First Day

Waking up this morning was easy to do considering I felt like a child on Christmas morning. I was and ready in 15 minutes, packed my lunch, and out the door I went. The walk to school is about 30 minutes, which is nice. It gives me time to enjoy my morning and prepare for the day ahead. When I started walking I was like yeah I'm cool I know my way around this city pretty well I know where I'm going. I got down to Dominick Street where our other 2 friends live and I was like ummmm... yeah.... not sure... One thing I did know was that my school was right next to a canal, so I found a path that followed the canal until I saw a building that looked similar to my school. I stopped to ask a nice gentlemen opening up the building gate where the Presentation Secondary School (where I am teaching) might be. He said "Ah. Well you've already found it. It's right here." I replied "Wonderful!" Happens to be that this gentlemen was actually the janitor of my school. He showed me the way inside and introduced me to a few people in the teachers lounge as I waited for the principal to arrive (the road conditions are still pretty bad causing most of the teachers and administation to be late this morning). While waiting for the principal Michelle (another student from UNLV) walked in the door. YAY finally someone I knew. This is a view from inside of the teachers lounge. AMAZING I KNOW!!

The front of the school


As we sat and enjoyed the view varies teachers walked in and introduced themselves as well as invited us to sit in on any of their lectures. There was not one person on staff who was not warm, welcoming and inviting (a much different vibe than the one I get being a substitute teacher in Las Vegas).The principal was around long enough to give us a brief tour of the school, and when I mean brief I mean very very short :) The school has only 500 students, let me mind you that this is a secondary school so all aged students from 12-18. ONLY 500!! After the tour Michelle and I met with the two teacher that we will be working with. Super Super nice women, but unfortunately (kind of.. I'll explain why in a minute) disorganized soooo... they let us leave at 11am and told us to take tommorow off and return Monday at 11am. Here I was envisioning my first day of school full of interactions with the kids, note taking, busy with tasks, and possibly some homework to do, but instead Michelle and I had the rest of the day off as well as tommorow (do you know see why the kind of unfortunate side note was put in?) It was unfortunate that we weren't in the school, but on the other hand we had plenty of time to explore.

First stop was back to Michelle's apartment to drop some things off and get changed and then out on a beach walking adventure. On the way we saw a photographer taking a close up picture of a friendly wild swan. At first the guy tried to make friends with the swan by placing his hand out in front of him after that was quite funny believe it or not the swan was actually posing for pictures. HILARIOUS!!!


Scenery along the way...


We tried to walk out to a lighthouse, which turned out to essentially be a.... well um.... sewage plant.


YEAH! Moving on.. we then walked back down the causeway to the beach


and made our way over to 1 of 4 Spanish Arches. This one inparticular is called THE BLIND ARCH and was built in 1584. The arch on theright in the picture has the fireplace inside. This fireplace was built in 1602 A.D. and shows the Lynch & Penrice coats of arms.


Following this interesting site we made our way to the Galway Museum where I was introduced to Currachs which are Irish Skin Boats. These boats have a basket or wodden fram, over which animal skins or hides were once stretched and were built in the 1400's

The information that was presented to me at this museum was overwhelming. I would love to revisit it and soak up some more information... P.S. for all of your jokers out there no the Currachs was not the only thing I retained, there are a few more things. Maybe two or three... :)