Blogger hates me. Not my fault, and whats up with only being able to upload one picture at a time. I'm going to wind up in a gaol our of pure frustration...
Dublin Cont. (um a month later…oops)
After Trinity, we got tickets to a hop on hop off tour bus. Always interesting J. The problem with staying in a city the size of Dublin for only a day is that you are never going to fit everything in. As a result about half my pictures are blurry snapshots from a moving double-decker bus. My personal favorite shows how silly tourism looks on the outside. 
Who knew Dubliners were so into their Viking history?
The first thing we went to see after Trinity, and the only real museum, was the National Gallery. It’s a nice museum, pretty much like every other National Gallery. I would defiantly suggest you go there if you get a chance. We only had around 45minutes and it was nowhere near enough time to appreciate it. I'm always a sucker for large mythological scenes and they had those in abundance. http://www.nationalgallery.ie/
One thing I didn’t expect was the continuous presence of Guinness in the city. Guinness brand trinkets were available in every shop, and advertisements were everywhere. The Guinness brewery, which is huge and right in the middle of Dublin, due to the founder, Alex Guinness, leasing the brewery for 45pounds per year for 9,000 years! Talk about an investment. I’m pretty sure the actual headquarters are in London now, but I don’t think Dublin is willing to acknowledge it . We were there, but we didn’t see the actual museum, so I have lovely pictures of the sign.
To finish off the night we wandered around Temple Bar, and the other pub districts. Temple Bar is supposedly Dublin's cultural area, but really it’s about five million pubs. I’m not a huge fan of drunk people, and apparently that holds for drunken Irish, too. One thing I found odd about Ireland is the amount of roving preteens and early teens that are out at night. I think they must have different parental supervision viewpoints, because not only Dublin, but also Swords had them in large quantities. They were roaming Temple Bar to the point I didn’t know if I was in the middle of a pub district, or a Miley Cyrus appearance.
All in all I enjoyed Dublin, but I wouldn’t say it’s really the city to pick if you have a limited amount of time. It kind of pales in comparison to London in my head, and was actually more expensive. A feat when you’re comparing pounds to Euro. Speaking of London, that’s what I need to post next. THAT will take a lot of talking, because I was there for a full five days and was almost ready to move in.
Anyway, time for lights out :)
Dublin
Sorry about not updating :(
I was going to do a post combining weekend trips to Loch Ness and Loch Lamode, but the second got cancelled. Last weekend I went to Dublin, so I thought I’d skip to that and do Loch Ness After.
We flew directly out of Aberdeen to Dublin on a budget airline called Ryanair. The plane was actually pretty big and comfortable, but they try to sell you really random stuff. Anyone want some smokeless cigarettes? We didn’t get there until the early evening, so we didn’t go into city proper (about 10miles away) until Saturday. Instead we wandered around Swords. We never figured out quite what it was. It was like a small town (or village as they say here), but it was so close to Dublin it might have been a suburb.
There is a “no runners” rule in some of the pubs. I asked what runners got up to when drunk that banned them from pubs, but sadly they were only forbade because it could upset people who scheduled fancy parties. Apparently, runners mean tennis shoes. I was hoping runners had a tendency to strip and run around like they do at GAC :)
On Saturday the first thing we saw was Trinity College. It’s a pretty famous college (which I had forgotten about) that boasts Oscar Wilde, Bram Stocker, and several other famous alums. It’s also pretty gorgeous.
Student’s memorial building
Entrance
The tour guide seemed particularly fond of the story of the college’s only murder. Some students a few hundred years ago started throwing stones at a strict lecturer’s rooms. The lecturer got a gun and started shooting at them. Then (this is where is gets really bizarre) the students ran back to their room, got their guns, and started a shootout. The lecturer was killed, and oddly the students got out of charges and went on to become successful lawyers. This was all in a main square of the college. I wonder what the neighbors thought.
Also, the college had one of my favorite things- heaps of books and libraries. The college hosts the Book of Kells a ca. 800 book of the gospels that took 30 years for monks to (almost)complete. The blue of the book was created from lapis in Afghanistan. Ridiculous when you consider it was during the Middle Ages, and they were in an isolated monastery in the middle of nowhere. The book was stolen at one point in the medieval period, but found a few months later “under a sod”. It’s been rebound in four volumes, two of which were on display. It was fun to try and piece out random bits of Latin, but I am defiantly not a translator. 
