Wednesday, Wednesday

So it is officially Wednesday, or rather Hump Day as many call it.  We are halfway through the week--I guess I'm more than there since I have off Fridays.

Classes are classes, of course, but here they are much different.  There are no caps, and we sit in HUGE lecture halls, and hopefully you'll get a seat.  There's also minimal class participation, so teachers ramble the whole time.  I'm not a huge participator, so this aspect is nice.

Managerial econ seems like it will be sort of fun.  It also seems a bit easy, seeing as our first lecture was about opportunity cost, and I covered that in microeconomics last year.  We also have an additional tutorial for that class where we break into smaller groups and the TA teaches us.  I bought the book for this class today at the student union's secondhand bookshop for 20 euro--I wish Duquesne had one of these!

Ireland, Europe, and the Global Economy (Global Econ, for short) also seems interesting.  But I'm into this kind of thing--Katie will beg to differ.  We showed up for class yesterday and ended up in an accounting management class.  I guess the rooms were changed, and NUI Galway failed to inform the international students.  So we trotted over to the business school and talked to the head, and we finally figured things out.  We missed the class, but met with the teacher after the lecture, and he told us to just review the slides/readings.  There is no textbook for this class--just online readings.

Econometrics is going to be a toughy--their "stats" language is so different over here then in the US.  I'm going to have to get up to speed with the lingo, or I'll fall behind.  Basically it's stats 3, but we base everything off of economic theory, and not just data alone.  We'll see how this one goes.  We also have tutorials AND labs for this class...so it's going to be pretty time consuming I think.  I bought this book off of e-Bay today, and I'm going to have my mom ship it over--so much cheaper than in the bookstore!

I have marketing at 5, and Imagining Modern Ireland doesn't start until next week.  All in all I think it will be a good semester.

Katie, Michelle, and I also tried out the gym today--it was open for all international students.  It's really nice, and I worked out on the bikes, elyptical, rowing, and arm swimming thing.  Good times, good times.

On Sunday we had a walking historical tour of Galway which included a visit to St. Nicholas's Church, built in the 1400's.  It was pretty nice, and an interesting little tour.  Outside of the church is a street market that runs Saturday and Sunday--we're heading down there this Saturday to scope it out.

On Monday, the girls and I went down to the Quays Street pub.  It was so cute!  It's built from an old church, and they have live traditional Irish music.  The band also played Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show, which made me insanely happy.  I had some ciders and a Guiness, and it was a good time!  Katie and I caught a cab back to the apt because the busses stop running at 10:50 (little did we know).

I have some classes tomorrow, and then I'm off Friday.  Sunday we have a tour to the Cliffs of Moher scheduled, and I'm quite excited to see it!

Peace & Love
Christy