Little Fish in a Big Pond

I arrived in SUNNY Dublin on Friday the 3rd with my new friend Christa, another first year vet student in my programme at UCD. Through some pretty serendipitous connections (my mother's student's uncle is from Dublin and lives in the country side near the city), we were picked up at the airport a chatty Irishman named Philip. Since we couldn't check into our hostel room in the morning, Philip took us to his cottage and his wife fed us some delicious Irish breakfast and let us snooze on the couch before taking us back to the hostel in the evening.

We've been exploring our new city a bit over this past weekend. I'm certainly not used to the big city and have yet to develop my "city sense" but it gets a little easier every day. (It's also nice to have a travel buddy in Christa). On Saturday, we took the bus to campus for a meet and greet breakfast with some of the other vet students and faculty. Since we're only the second group to go through the 4-year graduate entry programme (as opposed to the former 5-year programme), we'll each be assigned a peer mentor who is a second year vet student at UCD. That way we'll be eased into the organized chaos that seems to be how things work here. After the hot breakfast, we walked around campus to orient ourselves a bit. It's no College on the Hill (all the buildings are a "sky grey" block), but it's nice enough with plenty of construction going (always a good sign as my dad told me when I was going on college visits senior year of high school; means the school has a decent endowment. I don't know if that's the case here, but they're refurbishing some buildings and adding a pool to the rec center). After that we took the bus to the main shopping area and just walked around a bit and then it was only a short walk back to the hostel for a nap and then out for a bite. Something I've learned pretty quick: Dubliners eat big breakfasts and dinners, but supper isn't really much, especially later in the evening. They just go to the pub to drink.

Today (Sunday the 5th), we took a FREE walking tour of Dublin provided by the hostel. A charming James took us around the city with a group of other folks from some of the hostels in town. The Irish have a very sarcastic, almost insulting sense of humor but they're "just messing." I love it. And as it turns out James is graduating from UCD in December, so we found some favor with him since we are going to the same school, especially when we toured around Trinity College, which is right in the middle of the city.  We ended our tour in St. Stephen's Green, which is an absolutely gorgeous green space in the middle of the bustling shopping district and next to Trinity. For going on the tour, we got vouchers for a discounted meal at O'Neill's Pub. The fish and chips were as big as your forearm and I got a large bowl of Irish Beef Stew made with Guinness and a Coke all for 10 Euro. I'm still full from it.

We're spending our last night at the hostel in Dublin and going to our first day of orientation tomorrow. We'll also be able to move into our on-campus accommodations tomorrow once we finish orienting around 4. I'll be glad to be in my own room and on the UCD campus. That's a slightly smaller pond. As the second year vet students told us, "It'll be grand."