Pictures in order 1. "Silence" in the library! What a sign and demand. I felt bad for making noise when zipping my backpack.


2. Church where Chinese wedding was. Yes, I am a creeper but other people were taking pictures also. It's a pretty cool church.


3. Couple


4. View out my window. We got some snow!


5. Brenden, my neighbor, the day of The Gathering. He is an aquarium.

Parking

Here is a notice that I received in an email from the head of security. Hilarious, because people just park wherever they want. There are huge signs around that say "clamping is in effect." Yeah right! People never get clamped and they do not obey the signs. Every time I read it I read "Camping is in effect" and then get confused. Here is the email:

*Once again I must bring to your attention the inconsiderate parking
of cars on the North Campus. Some car users continue to show complete
disregard for the
Emergency Services, Wheel-Chair access, Pedestrian Crossings, cyclists
and grass margins.While it is apparent there are insufficient car
spaces, it is incumbent on everyone to make every effort to park
without danger or obstruction to other users. Therefore will you
please refrain from;

1.Parking within 15 metres of junctions
2.Blocking emergency access
3.Blocking wheel-chair access
4.Parking on or within 15 metres of pedestrian crossings
5.Parking on bends with double yellow lines
6.Parking on entrance road to Creche
7 Parking in Service Area ( outside Arts Block )

In order to deal with the above traffic violations , *car clamping
will be enforced with effect from Monday 22nd March*

I would also ask you to seriously consider car pooling, public
transport, cycling or walking when coming on campus. The exercise of any
of these initiatives will greatly assist in alleviating the car parking
problem.

Traffic

Wow, it has been a long time since my last post! Things have been going pretty normal here with plenty of things to write about but I've gotten a bit lazy.

I have a correction from the Hunting post. They DO have golden horns. Who woulda thought?

Today's post is about the amount of traffic in Maynooth. For a 3 stoplight town with a main street about the length of Brown Street from Stewart to Wyoming in Dayton, there seems to always be backups. At one end of the street there is a primary girls school. At the other is the primary boys and the secondary boys and girls schools. This is also where the parish is located. You can see the church in the first map labeled RC church. I live where the x's are above where it says Hostels. When school lets out, parents come to pick up their kids both on foot and in car. The parents who drive park halfway on the sidewalks providing problems for those who are walking. Then there are those who stop in the middle of traffic to pick up their kids. This would be like stopping in the middle of 48 in Dayton, but the kids are generally pretty fast and I am not driving so I don't really care. Then there are the parents who walk home with their kids. Most of the time there are moms with "buggies" but I have seen quite a few dads picking them up. I like it, especially because in Ireland the gender roles are still very traditional. School pick up happens everyday around 2:30.
Then pretty much constantly on Sunday there is traffic from the parish's 5 mass services with the Protestant church meeting across the street in the school gym. Then about 5 there is more traffic because people are getting out of work. At other times of the day it is very crowded and I cannot figure out what the reason for it is. From 9:30-midnight there is seldom a car to be seen but from 1:30-2:30 when the pubs and bars close there is a back up of taxis that are ever present waiting to take drunk people home.

Chinese Wedding

Over the weekend, I was in Dublin and was 40 minutes early for the train back to Maynooth, so I went to visit the church next to the train station. To my surprise there was a wedding going on of two Chinese people. I wondered in without just to see the church but ended up sitting in the back for about 20 minutes enjoying the service. I was accompanied by some moms with fussy babies and toddlers. They clearly did not speak very much English though half of the mass was in English. During the newlywed prayer, which they were struggling to say in English, one of the little girls running around in the back of the church, about one I would say, old enough to walk but not talk, toppled a small table with unlit candles and coins on herself. About half the congregation stood up and turned around to look at the commotion. She just lay there unsure what to do with this small table on her. Her mother was close and everything was fine, she was not hurt, but it was so funny! Luckily, I don't think that the bride and groom noticed, as they were concentrating on saying the prayer. Soon after, the little girl noticed me and I played peek-a-boo with her for a short time. What a wedding!

Hunting

My roommate Aisling goes hunting each weekend. My response to that was "YOU go HUNTING?!" She really did not seem like the hunting type. Well, by hunting she means old school hunting, on horseback with "hounds." I am imagining something like the painting we have over our mantel with people dressed in vests and trousers blowing golden horns. Apparently they do not have the golden horns anymore. They put the horse in the horsebox (horse trailer) and drive to the place where the hunting will take place. They get about 30 hounds and some other horsemen and ride around after the hounds who sniff out for any animals that have been there recently. She says that mostly they don't ever get anything but it just involves jumping over stuff. What kind of stuff, you ask? (I asked also) Anything that gets in the way: ditches, fences, logs, bushes, etc. Mostly that is the point of the hunt, to jump over things and get to be a better rider.
Then on Saturday she went to a hunt ball. It sounded kind of like prom for people of all ages. She said it was lame.
Oh, the things they do in Ireland.

