A Birthday and Random Observations

Kyla's Birthday Celebration

So since it is only the second week of class, not many exciting things have been going on.  Although last was a bunch of fun as we went out to Celebrate Kyla's birthday.  I'm one of the few people who actually isn't having a birthday in Ireland...oh well.  But it was a lot of fun, we went out to dinner and then later we came home and watched the new episode of Bones.

Anyways, so I thought that this was a good time to write down a series of fairly unrelated observations I've made since being here.

1. Sidewalks downtown are really wide, but really narrow everywhere else.
2. Lots of people smoke, but since you can't smoke in buildings this means that there are large crowds of smokers outside a lot of buildings.
3. People put the word like onto the end of sentences, not in the middle like we do.
4. People say "thanks a million" or "thanks a mil" a lot.
5. At stores etc. they'll ask "are you okay?" instead of "can I help you?" etc.
6. Irish students are more outgoing in terms of asking questions, they also seem to have more informal relationships with professors than the average US student.
7. Speed bumps are called ramps (as opposed to humps in England).
8. Chocolate milk is hard to find, as is dark chocolate (hint to anyone who wants to send me a care package).
9. The most popular chip (or crisp) flavor is cheddar and onion and plain crisps are hard to find.
10. Readings for classes are much shorter and appear to be mostly optional unless you're taking the scary exams at the end of the year.
11. Scheduling is much more relaxed, not only in terms of having a regular and organized schedule and stuff starting on time, but no one besides the US students seemed stressed that we hadn't been approved for our classes by the first day of class.
12. The monk at the Chaplaincy has an iPhone.
13. I know more German students than Irish students.
14. Irish Netflix has a great selection of movies, but an odd selection of TV shows (e.g. the US Office, but not the British Office).
15. Internet gets worse at night (but this is probably just our apartment complex).
16. Lots of pubs have live music and it's great.
17. I have somehow become the person who kills bugs in the apartment...including two inch spiders.

Well I think that is a sufficient number of random observations for the time being.  I'm sure I'll have more later though.