I turned down drink offers at parties most people seemed fairly relieved! It was satisfying waiting this long to have any alcohol. My friends here in Ireland were very supportive of my decision, and I had a very memorable birthday because of them.


I also got two wonderful birthday cards from my parents! I went into the main office for the apartment complex I live in, and opened the cards as they handed them to me. One was a musical card that sang the "funky chicken dance" and everyone in the office danced the chicken dance with me! I also got a cute little Wizard of Oz singing e-card from my Aunt Marie and Uncle Keith! No one in our family will be surprised, I'm sure, to hear that I received a lovely hand-made birthday card from my Aunt Christine, who is reputable for her incredible scrap-booking skills. She never misses any family member's birthday, (and that's a lot of birthdays!), or even the more unique holiday cards, (my mother always gets one for 'Nurses Day'). Getting one of her special cards made me feel like I was closer to home than I realized. I cherish these contacts - snail-mail, e-mail, blog comments. They all make my life here even better.

St. Patrick's Day!

There couldn't have been a better place to celebrate St. Patrick's Day than here in Ireland! All of our friends, (probably about 30 of us), woke up early and caught the train to Dublin to watch the St. Patty's Day parade, and then go pub hopping.

This is a great picture of most of the group. We were waiting for about 5 other people who missed the first train. As you can see most of us invested in hair dye, makeup, and silly hats. In my captions with friends I'll include in parenthesis their nationalities, because one of my favorite things about this group is all of the different countries and cultures that are represented.

Just off the train. Took a few minutes to realize we were missing some people.

Here is Ben (France), Me, Meagan D., and Megan R.

Me, Tom and Michael (both from France), Meagan D., and Megan R.

The three M's.

Probably the best candid shot ever.

Daniel (Austria) has a little something extra going on with his glove...sneaky!

Here are a series of photos from the parade. All-in-all the parade was actually kind of disappointing. It was slow moving, big gaps in between people, floats, and bands walking through, not much music. It was fun with our group, but I think that even the parades through Coldwater keep an audience's attention better.
Some of the floats built were very cool though, as you will see:

The parade began with the releasing of green balloons all down the main street.

Ben and Andrea (both France), Pauline and Daniel (France, Austria) waiting for the parade to start!

It was pretty funny that we didn't have any Irish person in our group. Not one. I have plenty of Irish friends, and I know that one of the girls is even dating an Irish boy, but it just worked out that no one could say "Kiss me, I'm Irish!"
As you can see, Andrea (France) improvised on her forehead.

Ben and Michael (France) before the parade.

Alfredo (Italy) on Hendrik (Germany). Because there was a pretty big crowd, this was the best way for anyone to see if the parade was coming our way. If you got closer to the street at all you had to be shoulder-to-shoulder and front-to-back in order to fit. If you weren't squished, you were pushed by others until you were.

Tom (France) and Me.

I loved this little boy. He was absolutely adorable. He was standing in front of us during the parade.

Hendrik (Germany) is quite tall. Ben brought me a cookie from the market while we were waiting for the parade. As soon as I took a bite the sun disappeared and I was cloaked in a dark shadow. I looked straight up only to see Hendrik looking down right into my face.
"Hey Hendrik," I smiled, "how's it going up there?"
"Give me half of that cookie or I will kill you!"
I laughed pretty hard. Then shared my cookie. He was nice to me all day after that.

Ben (France) and I waiting for the parade to start.

One of the cooler series of floats were these enormous bugs. Underneath the bugs were people on bicycle contraptions pedaling and pulling rods that controlled all legs, arms, and feelers. It was very cool. This one was my favorite, although there was also a dragonfly, ant,
and a creepy spider.

There was a huge chicken that came by, and a group of women dressed like chickens, then some man rapping about "hens in the hen house."

One of the first parts of the parade to pass by was a bunch of eggs with legs being chased by chefs with huge egg beaters. I thought this was hilarious!

You may be asking yourselves at this point "Where are the leprechauns? Where is the green? What do any of these parade attractions have to do with St. Patrick's Day or Ireland?"
The answer is that there are none, there was none, and they have nothing to do with it. The closest we had was that there was a man dressed as St. Patrick who walked by in sunglasses. Beyond that the closest theme we could think of was a picnic or a children's show.

Hendrik (Germany) saw St. Patrick walking around on the other side of the street and started shouting "The Pope! It's the Pope! Come over here to bless me!!"

We tried to explain to him who it was once we recognized it, but it quickly became clear that he knew the whole time it was St. Patrick, and simply felt like yelling that it was the pope. He was the tallest, so we didn't see attractions coming until after he did. He enjoyed this, so he proceeded to should that the Mayor, Shrek, and George Clooney were all coming. Shrek actually did come by, but we soon learned that Hendrik was shouting that about a policeman walking by at the time.

We settled into a pub that was a short walk from our spot at the parade. We had been there once before, and it was an incredible place! Not much to look at on the outside, but the inside was all old wood, chandeliers, and large, beautiful staircases. The pub was about 4 stories tall with balconies looking down to other floors, and even live music playing up from the bottom.