The Gathering

Last Wednesday classes were canceled for the first time in NUIM history, as all my teachers were glad to complain about, for an 11 hour concert called The Gathering. http://www.thegatheringfestival.ie/day.php It was part of RAG week, which is raise and give week, though it is more like Spring Break, only they just drink all day for a week at school. People came in for it from other universities and other towns. The pubs closed their doors about 10pm because they could not fit any more people in. That almost never happens. In the past for RAG week, the student union would put on events every day for the students and the profits would go to charity. There were events like bungee jumping and paintball. To encourage people to not drink so much and attend classes this year, the SU decided to concentrate all the activities on one day for this concert. There were two stages and 15 bands/acts. I made it to six of the bands. It was a FUN day. It started with the best and then got progressively worse or maybe I just got progressively more tired, both are entirely plausible. My roommates started the day at noon, drinking two bottles of wine each by 2pm. Needless to say, they were drunk. We got to the concert about a half hour early in order to get a good front place to stand to see The Coronas. I was front and center! It was great. I was next to two St. Mary's girls who were OBSESSED with them. They were the typical screaming girls from Backstreet Boys concerts. Occasionally, the lead singer would look down at us and boy, would they scream. Well in all fairness, I was pleased also, but just on the inside. Here is a performance of theirs from the O2 music awards where they won something for this song. They did not have all the lights for the show, but it was still really neat!


Next we had Duke Special, who was very weird but I thought that I would give him a chance because others liked him. I decided to leave after the song "I'm diggin my grave." No need to say more.

Then Mundy came on, who was pretty good and sang some famous Irish-y songs, though he was rather bitter about it. Everyone just wanted to hear Galway Girl. Two guys behind me started chanting in between songs and he got kinda mad at them. His newer stuff, I did not know, but that was normal because all the acts were Irish or European and have not made it to the states. Here he is playing Galway Girl.


In between all the acts, everyone went back to the apartment and drank some more. We had a messy, messy apartment that day. I came back from one of the acts to find about 20 beer bottles smashed on our kitchen floor. Well, they cleaned it up by 11am the next day so I had no problem with it. When one of the boys broke our broom, I got a little peeved. When I took it away from him, he told me, "Liz, I both hate you and love you." I didn't ask what that meant.
Here is The View. They were okay.


My roommates collect posters to decorate our apartment. On the way back from one of the acts we went through the arts building, which is the clubs and societies spot for advertising and was deserted due to classes being canceled, and collected some good posters. One of them was for a "marathong," which was a 5k that you run in your "tighty-whities." Hilarious! We also collected a large wooden stake about as big as me and another orange construction cone. Oh our apartment.
Here are the Magic Numbers, who were good. They had some natural talent, especially the girls. They are two sets of brother and sister's. It was cool to see them just playing for the fun of it and not for the fans.


Finally was Sidney Samson, who was worked up to be AMAZING by some friends of mine. A let down to say the least. He is a DJ so he just stood up at the front mixing music and was good but most of my friends were not there because it was a long day. I ended up being smashed up against the front gate by adoring drunken people. Oh well. His one famous song is fun because everyone goes crazy when it comes on here. Don't watch it if you don't like a little bit of cursing. The video is actually pretty funny if you watch it all the way through.

In conclusion, The Gathering was quite fun and worth my 30 euro. I did not know any of the bands so I really did not know what to expect. The SU expected to sell 5000 tickets and needed to sell 3000 to break even. I think that they sold about 900. This was a letdown because with a pretty empty tent, the energy was low, but on the bright side, I was able to get very close to the bands every time!

Cork Weekend

A couple of weekends ago I went to Cork with the international society. It was pretty fun. My favorite is still Galway and the Aran Islands. We left on Friday at 3:30. Cork is south and 3.5 hours away by bus because there are no highways really anywhere here. Traffic circles are common and so are the pot holes, making the ride an adventurous one. It is a good thing that I do not get car sick anymore because those buses could make anyone sick. We took 79 people and out of that I would say that there were 15 lads. For some reason many more girls study abroad than lads. This is true of all the countries because we took many of the European exchange students also. I stayed in the girls dorm with 15 others. It was very loud to say the least because people were drinking and coming home from the pubs late. We went out to dinner that night to a cute cafe and then to a creepy punk pub. I did not like it much especially after I saw an advertisement for a band called Pontius Pilot and the Nail Drivers. I felt like boycotting after I saw that. There was a creepy painting on the wall of a gremlin-like creature.
The next day we went to the English Market, which had lots of meat and fish and fresh fruit. I did not buy anything because I would have to walk around with it all day. This picture is of the fish market that had a really gross huge fish looking up at us.

