first week of class

Classes began this week on Tuesday and ran through Thursday. This week we were encouraged to try out as many classes we found interesting and then we are finalizing our schedules later next week. I attended about 6 classes and found them all to be pretty interesting. On Tuesday morning at 10 AM I started with an Irish Art History course taught at University College Dublin, near St. Stephen's Green. We looked at artwork on slides and then walked to the Irish National Museum to look at early Irish artifacts. I really enjoyed this class because the teacher was basically a tour guide for us at the museum and this made it much more interesting to look at all the exhibits. The next class I attended that day was Intro to Northern Irish Troubles. i can tell this class is going to be a lot of work, but I'm basically starting from scratch on the violence in the North so I should find it very interesting. Later that night I went to Ireland in the EU, an economics class about the European Union. I think this may be one of my favorite classes because it relates to business more than the other liberal education classes. After that first day I was pretty burnt out because I spent about 10 hours at the IES center/the city center and I’m not used to having 2.5 hour classes!

On Wednesday I slept in until noon and went to a class that afternoon called Perspectives on Northern Ireland. This class is going to have guest lecturers come in each week to share their personal experiences with the conflict in Northern Ireland and I think that this might be the best way to learn the complex history of the area. We didn't have a speaker come in this week, instead we watched a movie about the IRA that our professor made for TV and basically talked about the basics of the conflict. Wednesday was probably my easiest day this week and after class I went to the Town Centre and did some grocery shopping and walked home in the rain (of course).

Today, I went to Irish Literature to Film, a class taught by the IES center director, Ashley Taggert. I wasn't thinking that I'd like this class at all, but decided to go with my roommates Maura and Andi. I was actually very surprised with how great this class was. Ashley had us watch a clip from 'A French Lieutenant' and we analyzed it as a class. After looking at how much work and thought went into this one 5 minute scene I can say I was interested in the topic. Towards the end of class we went over the Irish films we'll be watching this semester and they range from dark comedy's, to dark sad movies, to lighthearted love stories. I liked the wide variety of films so I think I'm actually going to take this class. Oh, we started watching 'The Commitments' today and I would recommend it to anyone who likes dark humor. It's a film that takes place in Dublin during the 1980's and follows some friends who want to start a soul band (pretty funny movie so far). After film, I walked with some other IES people to the European Business School to talk about possibly taking a marketing class there. Unfortunately, I can't fit the class into my schedule, but i did find out I can play squash and badminton with the European students on Friday for free which was good news! After walking quickly back to the IES center I attended Irish language and Irish Culture class taught by Siobhan and Regina. The first part of the class was really hard, not going to lie. Siobhan, an IES staff member who actually grew up speaking Irish at home, is teaching us Gaelic. No one in the class has ever experienced trying to learn a language like this and I find it so much harder than Spanish. So far I can only say a few phrases and I know some crazy grammatical rules- when I get better I'll try and write some in the blog! As for Regina, she focuses on Irish music, religion, traditions, and sports, and I found out that we are going to be doing a variety of things from attending a Hurling match to learning traditional Irish dance.

in summary, I'm happy with the classes I have taken so far and it seems like the workload will be pretty comparable to the U of M. I think that this semester will be fun, because all the classes I'll be taken are so different than Carlson classes. This weekend we are going to a pub as a group to listen to traditional Irish music on friday night in the Temple Bar area and then I'm going to take the DART north or south of the city to see the coast on either saturday or sunday (depending on the weather).