We're Here!

We made it to Ireland!!

We officially arrived on Irish soil at 6:44 AM Ireland time (which is 8 hours ahead of Oregon time). Can't believe we are finally here!

We arrived in Shannon, which is on the West Coast of Ireland. From there, we checked in with immigration, gathered our bags, and met our bus driver, who would drive us to Galway. The bus ride was about an hour North to get to Galway, where we will be living for the next 5 months. The ride was beautiful, with lots of Irish scenery to look at. It's just like I imagined, green, green, and more green, with short rock walls everywhere!

Once we arrived in Galway, we checked in to our apartments. We live in Cuirt Na Coiribe (pronounced Court Na Korb) and moved all our stuff in. My apartment is two stories and has five bedrooms. We have three people from Linfield and two roommates from Pittsburgh. We like the apartment so far, it just has a ton of doors to every room, so it's sort of odd to hang out because everybody stays in their bedrooms and none of the doors stay open. Guess we will just get used to that.

Great news of the day: we FINALLY got our shower working yesterday! Amanda and I share a shower downstairs, and for days we could not figure out our shower. Finally, we noticed a string hanging from a switch on the ceiling. Apparently, you have to turn on the switch before you can turn anything else on. But, luckily, everything seems to be working fine now.

We have our second day of orientation today, and hopefully we are caught up on enough sleep to have the energy to go explore Galway a little bit today. Our school is about a 15 minute walk over a river to get to our school, and then I think the city center (that's what they call downtown, nobody says downtown here) is fairly close to school.

Slainte!
 (that's cheers in Irish...pronounced Slancha)