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Dublin Days 1-3

Campanile at Trinity College
After a series of delays, I finally made it to Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. I got in Sunday July 1st around 12:30pm local time. It was a long night of traveling, but it has been so worth it!

On Sunday, it was all very low key. We had a small orientation and then had dinner at Kennedy's, a local pub that is a favorite of students at Trinity. It was exactly as I imagined an Irish Pub to be: live music, Guinness, good food, and good company. After supper, the other girls and I went back to Trinity and slept a good 13 hours. This is exactly what we all needed after our crazy day of travel and excitement.                                                                           
Monday was our first day of programming, and boy did we jump right in. We started with a tour of Trinity College. It is amazing how much history can be in a single college campus. After the tour, we went for a more formal orientation on the history of Dublin and Ireland as an Island. The program is very well planned in that we start small learning about Trinity College and then move out to Dublin and finally to Ireland as a whole.                                                                   
Grafton Street 
That afternoon, after orientation and dinner, we went to the Little Museum of Dublin. This was a very interesting museum in the fact that it is located in an old house and each room goes through multiple decades in Ireland's history. The last programming thing we did on Monday was a culture event; a Literary Pub Crawl through Dublin. This was such a different approach of a pub crawl, but it was a great way to experience pub life (during the World Cup), to get my bearings in Dublin, and to learn about different writers that have connections to Ireland.                         

Today, we had two main programming events. One was a seminar with Paul Cullen, a Health Correspondent with the Irish Time, and the other was a walking tour of Dublin with Dr. Conor McNamara. Both of these events were very informative. Paul Cullen taught us all about Ireland's Health Care Services and how the private and public sectors operate, while Dr. McNamara showed us different parts of Dublin and told us about the history about Ireland. One of my favorite things we saw on this tour was the Dublin Castle. Dublin Castle was the headquarters of Great Britain when they ruled Ireland. This was so interesting because the oldest tower there was built in 1204 and is still standing today. Another reason I found it so interesting is that you are in the biggest urban city in Ireland, and you walk under a gate and it's like you are transported in time.
Outside Dublin Castle


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