A wedding? I love weddings!

Back in Galway. And man, I have had a weekend.

Firstly, and most importantly-- my good friend/former roommate Cary is married! The ceremony was lovely and simple, in a beautiful park in the morning. (I had been grumping about that, actually-- "Why the hell would you get married at 10:30 in the morning?!"-- because it meant I had to get up way too early in order to get ready, but then I saw the park at 10:30 in the morning, and how gorgeous everything was, and I understood.) There were a few snags, of course, one of which will be detailed below, but overall the whole thing was wonderful. (They got married. Beyond that, what really matters?)


The less fun parts of the weekend were in getting there, and, to an extent, getting back.

I missed my flight on Thursday morning. This is entirely due to the bus, and makes the second time that public transport has caused me to miss a flight. The bus schedule online said that it should get to the airport around 9:40 (a three-hour trip)-- for an 11:10 flight, I figured that was kind of tight but I have never taken more than 30 minutes to get checked in and through security at the Dublin airport. Well, the bus actually got there at 11:10 (almost a 5-hour trip). Yeah. I ran around the airport panicking for a while, asked about ticket prices-- my flight, being international, was an "unchangeable ticket" according to the airline (KLM Royal Dutch) so I couldn't just change it for a small fee. I was starting to think that I would miss the wedding entirely, and I called my mom, crying and incoherent. Called collect, actually, because I was/am broke. My mother, being wonderful, calmly told me to find the next one-way flight and gave me her credit card number. (Bless her!) So I got a flight for the next morning.

Of course, now I had twenty-two hours until that flight, and no money. I had €20 that I was planning on using for groceries when I got back. So I found a comfy chair, bought some cheap food with my grocery money, and hunkered down to spend the night in an airport. Luckily I had two books with me. Unluckily they were the second and third Harry Potter books, so I finished them both before the sun rose. Luckily I had put a season of Scrubs on my iPod, so I had that to watch. Unluckily watching videos drains the batteries, so I only killed about an hour and a half doing that before it ran out. I slept a little, but not too well-- especially when, at about 04:30, an airport employee came by and woke up all of us (by this point there were a lot of people camped out in the same area, presumably with early flights) and saying "No sleeping!" Um, ok. My flight wasn't for six more hours and I had no money for a hotel. Where do you expect me to go and/or what do you expect me to do? So I pulled out my book, knowing that I would fall asleep while reading it but figuring that at least it wouldn't look deliberate.

The upshot to all of this was that I flew in to Chicago, and Jim picked me up! ♥ Then we drove straight to Ann Arbor. This is a five hour drive, which would be sucky except that meant that I got an extra five hours to hang out with my love.


My travels yesterday were not nearly as disastrous, but were still definitely annoying. My flight was from Detroit at 4:15 pm, but Jim, my ride to the airport, had to make the five-plus hour drive back to Chicago, so he dropped me off around 11:00. So that was another five hours to sit around an airport. Then it was a short flight to Atlanta, and a two-hour layover before flying to Dublin. Supposedly a two-hour layover, that is. The flight to Dublin was for 8:25 pm. At 8:20, there came an announcement that the flight had been moved to a different gate, at the absolute opposite end of the airport. So two hundred-odd passengers had to schlep across to the new gate. Then boarding was delayed, for reasons that were never totally explained, for another hour and a half. Then, when we finally got on the plane at 10:00, there was a problem with a door not being shut correctly, so that took another half hour to fix. Oy.

After that, no problems, other than getting to Dublin two hours later than planned. Luckily there are lots of buses between Dublin and Galway, which took four hours this time, getting me back at 5:00 this afternoon. Yes, that is more than twenty-four hours of travel.

Oh well. I made it both ways in one piece, and was there in time for the wedding, which is all that really matters.

(almost) back to school

Raise your hand if you completely forgot to update your 'blog yesterday?

*raises hand*

Ah well. I wouldn't have had anything to say yesterday anyway, because I spent last week-- my week off-- in complete indolent laziness. (Read: playing World of Warcraft.) But today, I registered for school! Which is another illustration of the difference between schools in Ireland and in America: in the U.S., you would usually register in April for a term that starts in September. In Ireland, you register the week before-- or, in my case last year, three weeks after-- classes start.

There were some Adventures in Bureaucracy involved in registering, of course. Basically, my registration path should have gone: Moore Institute-->Registration. Instead, it went more like this:
Moore Institute-->Registration-->Fees Office-->Moore Institute-->Fees Office-->Registration

Ah well. I am registered for college, my tuition fees are paid (thank you, stipend!), and I have a new student ID. It looks exactly like my old student ID except for the expiration date. I also chose classes! Last year, for my MA, the courses were all the same for everyone, but since everyone in the Texts, Contexts & Cultures (hereafter referred to as TCC) PhD is working on a different project, there are two required courses and a choice of two out of several optional courses. So my courses are:
-Imaging Ireland (required)
-Research (required)
-Studies in the History of Colonialism and Imperialism 1 (elective)
-Colonialism in 20th Century Cultural Theory (elective)

What the hours will be, of course, is anyone's guess.


Other news: I will not be updating this weekend, because I will be in America this weekend! I will be in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as a bridesmaid in my friend Cary's wedding! How exciting! Additional excitement: seeing my parents, seeing my bestest best friend in the whole wide world (Neil), spending not one but two nights with my wedding date Jim. Hopefully I'll have pictures on my return!

Submission accomplished!

That is three copies of a finished Master's Thesis, one hardback and two soft, bound and submitted.

Yeah, it's good to be done. ^_^

Now, I have three weeks until my PhD courses start! Free time? What the hell am I supposed to do with that?