September 12-14th, 2011. I’m in Ireland!!! I have arrived in Ireland and it’s around 9am local time. Its 5 hours ahead of Pittsburgh so today is now September 13th! It was such a relief to walk off of that plane. However, leaving my family was so much harder than I expected it to be. Leaving people you love is always a lot harder than you expect it’s going to be. But I just have to tell myself that they are only a phone call or a Skype call away. Eric was waiting for me as I walked off of the plane. Even though I had never met him before, it was calming to see him. The plane was the biggest plane I’ve ever seen! And the flight attendants were awesome! They were so helpful and their accents were great! It was there that I met my first new friend of the trip, Sarah. She is from another school in Illinois, right outside of Chicago. I was surprised to learn that there were actually other students from Pittsburgh on my flight to Ireland. The plane was just so big that I had no idea they were on there as well. We all gathered and Eric took us all outside to wait for the bus to Carlow. After a long drive of dozing on and off, we arrived in Carlow! We walked the short distance to our student village. My American roommate, Allison and I went in to our apartment to find that we had 2 Irish student roommates! Their names are Grace and Laura and they are very sweet girls! We pretty much just dropped our things off in our rooms and headed into town to explore and get some very necessary supplies. (Things like blankets, towels, toilet paper, etc.) But before we shopped, we headed straight for the closest café we could find! Eating our first meal out in Ireland was also a different experience. Perhaps that biggest difference is that people in Ireland for the most part, do not tip. This sounds very strange because as American’s, we come from a society where a waitresses job is based on the amount of tips that she can get. In Ireland, one would only tip the waiter or waitress if the service was phenomenal. We went shopping and went home to unpack our things. I was so tired from my trip that I pretty much just crashed. The next day we woke up and had more errands to run. We got to town and I made an a-line for the cell phone store, or as they call it here, the mobile store. We made the executive decision as a group that since this was our first full day in Ireland that we had to get our first Guinness. Guinness over here tastes quite different-it’s much stronger in taste! Overall, it’s been a pretty good first few days in Ireland.