There was also a library on exhibit that was awesome. It’s the longest open library in the UK. What is insane is all the books were organized by size when it was in use. No idea how they found things. I bet they were happy for matching volumes. They wouldn’t let us take pictures of anything, so I’m cheating and using google images.
PS-Something I’ve been meaning to mention. The entire library here is all in Dewey. Dewey! Plus the periodicals are blended into the books. I’m sure some of you can feel my pain at that (Hi, Sonja and Jay!).
This is getting pretty big and bulky, so I think I’ll split Dublin into two groups. Wait until you see the prison :)
So when I say things are more complicated here....
Dear Colleague
INFORMATION: Interruption to external communications service – Saturday 27th February, 2010
What is happening?
On Saturday, 27th February 2010, there were several interruptions to the regional network (AbMAN) that connects the University to the Internet. This resulted in a loss of connectivity from within the University to all external services and prevented users gaining access to resources such as the University websites and Sharepoint.
This was related to work that engineers from JANET (the UK Education and Research network) were conducting on Friday afternoon. This maintenance was to repair a damaged fibre cable in Glasgow, which is one of our major connections to the Internet. However, this work revealed a further breakage, which has not yet been repaired due to poor weather conditions. Unfortunately, our backup connection is via Dundee and a fault in one of the connections there resulted in a total loss of connectivity to the Internet. The faulty equipment was replaced and connectivity restored, however a further similar fault was discovered in Leeds and required equipment to be replaced also. Connectivity was finally restored at approximately 01:00 on Sunday morning.
The outage also affected other North East Scotland institutions such as Robert Gordon’s University, the University of Abertay & St Andrews’ University.
What should you do?
You are not required to take any further action.
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Before I forget...
Rose Follis
Hector Boyce Court
Hillhead Halls of Residence
University of Aberdeen
Don Street
AB24 IWU
Long isn't it :)
It's Complicated
I figured I should actually post about what you are actually following this for :). This post may seem a bit negative at first glance. Don’t worry. I really am enjoying it here. This is just me letting my ironic nature and tendency to complain run free.
I, finally!, have been registered for all my classes. I thought I was done the first Thursday, but apparently I needed to register with a department separately to be recognized. I kid you not. Here it takes around a week for things to update on the computers, and the school is so old departments have their own rules. You have to sign up for tutorial with them (small group that meets once or twice a week). I spent the first four days without email due to me being an idiot and not writing my password down. I spent the next week without the moodle equivalent, or a timetable of classes. In retrospect iswas kinda funny and not at all tragic because……
Only thing not complicated here is being an actual student after registering. The students here go out more in a week then a group of 18 year olds in Mexico for a month. It’s quite frankly amazing and they don’t have any qualms about being drunk in public, unlike the rest of Europe. In class it’s even more apparent. A girl answered her cell phone and STARTED TALKING in class. Today the professor actually had to halt a lecture for late students, so they could cram into a crowded auditorium. That would have been less sad if there hadn’t been four groups of them. One friend is in a chemistry class and a fellow student said he could probably have understood the class better if he wasn’t still drunk. I am pretty sure it was the middle of the week. They also complain about work like nothing I’ve seen. I can’t even complain that much. My politics class requires two papers, not long ones -maybe four pages; they thought this was an unjustifiable amount of work. Considering the only other thing in the class is one test, I almost rolled over laughing. I really hope none of them exchange to America and take biochemistry.
Last weekend I went to a castle about 15 miles away. Catching a bus is really common here. You’d think it would also be fairly easy to do. Nope. First of all when they moved the bus station to the other side of a shopping station they didn’t put up a sign informing people. Second they didn’t post times, busses, or bus port numbers anywhere in the station. When we figured out we needed 109 or 107 and it was in space 2 we had an additional issue. Space 2 wasn’t marked it was skipped over to space 4. Space on was a sheet of paper on a window, and we found a very faded space 3 ten minutes later. We wound up jumping on bus 117, which we didn’t know was a possibility and following 109 bumper to bumper for about thirty minutes. Evidently, their bus routes are complicated to. It was worth it though to see this……
Although we didn’t get to go in….because they posted the wrong closing time. I mean, really?
