Hi all! Little did I know, that the snow days in Ireland actually happened when I woke up to an email about two (then eventually 3, plus the weekend) days of school cancelled with 4 inches of snow outside of my window (Holy Cross students are like what…?) so I actually had time to work on some of this despite brief power and Wi-Fi shortage! It was something else. The snow days were really nice at first, given that I had a lot of work that I needed to do during those days, including applying to a ton of internships that is due at the end of February and my midterms and other forms of evaluation for my classes. I was able to sleep in for a bit, and one of the midterms that I was most worried about ended up being postponed.
But then things changed because I did not think that this snow is actually going to be this severe. On Wednesday (our first day of snow), I started to realize how transportation started to cut back, so I went into centra (our grocery shop on campus) and got some veggies (at the time they only had some salad greens left, not with a lot of other things) and some chicken having in mind that this along with the rice that I have and some leftover takeout will get me through Friday. Things don’t always go as planned, as always, and I found myself trying to get more food in centra on Thursday, at the time the grocery shop is starting to run out of salad greens and chicken, and Friday, when there are absolutely no green veggies on the shelf, having only sausages left, and almost running out of regular pasta… And you know how grumpy I get when I am hungry. Feeling trapped in our residences and wanting to get out, our friend Mason had the idea of heading out of our rooms and taking snow pictures outside on Friday. And then, we ended up dancing to a song that is really popular in China as of the moment called “the seaweed song” in the snow and the wind (will dm a link if requested)! I also helped building my first ever snowman on Wednesday. Although we have a ton of snow in Worcester, I feel like so many people had grown up with snow around and just got so used to having snow around, and it wasn’t that big of a deal for them anymore. I did not grow up with snow at all, so it was actually quite exciting to have some snowball fights with my friends and to build the snowman!
So snow days were fun-ish until we ran out of food and we had absolutely no means of transportation to get into the city since Dublin bus stopped operating. On Saturday the snow finally dwindled and Dublin bus was back up and running by noon. Mohan was supposed to fly in Friday night from Boston – up until now I still had no idea how she did it, with storms going on both at the Boston side and at the Dublin side – and she made it, only with sitting in the airplane for two more hours than she was supposed to. We ended up doing a fair bit of travel around Dublin and I felt like I was the tourist again from two months ago!
My friend Mark ended up tagging along with us for a bit, and somehow managed to convince Mohan to have half a pint of Guinness (for she’s not that into drinking) after we had some delicious Szechuan food! We also paid a visit to the Little Museum of Dublin (so this is the second tour that I went on in the museum but the tour was given by another guy Sam – giving him a shoutout here since I was too lazy to do it on their website – rather than Ronan, whom I had for the first time.), went to a cafe called Bewley’s on Grafton street (not the one that Ed Sheeran met someone at the side of the bar though), passed around the Dublin Castle, and headed to the Cobblestone to listen to some really great Irish Music (apologize in advance that I didn’t take any pictures, but I will definitely visit there soon in the future because they do give free lessons)!
Oh how I wished that I could’ve gone to Cork with Mohan but I had classes, and my theater class was going to a play in the Abbey Theater. The play was called “The Unmanageable Sisters”, which is an adoption by Deirdre Kinahan on a play originally written by a Canadian author, Michel Tremblay. A large side to the adoption is that it was made really Irish, and it was really hard to imagine that it is not originally written in that way! It was a really interesting play in so many aspects, because it really was a hilarious play with many twists. The audience was laughing at jokes a lot! And this play only has women in it – which is really uncommon in Irish theater apparently, but I think it might not be only an Irish theater thing. It was also really relatable to nowaday Irish society issues such as how people are coping with the aftermath with the changes in how church power controls the society and about repealing the 8th (which makes abortion illegal in Ireland unless a pregnancy has grave consequences on the mother. It took its place in the Irish constitution at a time when the nation was heavily regulated by Catholicism) mostly. But overall it was a great experience – we got the cheapest tickets but then ended up sitting on some of the best seats because the show wasn’t entirely sold out, and I will definitely recommend going to see a play when you’re in Ireland.
I went into Burgh Quay to get my Irish Residence Permit (irp) a while ago, and I finally received my card today (the mailing process is also delayed in the storm). I also went into an appointment for my re-entry visa and it went really well, that I could leave Ireland to travel to a couple of places (I’m definitely hoping to travel in Berlin and Barcelona, and then maybe Iceland and the UK? I just don’t yet, there are so many possibilities)! The weather was also extremely nice today compared to the blizzard that we just had, so Mohan and I decided to walk around Dun Laoghaire for a bit. I’m definitely looking forward to being the traveller and explore this extremely diverse continent. But now, gotta spend the night with Mohan and try to get some work done before we head into spring break!
