Tiiiiiiiired

Thank you all for letting me know that people are reading this. It makes me feel a lot better :) So I am pretty tired right now. I've had a long week and I'm just ready to do absolutely nothing at all tomorrow. I went to the gym a lot this week and I feel like I'm really progressing with my workouts which is really nice. I am going to school. It's really hard to concentrate on school around here because I just feel like I have no time. I mean I'm trying to do as much school work as I can but then I usually find something else to do instead. I just know that I'm not going to let myself fail anything because that would be just absolutely horrible. I only went out twice this week and I'm really proud of myself for that. Thursday night I went out with my friends Lydwine and Colleen and we went out to Costello's which I have concluded that it is my favorite pub. We went a little earlier than we are used to and there was a group of musicians playing trad Irish music. It felt like I was in a movie. We all drank some Guinness and just listened to the music. It was fantastic. We met up with our Italian and Spanish friends and just had a good time. It's crazy because me and Colleen are the only two Americans that hang out with the Erasmus students. She's the only other American that I spend the most of my time with. I love talking to the European students and the differences between our countries. I'm realizing more and more how much the educational system in the U.S. is screwed up. It makes me feel like I'm missing out on a lot of stuff when talking to these people. Another thing that I am noticing is that the image of Irish people that I'm used to hearing about in America is pretty incorrect. The Irish as a whole are a lot more rude than people back home. They don't say excuse me when they walk in front of you, if they want to grab something that's on the shelf in front of you they'll just grab it and not say anything. When you're walking down the street and someone is coming the other way, they don't move over for you at all. You either knock into them or you have to move. If they drop something from a shelf in a store they just walk away and pretend that nothing happened, they don't smile and say hello when you say it to them. They usually just pretend that you aren't there. The children here are so unbelievably misbehaved. I mean there are plenty of little kids back home that aren't the best in the world but here it seems like they all just run wild. I am making huge generalizations but it's to the point where I really am noticing the difference. It's so weird too because I've been told my whole life how nice the Irish are and I'm not really seeing that at all. I still love it here though. It's absolutely gorgeous and you can find nice Irish people to talk to. So yea, Friday I went to the gym again and then a group of us went to this bar called Molly's. The place was awesome and we all had an absolute blast. Today I went to Bunratty castle. It was the castle and then there was a Plymouth Plantation style folk park that was supposed to represent a mid-1800's village. It was really cute and a lot of fun. So I finally saw my first castle. There were a lot of spiral staircases. And the staircases were wicked narrow. There must not have been any overweight people back in the 1400's. We all had a great time and it was wicked touristy. I am being such a tourist here and it's great. Then I went to a Munster Rugby match with my Irish housemate and her boyfriend. Rugby is sooo much better than football. It's non stop action. I didn't understand anything that was going on but it was still awesome. Then we went back to my housemates apartment and had lots of pizza. So now I'm just sitting at my desk and relaxing. I have a lot of random stuff to do tomorrow like laundry and just cleaning up. It's pouring outside right now and the clothes I was wearing to the match are completely soaked through. I will probably be going to more rugby games as time goes on because my Irish housemate's boyfriend gets tickets for a discounted rate. I added more photos onto webshots so you can all view them on there. http://good-times.webshots.com/album/567630683YpqZtg I also have a video of the hall at the castle. This is mainly for my mom because I can't send the video to her on email because it's too big. But anyone can view it :)