And here is a quick shot of my face taken at the pub early in the day.

It was an incredible St. Patrick's Day, and I'll never forget how I got to celebrate it in The Emerald Isle.

Sláinte.

Bog of Allen, Donadae.

In one of our more thrilling SMC trips, we spent two hours learning anything and everything there is to know about bogs. Apparently there is way more to them than I thought, because two hours is a long time to talk non-stop about bogs, and let me tell you it is an eternity to listen. Just try it. Try to read from wikipedia about bogs for five minutes. Time yourself. You'll see.

We learned about the harvesting of turf, burning turf, the time-table of plant build-up in the bogs beginning at 8000 BC, and the almost immaculate preservation of anything dead in the bog (because of the lack of oxygen, if you were wondering). This part actually perked my interest. We learned stories about prehistoric animals getting trapped, and even humans drowning thousands of years ago and being found recently with their clothes intact, hair, fingernails, skin, everything. Apparently there is an exhibit at the Dublin museum that has these bodies on display, or "pieces" of bodies, because the heavy machinery that accidentally discovered them tended to chop them up first. Hence accidentally discovering them.

Here is a picture of me holding a brick of turf which, once harvested and dried, was burned to heat Irish households. Turf is basically dead plants:


Here are three different kinds of wood that can be found in the bog, and vases that were made out of them:


After our indoor tour, Nula, our well-informed tour guide, took us out to the gardens to see the different flora and fauna that normally grow in the bog:


We saw a few different kinds of carnivorous flowers, even though they weren't in full bloom yet, and she showed us how they killed bugs. She also drew our attention to two little frogs that were mating, which came as no surprise to her, as "it is the season for love in the bog."

Eventually we made it out into the bog and spent about a half an hour feeling the different types of moss and turf under our rainboots. Nula took us out to a part of the bog, separated us into two groups about a few feet apart from each other, and then had one group jump up and down. The group standing still would move up and down as if we were on a water bed!

And here is the bog in all of its glory:

Meagan and I were jumping around on the bog, enjoying how our feet stayed dry in our boots.

Nula cut a bunch of tall grass from the bog and taught us how to make St. Bridget's crosses out of them.

The girls insisted that I put this up here because it was my "I'm so bored I'm going to throw myself into this bog" face, and because it was captured in a flash of quick-acting camera skills.. Well done, Meagan D.

This SMC trip was extra special, though, because it was a "Seamus" trip. These trips have become legendary, and I quickly learned why every Saint Mary's girl remembers these trips, and has a soft spot for Seamus. Well, most of them. I sure do.

Seamus is an older man who narrates the bus trips to certain places, and then guides us through our destinations as well. He is full of old folklore, myths, plenty of historical fiction, and simple humor. While in transit between sites he told stories about the towns we passed through, the families who used to live there, roads we were travelling on, and even threw in a few kidnappings, human sacrifices, and royal marriages to keep things interesting. I also learned about what different celebrities like Mick Jagger thought about the castles we drove by.

As the bus was traveling I was tuning out everything with my iPod and daydreaming at the scenery out my window when I heard the feedback of a microphone turning on, and Seamus began narrating our trip. I was clearly one of the few girls who was entertained by the entire concept that this man was narrating our trips by microphone, and his stories, on top of things, were fairly entertaining in their eccentricity.

The high pitched squealing sound shook all of us out of our daydreaming stupors as the microphone clicked on. Seamus's voice carried through the bus: "Prosperous? Anyone heard of it?"

His question was met by the blank stares of St. Mary's girls.

"No? No one?" I shook my head when he made eye contact with me.

"We are driving through it now, if you want to look to your left and right! Well, the first thing you're probably all wondering about this town is 'why is it called Prosperous?'"

He paused, as if to give us time to acknowledge to ourselves that this was, indeed, what we were thinking.

"Well, there was a wealthier man in town who decided to build a factory," he explained. "It was a textile factory, so he wanted to attract skilled weavers. But he couldn't attract skilled weavers. And why couldn't he attract those skilled weavers?"

Once again he paused, for our benefit I'm sure, then slowly dragged through the first words of his answer, as if someone would try and finish the answer for him. "Because they all wanted...to go....to....the New World, yes. So, a law was enacted that would prevent them from leaving the area. So the wealthy man decided to create subsidies for the people who would move into town and work at his factory. I believe it was about 10 euro he would offer for new babies being born there. Or was it to new marriages..." He looked to Roberta, the SMC advisor, for help, but even though she's heard these stories thousands of times I'm sure, she didn't seem to know the answer either. Her reaction, however, indicated to me that they probably had this exchange every time he got to this part in his story about Prosperous.

"Either way, this man only wanted male workers at the factory, so then those men would have to go out and find other women to marry and move them there. So there you have it! He called it Prosperous because he wanted people to move there."

