It's Friday!!

Last night, Josh and I met up with Marit, Niamh, Ruth, Tyler, Bryan, Ala, and an Irish friend of Tyler's. The Irish guy (who's from Galway) took us to Bierhaus, which was by the river, where we hung out and had some drinks. It was nice, but there was some weird Irish rapper there. After that, we went to the Living Room, a club, where we met up with Sarah and Greg again. There, we danced and hung out til about 2AM, where Niamh and I walked home (most everyone else had already left).


It was a lot of fun, but I was exhausted this morning. It didn't help that we had a lecture on "Good Lab Practice" which sounds self-explanatory, but is actually a whole government program of standardizing clinical procedures. It was really bad. Not to mention the room was warm (because the weather has been really nice by our standards, but hot for the Irish). So that was a bad combo. Afterwards, we went to lunch, and then headed off to work.

Today, Sarah and I went through the PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) procedure, which is a bit different than ours back at LSU. But I think I'll get the hang of it. We also got the chance to learn how to prepare a gel and run it out to get a picture. It was neat to finally get down to research - next week will be even better. After we had the gel set up and cleaned our work area, Sandra let us go early. Since we had a get-together at the College Bar at 5, I just hung around campus for an hour at the library. Sarah went back to the apartments to meet Greg, and they were going to catch a bus back to Cork for the weekend.

The social at the pub was nice. I got a chance to talk more with the NUIG students, which was nice, since they don't live in Corrib Village. I really like all the students in my program. I know I keep saying that, but I mean it. They're a good group of kids. They served us an assortment of fried foods and chips (fries), which was interesting, but not bad. I also had a cider to drink, which was excellent. I wish we had it back in the states! It tastes like apples. :)

Marit, Josh, and I stayed late talking to Aoife, the program director, Conor and Nicky about Ireland and America, and the differences between them, while getting info about Estonia too. It was really cool. At around 8PM, the three of us in Corrib Village headed back. We really didn't do much tonight, I think because we were all pretty tired. We decided to go into town to shop in the morning, so we watched some TV and went to bed. Yay for the weekend, though!