Where the toilet paper isn't free...

Yup you have to pay for your toilet paper here!!! Weird!

Well after that extremely interesting disclaimer I guess you can figure out that I made it to Northern Ireland- woot! It was a LONG trip filled with layovers, delays, waiting hours for a bus in the rain, and then getting dropped off in the middle of campus and attempting to find my dorm... all in all it took me 22 hours to get here oh and did I mention I can't sleep while traveling..... ya. One little tangent about the bus, it for real looked like it was from the 70s, ashtrays behind the seats, tacky orange and brown patterned fabric, a radio that looked like it inspired star trek, and orange curtains :) But, I finally got here and it is beautiful (albeit freezing and a little rainy)! Seriously, I keep looking around trying to convince myself that I'm not looking at a picture out of my Ireland book.

Let's see... what else would ya'll want to know? I have definitely met some really cool people so far. We've been going to this orientation for international students which, is probably the most hilariously unorganized orientation I've ever been to- last night they literally stuck all of us into a room, watched as we awkwardly tried to make small talk, and tried to force feed us weirdly flavored pringles (prawn cocktail??) ya. So I've been around mostly international people, including a few Americans, which has been really interesting. I'm also living in international housing so my 6 housemates are from Italy, Japan, Taiwan, Ireland, and the last one is an American from Seattle (it seems like I can never escape those crazy Washingtonians). Everyone I'm living with is super sweet, my Italian housemate even made dinner for me and the other American girl last night after she heard we hadn't been fed since breakfast on the plane- back to my point about how unorganized the orientation is. It was a great dinner, we ended up spending most of it laughing about messed up sayings (their English is a work in progress). OH, and she poured us drinks when I wasn't paying attention and I didn't realize until I was halfway done with mine that I was drinking alcohol (ya, I was that exhausted) so my first drink wasn't a very ceremonious affair. I do find it funny that I am probably one of the only people alive that drank alcohol for the first time without realizing it :)

Today all of the international kids went to Coleraine (about a 20 min walk) and it is such a quaint town- it seriously looks like something Disney would drool over. The architecture in some areas is breathtaking and the history nerd inside of me is freaking out a little :) Although I didn't take pictures today for fear of being the obnoxious touristy American, I will most definitely be taking some tomorrow! We didn't have too much time to explore, but I think we (me and some other Americans) are going to go to dinner there tonight and maybe do some shopping tomorrow!

For all of you ladies out there, I haven't met too many Irishmen yet, but just listening to the accents has been fantastic! But, I have met some guys from all over the world (and, of course, talked to one of them about Disney for a really long time, trying to convince him that princess movies were worth watching)... hopefully I'll have more to say about that later on!

The rest of my week is filled with sporadic orientation meetings and then Friday I FINALLY get to register for classes, which start on Monday (and I still don't have a complete course list). I'm really excited about Thursday and Saturday because Thursday my whole house is going to this town nearby to a really cool pub (hopefully there will be an Irish guitarist...) and on Saturday all the international kids are going on a tour of the northern coast!!!

So I think that's about it, I hope this wasn't too boring, I'll try to do something crazy so that my next one will be more entertaining. Email me so I can hear about what is going on on your side of the sea (everyone but Jill).