Operation Beachhead: An Unqualified Success

Well who would've believed it, but I'm here in Ireland, registered for classes and sitting in my tiny but clean apartment/dorm room. Rather than try to update an entire week all at once, I'll write about something from today and from a week ago. One week ago today we arrived early in the morning Irish time, essentially taking the red-eye from Boston to Shannon. As an unexpected bonus, we were seated in first class. I guess they only sell one grade of ticket and if you are in the first few rows, you're in.

The drive from Shannon to Galway was uneventful, but I will say it takes a day or two to get used to Irish driving, even though I've done it before. Driving on the wrong side is tough enough, but there are several other factors that add up to make it downright frightening at times:
-all the rentals are stick, and the stick is on your lefthand side.
-the standard intersection is a rotary/roundabout, not a traffic light.
-passing on two-lane roads is commonplace, and to do so another car will typically tailgate until they can get by.
-the roads are MUCH narrower than at home. There are rarely breakdown lanes, and usually the edge of the road is a hedgerow, so there is nowhere to go in the event of trouble, and the lanes themselves are more narrow. You really haven't lived until you've sped down an Irish road at night, let me tell you.

We checked into our B&B and checked out the campus, which was essentially closed. I did get this nice pic of the Quadrangle:



Today I woke up early after having crashed early last night. I'm looking forward to two classes in the late afternoon. I emailed the professor for European Community Law II. I was concerned that taking a "part II" class might be tough. He said he'd send me a pdf that would give me a good overview and then we could see if it would be something I'd like to try, since it definitely would be more work than just taking EC I. The pdf is 125 pages. So I have work to do.