The last days...

Saturday June 18, 2011
Free day here in Dublin. After having some blessed time to sleep in, most of our group met together to walk to the museum of modern art and then tour the Guinness factory. The museum was great, especially because they were featuring a Frieda Khalo and Diego Rivera exhibit which was really interesting. I took a few minutes for myself before meeting back up with the group and went to the gardens of the museum just to sit and look at them and the sky and to listen to my music. I didn’t need time away because I don’t like the other students though. I love all these people. Before we left for the trip, Dr. Kelly said that we’d all be best friends by the time we got home, and I didn’t really believe him, but it actually is true. I love them all. Once we met back up after the museum, we walked over to tour the Guinness factory (which just seemed so fitting after the amount we’d drunk of it these two weeks). We all met up for dinner and then Charles’ and Drew’s 22nd birthday celebration which lasted well into the night. Like I said before, we’re like family now.

Sunday June 19, 2011
Its our last day of doing stuff for the course and our last day here. We took the train to the little coastal town of Howth and climbed the big hill (which is really more like a small mountain rather than a hill) right on the edge of the land to the point where the Ulysses character, Molly Bloom, remembers her final soliloquy that closes the book. We sat there on the rocks that jutted out over the azure water and crashing waves and listened as Shannon read the final pages of the book as Molly is remembering when she and Leopold came to those hills when he proposed. The scenery here was some of the most beautiful I’ve seen. There were sweeping cliffs covered in heather and coarse greenery that swept down at a steep angle to the cliffs and the waves. Gulls were wheeling around and screeching their heads off; we even saw a seal playing in the water 80 feet down the cliffs. The weather was perfect today too: clear skies, sun alternating with over-casting clouds and a refreshing breeze that didn’t allow any of us to get too sweaty on our little hike. After we traversed the cliffwalk, we chilled at a pub for about an hour waiting for the bus back into Dublin and got tea, hot wings and, of course, pints. We hopped on the bus there in Howth and rode to the outskirts of Dublin to try to find a spot where a certain scene in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, called “The Bird Girl” scene, took place and in which Stephen (the main character) has a life-altering change of mind in a completely silent, spiritually-connected moment with a girl he accidentally comes upon in the water. It turned out to be substantially farther than we’d anticipated and some people had things that really needed to be finished before it became too late so we turned back. We all went out together for dinner at a Japanese restaurant called, awesomely, “Wagamama,” the same place we’d gone the first evening we arrived in Dublin. We had a wonderful time swapping our favorite memories of the trip and with Dr. Kelly quizzing us to identify snatches of the literature we had been studying. There was lots of laughter, teasing and memories flying around. These are my friends.

Monday June 20, 2011
Today is the end and that it unthinkable to me. I can’t believe we are already heading home – this trip has been one of the most fun, memorable things I have ever gotten to experience in my life and I am so grateful to have been given this opportunity. The places that I saw, the people I’ve met, the things I’ve learned, the things I’ve done (from climbing up 5000 year old monuments to discovering an appreciation of beer) and the questions I have been prompted to address while here have forever shaped me, some subtly and others not so subtly. Not only did I learn new things about a people and a culture and a literature that I knew nothing about, I learned new things about myself.
According to my flight map in the seat back in front of me, I have traveled 1565 miles toward home which puts me about half-way there. What a blessing that I both desperately want to stay here in Ireland and go home; to have so much good to multiple places is something I can never take for granted. And I never will.

“I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.”
The Lake Isle of Innisfree; W. B. Yeats