Blog- Week 2

Ireland Blog 2

Week 2

Kelli Monheiser

When planning for the Ireland trip from day one, I told myself that I would see as much of Europe as possible in the time allotted. For our first weekend in Ireland, we went to Cork; a larger city about two and a half hours south of Galway. Before I get into explaining the trip, I will be completely honest when saying that traveling away so soon was a little bit harder for me and made me feel a bit homeless. After only two weeks in Ireland, my advice that I have for planning trips is that you have to cover all aspects such as how you will get to Galway, getting from Galway to where you are going, staying the nights and booking the hostels, finding activities to do during the day, making sure you have records of addresses so you don’t get lost, and getting back all while keeping in mind that only in some pubs, restaurants, and McDonalds will you have free Wi-Fi. We used a bus system in Ireland called City Link. They are very easy to navigate and they presell tickets on their website for convenient planning. We also have become accustom to using Hostel World to get cheap hostels where we are staying. Now to the subject of hostels, they can be a little bit deceiving. I went into it with a very open mind, but I didn’t know what to expect until we got there. Us five American girls walked into our room for ten, only to find a French man sitting in the dark across the room. I was fairly nervous. Feeling very uncomfortable, I immediately built an opinion that hostels are filthy, uncomfortable, smelly boxes that open the doors to stealing and rape and I never wanted to go back. But when there’s no other options, you’ll get over it pretty fast.

Aside from the trip to Cork, I figure the academic life and situation is important because, contrary to belief, you will have to go to school while here. When preparing for the semester of actual classes, don’t put a whole lot of thought into it. All materials are provided through the fees you pay to be here. All that I brought was a notebook, pen, pencil, my laptop, and a planner. Gaelic class will be your favorite and probably the only class you will be able to stay awake through. History, on the other hand, will remind you that you’re still a student and will have to do work, and literature will make you feel right at home sitting in class at UNK.

            Class takes place at the Park Lodge Hotel and you will meet there for class four days a week. Although it makes for about a 40 second walk to class in the morning, it gets a little bit old not being able to go into the university or into Galway city to experience more of the Irish culture. This is definitely a downfall with the study abroad experience. However, I can definitely promise that you will have plenty of time to do leisure activities during the week. When I first planned to come to Ireland to study abroad, they warned me that the Wi-Fi is not the best and taking an online course was a little far fetched. However, I say that Wi-Fi at the Park Lodge Hotel beats out Wi-Fi in CTE at UNK any day.

So an academic week in a nutshell here in Ireland consists of enjoying the heck out of Gaelic class on Monday, getting through History class on Tuesday and Literature on Wednesday, waking up on Thursday to take care of business and starting the weekend off right that evening only to be back on Sunday to regroup and hit the books again hard the next week to come.