Tuesday, February 3, 2009

and the rain rain (snow?!) came down down down...

and it kept raining...and raining...and raining!

From the last blog I wrote way back in October, it hasn´t really stopped raining in Bilbao. That´s right, 4 months of drizzling, sprinkling, slushing, txirimiri-ing, and pouring. And then came the cyclone! That´s right, about two weeks ago a big 24 hour cyclone passed through northern Spain...wild!

But now we´re in Dublin. Break from the rain? Yes...but not really because it´s now SNOWING! It´s been unbelievable weather here, as it has been snowing off and on for the last 48 hours.

Enough about the weather.

We came to Dublin on Saturday with Merlys and Aliva, two fantastic girls from Deusto who are doing the second semester of the master´s program here with us. Gaizka and I arrived at our place, and to our surprise found it much newer, bigger, and nicer than we expected, and our flatmates are very friendly as well. On Sunday I went with them to the nearby shopping mall/grocery store, and though it´s all quite nice, it is definately a situation of "we´re not in Kansas anymore, Toto." Compared to Spain, everything here is about 3 times more expensive.



Example:


30 min. bus ride in Ireland: €1.80/ 30 min. metro ride in Spain: €0.80.

Pint of Guiness in Ireland: €5.50/ A pint of San Miguel in Spain: €2. crap.


And that is the least of it...needless to say, we will be pinching our pennies and enjoying home cooking, and walking a lot!


Anyway, we started classes yesterday, with a brief introduction to the different components and modules in UCD for our second semester, and then we went straight into our first class on research. A bit intense, but today we got the day off because the professor couldn´t make it into class (Dublin is not equipped for snow, and there have been endless traffic problems). The UCD campus is very much like most American universities, with multiple cafes, libraries, a gym, international student center, etc. So far looks good!

More to come...