(Of course the route to get there was uncomplicated-The blue in the picture is water. The path was about 1.5 feet wide and three miles along the cliff)
There are so many things her that fall into the category of complicated it’s not even funny. I need to stop before this becomes epic. If you want entertainment wiki British politics and try and figure out how a party can have a huge majority of seats in parliament while only getting 35% of the vote. Also, if you like this post, tell me. I can complain like this four hours if it’s actually amusing people.
Ps. Here is where I live….
PSS-and hers what they think a police car should look like
Cheers!
Prankmaster!
Being cowardly, I have always thought the best time for pranking is when the victims can't get back at you for an extended period. I'm here for six months and was left to my devices for a month in a tiny room, so here are the results....
"The Couch"-Also known as Ali's roosting space. This is filled with a year of latin and a semester of biochemisty notes. I really want to know what happened when they tried to tear it off.
Mel's desk- Wrapping this up actually made it a hell of a lot less of an eyesore. Might be the only area where it had that effect.
All things entertainment+the fridge
The beds. These were actually pretty cool, especially Mel's. Hard to see in the photo.
Helpers... if they turn up missing blame Ali and Mel.
A hint of what is to come and my last note as a roommate.
I have more pictures on facebook, if you want to check them out. It was fun, but I bet they will not leave me alone with their things for a month again. :)
Just the tip of the iceberg
Hello!
I thought I should post on this before people started thinking I got run over by an angry Scot. A distinct possibility here, since pedestrians really don’t seem to have the right of way. I landed last Friday morning with a surprising number of Americans. I think there are around fifty of us. One thing that is become clear is that this University has very much a sink or swim attitude. I think it comes from being built in the 1500’s. If you have trouble with their computers, course system, or department structure, you figure out a way around it yourself. There was about an hour tutorial that said to register with a doctor and not to get killed. Other than that we were pretty much left to our own devices. I don’t even think the dorm I am in comes with an RA. Speaking of the dorm…It’s strange. I live in a hut of four or so flats, which is in a circle of huts with the name Hector Boyce. The circle is off to the side of a complex of “dorms”. The complex houses around 1,500 freshman and international students. Yes, I live with freshman. AHHHHHHHHHH. I can’t say anything more accurate than that. I’ll post pictures of the dorms tomorrow hopefully, and a bit more about the journey here. They almost made me run at first site. In America they would be sketch, but here it just means they can’t be bothered to redue the paint every twenty years.
The school itself is something else. It is about a 15 to 20 minute walk from the complex. An interesting time, since I seem to have taken Minnesota snow with me over the Atlantic. All the Scots are complaining about the worst winter ever, and they don’t have any experience with snow shovels. Basically, its 20 minutes of four inch slush slogging. The campus its self is gorgeous. I’ll get pictures of that up, too. Everything is granite and gothic. The city itself is called the Granite City with the sidewalks, houses, and streets all covered with bricks of it. Hard as heck to figure out where you are, especially since the University houses 20,000 students.
I have so much that I can post I’m overloading. I think I’ll just leave you with a mashup of basic foods between the US and UK.
Soda (Any variety): I will be drinking water. You kind of get used to it after a few hours of drinking it quizzically, but my God this stuff tastes funny. It’s Coca-Cola and Pepsi, too. It is flatter, more bland, and sweeter, with a strange after taste. I cannot tell you what I felt when I tried Dr. Pepper. I have been trying to think up a good way to approach a Scot and ask if they know their soda sucks. If I try cherry coke, I may cry.
Peanut Butter: Yum. This was the cheap stuff. Yum. They don’t use a lot of oil or preservatives, so it’s all peanuts. The best thing ever!
Yogurt: This is a funny one. It’s less creamy more of a soupy texture, but it really tastes good. It has a tanginess to it that intrigues me and a nice light flavor. Defiantly try it.
Milk: Oddly comes in 1.5%. Very good. I think they must grass feed, because it has a nice creamy flavor you don’t get from corn feed. I feel so Minnesotan there. Yay, farm land!