Tours and Crawls

After feeling generally awful all last night, I woke up feeling healthy (if not exhausted). I met up with the group for some morning Starbucks at 8:45am. Afterwards we headed to the Arts building for the first lectures of the Semester Startup Program.

Today was mostly administrative stuff, with the first lectures focused on the nature of the week. We had a lot of free time in between scheduled activities, for which we were divided into Groups 1.1, 1.2, 2.1, and 2.2.

Our big event for the early part of the day was heading to the administrative offices to register and receive our IDs and internet access. Afterwards we did a tour of the modern library and were then free for lunch. Sean, Brittany, Ali, and I found a sandwich shop off of Grafton that offered a 5 euro deal of a spicy chicken sub, soup, and fries. I added an apple juice to the mix. We took our lunches back to the Arts building and ate them while we waited to do our campus tour.

Even though I had felt better for most of the day, something hit me after finishing lunch (the dreaded plane sickeness!). After the tour I felt exhausted (as did everyone else), and once I failed to find sufficient wireless access to the internet in my room, fell asleep for a couple hours.

After waking up, the gang met up at 5:30 to head out for dinner. While wandering around towards the front of campus we came across an Italian style restaurant called Mona Lisa. They offered an incredible deal before 7pm of buy one get one free pizza or pasta. I had hearty meat sauce spaghetti and was glad to see that, for the eight of us, our meal cost only 58 euro after a saving of over 30 euro.

Bathroom Sign at the Mona Lisa

Following dinner was the Literary Pub Crawl, which involved two actors taking us to four different pubs – including one frequented by Michael Collins – and acting out skits from Irish literature. It was pretty funny, but I was only confident enough in my stomach to start drinking at the third pub. When the crawl ended, the gang decided to stay in the last pub to drink and chat.

Last Stop on the Crawl

Once back at my apartment, I finally secured internet access after Sean gave me his Ethernet cable from Villanova. It is not the fastest piece of equipment (nor as it turns out is our Trinity internet), but since he is still waiting register, I was able to borrow it. It was nice to logon to gchat and be immediately bombarded with messages. I miss the US, but I am happy to be abroad and will come back loving AU all the more.