I definitely expected the story to end with the town being named because of wealth of some kind, not merely because the wealthy man wanted people to move there. That was an interesting twist.

Seamus immediately moved onto the next story - his segways were always swift. "Now there was a political party who was here in Prosperous, I remember, and they ran their election here saying that they would 'Bring Prosperity to Ireland.'" He laughed a breathy laugh into the microphone that boomed through the bus speakers. "Now I came through Prosperous at this time," he quickly continued, "and...well I don't want to... I hope I don't offend anyone here..."

He definitely grabbed my attention.

"..but I don't think there's anyone here from Prosperous anyway!" he laughed. "But at this time, there was so much poverty here that houses didn't have heat!" He waited for reactions. "...And they didn't have bathrooms. No washrooms!" He still didn't seem to be getting the reaction he was looking for. "And children were walking around with no shoes. Barefoot!" I was sitting closer to the front of the bus, so I made an appropriately, but visibly, shocked and disgusted face that I hoped he noticed. He seemed satisfied, so I might not have been the only one. "I just remember saying to myself," he finished, "that because there's so much poverty in prosperous I thought it was a derogatory name!"

"Now," he moved on, "we're still on the straight road, Mosses road some people call it. I bet you're wondering 'why do some people call it that?' Well, some people call it Mosses road because of a road worker who was here named Moss." Makes sense.

Right after we left the bog, Seamus came on the microphone asking if anyone wanted to hear a "spooky story about the bog..?" His mischievous grin made it clear to me that he was confident that he had an attention-getter for us girls, and his enthusiasm for the story was enough for me, so I gave him my full attention.

His story came from a bit of the history we learned at the bog museum about 'bog butter.' 'Bog butter' was made in the bog, obviously, but during the winter season the people living there would store it by burying it in the bog until they needed it. Then they would dig it up and use it at the time. As you may have imagined, a lot of butter was left in the bog because people who buried it had died, or because they forgot where it was, or it was just left unused. "Well," Seamus said excitedly, "the workers would be cutting out turf in the bog and would accidentally come across some bog butter. Then they would just eat it plain. Or on bread." He soaked in the disgusted faces we were making as if they were applause. Smiling, he said "Last year we found more bog butter, and right next to the butter they found human remains!"

He described how the person found was most likely storing the butter, and accidentally fell into the bog and drown. That the surface of the bog could be like quicksand. The remains were a part of a human leg. According to Seamus, archeologists tried to put a date on the butter and the remains, and marked it at around 2000 BC. But they couldn't figure out the gender of the leg. "Locals said it was a male. But how would they know? They said the leg they found had lots of hair on it!"


The next place we went was a large public park area called Donadae that had a castle, a church, a river and bridge, and other monuments in it:

Here are a few pictures of the castle we saw there.

Recognizing a candid shot as it was being taken at the castle.

We thought this pathway, that was blocked off by trees to the right, looked like the secret garden.

The trees were curved, so it looks like this photo was taken with a cool curved lens, but really the trees at the park were all shaped that way. Beautiful.

I loved this little boy on top of the rocks. His mom kept trying to ask him to come down, but he wanted to listen to Seamus guide our tour around that area of the park and insisted on staying up there until he had finished.

Here is a picture of Seamus! He was explaining about the different carvings and sculptures on the alter in this church on site at Donadae.

He also took us to the Royal Pet Cemetary of the king of the castle, who ironically got mauled to death by his two dogs who didn't recognize him in his pj's. The dogs were given a royal burial there nonetheless.

I was surprised to find that there was a 9/11 memorial deep in the park. It was built for a man named Sean Tallon who was one of the NYC firefighters killed during the attacks. Because he and his family were from Ireland, they built this memorial for him and the other firefighters and police officers who lost their lives that day. Their names were all engraved in the monument, and they planted 400 oak trees behind the memorial in honor of each of the men and women who died.

Here are some pictures of the beautiful river that was in Donadae. There was a nice little bridge that crossed over it as well:


I was standing on the river bend by the bridge, (which most of the SMC girls were on or around), looking into the water. I was trying to decide how deep the river was, because it looked pretty shallow from where I was standing. Shin-deep at best. I was dipping my rainboot into the water deeper and deeper to fulfill my own curiosity when I lost my balance and fell into the river. I learned that it is much deeper than it looks. It was up to the upper part of my thigh. The girls got a real kick out of it, especially because a few of them could tell what I was doing the whole time. Meagan D., one of the lucky few who saw this coming, was able to capture some photographs to document the moment. Not that they need to, because they will not let me forget it.

Here you can kind of see the water on my left pant leg. You can also see the embarrassed 'I should have known better' look on my face. None of us know how I managed to keep my right leg dry, but I did.

Here I am dumping the water, mud, and god knows what else out of my boot. Luckily this was the end of the trip because I had to spend at least 30 minutes after that walking to the bus, waiting for girls in the bathroom, and traveling back to campus where I could change into dry clothes. Here I am on the way back, airing out my leg:

Sláinte.