Later we went to Kinsale, "Ireland's center for good food." It was a cute little costal fishing town. We walked along the water for about 20 minutes which was wonderfully beautiful. They had a cute little harbor and some old forts.
We went to Charles Fort, which is huge, old, and covered in grass. We took some good pictures of the coast and some of us being silly. When we first got there we saw a wedding party leaving. This was just after it started pouring rain, but only for a short time. He was in a green kilt and purple kilt with a frilly white top and a brown bag thing. She was wearing a strapless white dress that was dragging in the mud. I think that they still had yet to get married that day. Poor dress. She also was all red from the cold wiping wind. Oh the lengths we go to to get a good picture!

We then went back to Cork on the bus, which was over full and they had to turn people away. We were the last 4 out of 6 people to get on the bus! If we did not get it, it would not have been a big deal. We could have gotten the next one an hour later. It was a good thing that we did get that bus because we were planning on going to a play that night in Cork. It was pretty bad, I am sorry to say. We thought that it was about Cork life in the 60's but it really was written for Britain. It was about 12 women who were at a stamp sticking party, which is something like the winning the lotto from what I could gather. It followed their lives and had some fabricated drama with a teen pregnancy but mostly it was just setting up things to get a quick laugh. Oh, well, now I know not to go to anything that I have not heard of before.

The next day I went to mass at the North Chapel which was very big but not very well attended. The congregation was old people with one Hispanic family. Mass was short with very little singing. We then went to Blarney Castle after that. We caught the bus at 11:45, got some lunch at the grocery store in the town that had about 10 shops/pubs. We then went to the Blarney Castle. My liked the grounds the best. There was a lake, fields with horses, a fern garden, a large house looking like it was from the 1600's, and a horse graveyard. The fern garden was really neat and I felt like I was in Hawaii. The 3 or 4 story house is really cool from the outside, but it was closed for the winter. It is on top of a hill facing the lake. Adam and I had a discussion as to whether someone was living there because they had a private back yard sign but we decided that no one did. Then we went to Blarney Castle. I did kiss the Blarney stone, even though I was not really sure that I wanted to. It just does not seem sanitary! But I was in line and all of a sudden the old, grumpy man who holds your legs sorta pushed me to sit. I put my hands on the bars to prevent me from falling ten stories and giggled. The man told me not to giggle and to kiss it, which I did and then was whisked away so that the next person in line could go. I was not so afraid of falling there as I was when standing elsewhere in the castle. There are bars below the stone that would keep you from falling ten stories but if you did fall it probably would still hurt a lot. Here I am smiling but actually scared because those bars at my feet prevent me from falling to my death! I am pretty sure that they would hold, but I was not about to check. I was more afraid of twisting my ankle in them than anything. The castle is very tall and built without any of the machinery that we have now. There were many rooms one on top of another. I feel like they were inefficiently built for labor's sake, but I know that the point of it was to be well protected and going up is better than going out. There were many funny little signs talking about parts of the castle. The funniest one talked about an entrance way that had a hole in the ceiling. It was like that so that if you were not a welcome guest, then the guards of the castle could drop stuff on you like bricks or scalding oil from the kitchen.
I also was afraid that the castle would fall while I was standing on it. It seems to be leaning on the edge of a cliff. Then we went into the dungeons and storerooms underneath the castle and I felt like something was going to jump out at me from the dark.

The funniest part of the hole adventure was visiting the horse graveyard. It consisted of a mud pit with four headstones with names like tinker and jasper. It is too bad that I did not take a picture. We walked pretty far to visit it too. There was a sign on the trail and it was on the map making it seem like it was this thing that you could not miss. It would not be so funny if the area was not just a pile of mud.

We caught the bus and went back to the hostel. There I met this girl who was pretty cool. She just had gotten off the plane from the US where she goes to the smallest college in the country, it only has 100 people. It is for organic farming and they live on a commune! A different life than what I am used to that is for sure. I'm excited for her to be here because she is working on some organic farms in Europe for a couple of weeks and then traveling for the rest of the three months that she is here. She has never been to Europe or stayed in a hostel before, but she was doing both by herself when I met her. What a girl!

Then I caught the bus home and went straight to sleep due to the big weekend.