Wow! What a long, long (but good) day! I made it to the airport with plenty of time, thankfully. I had a small hiccup when my worst fears came true and my bag was slightly over 50 pounds.However, that was easily solved by taking things out of my bag then putting them back in and somehow lost weight in the process. Security lines were long, but moving and there was no trouble navigating through Dulles. We weren’t able to board the plane until an hour later than we were supposed to, which was a little stressful.  It didn’t put us that far behind schedule, though, because we didn’t sit around in the plane waiting to takeoff,which was nice. Unlike my Germany trip, I listened to my dad’s advice and stopped myself after watching only one movie and tried (very hard) to sleep the four hours we had left.
We landed in Manchester for a two hour layover before boarding this cute, little Irish plane. It was a small plane  two  seats for the two rows. (Please don’t mind the off-centered picture it is hard to snap one when they are rushing you along.)This flight was super quick, which I spent half dozing and half staring out the window at the green landscape. And man was it everywhere! 

I was in awe as we got closer and I saw fields that I’ve seen in so many pictures and movies with my very own eyes. And let me tell you those do not give it justice.
We met up with the group at University College Cork, where we had our first meal in Ireland! And where did we go you ask? The one and only Subway! And yes there are a few differences between American Subway and Irish Subway. For example, you get two choices of cheese here: plain or spicy. Oh and they don’t have banana peppers. Rookie mistake, Irish Subway, rookie mistake.

After our very Irish meal, I took a short walk up a few blocks with some friends to check out the grocery store. I still had time before our next meeting so I checked out my very own room and began unpacking a bit. It was nice to get my bearings on everything and be able to charge my electronics and set up Wi-Fi before we went on the city tour.  We learned the basics of what we can use here like laundry and our classroom and then how to work the buses. Once we finally found ourselves in the city, we realized all the roads connect together somehow. I didn’t bring my camera with me, which I was kicking myself for, but now I think it was good so I could take it all in first and scoped out what I need to go back to. Plus, this was only day one and we have plenty more time here to play tourist. We finished our tour in the middle of the city and our group decided to all go to dinner together. We stopped at a pub called The Oliver Plunkett, where I had a delicious Chicken and Chorizo Pie and a pint of Guinness.

Our group split up after dinner some heading home, while the others went on to another pub. I decided to go home because I had not napped earlier in the day and the lack of sleep was catching up to me. We walked back this time instead of busing and stopped at a convenience store to check out other grocery options. I began writing this post once I got back, while I was trying to connect to Wi-Fi, but fell asleep in the process. I just checked with the front desk after my little nap when I saw the internet still wasn’t working and they are hoping to have it back on by tomorrow morning. Therefore, this post will be coming to you a little later than expected and I’ll post it when they get the Wifi back. Hopefully this outage is getting it out of its system now and I will be back online for the remainder of the time here. Until then, I will be trying to sleep and adjust to the time zone as smoothly as possible. Goodbye for now!