I've studied.
That's about it.
I have to read an entire History book, so it takes a lot of time....
No, you already know that's not true =)
On July 10-12th I went to Killarney, Ireland in the southwest corner of the country. I intended to go there and go bike around the park by myself, but if you'll look below....
The weather gods disagreed... So that's me with a rain jacket, an umbrella, and my back pack on my front so it doesn't get wet. I walked ALL OVER that day. The first thing I saw was Ross Castle. But then in the background I saw the mountain, looked at my map, and they had trails to the top of some of the mountains (actually hills, but I live in Minnesota so anything bigger than and anthill is a mountain to me) so that was my next quest. 
On the way to the mountain, I saw some cool things. Like mist flowing out of the trees in to the clouds. So although rain was unfortunate, I got to see another more standard side of Ireland and I thought it was gorgeous. Besides, it was just raining straight down without a lot of wind, and at this point, not incredibly hard, just constant.
Then I ran into this waterfall on the way up. At this point, the rain had cleared up and it was a gorgeous day the rest of the afternoon.
After a while, past the waterfall, on the way up to the top of the mountain, the following happened:
For those of you who didn't understand, I saw the path to the top (picture 1), saw the sign (picture 2), then made the following face (picture 3).
But whatever, I got to hike around a gorgeous Irish countryside, so I dealt.
Then it started raining when I got back to Killarney, so I went to Transformers. =)
Okay, so this past weekend, the 24th to the 25th of July, I went out to Galway. Galway is every Irish person's favorite city. Seriously. Mention Galway, and almost every Irish person will say something along the lines of, "Oh, yeah. Galway. Very pretty." Generally in a very airy dreamlike voice.
I went to the Aran Islands with Tessa (another girl in the program) and I finally got to go biking!
We biked around the largest of the three Gaelic speaking Aran Islands, Inishmor. We went up to the highest point and I waved in the direction of home. To continue on the loop around the island, we had to bike our way through these old stone walls that separate the different fields. Scary when we got to corners, but very fun and idyllic.That night we ran into some other people from class and went to Coyotes -- the Coyote Ugly bar.... not my choice....
But the next day we went on a bus tour around the area.
First stop, the Aillwee caves. They were discovered in the 1940s when a farmer's dog went to chase after an animal into a hole, and he found the caves when he went to look for his dog. They used to be an underground river and after, it was used by the (now extinct in Ireland due to deforestation) brown bear for hibernation.
Most of the tour was from the bus without a lot of stops, but we got some GORGEOUS views of the Burren. The Burren is a huge limestone area of Ireland, but the grass that grows inbetween the limestone is really good for grazing of dairy cows due to the extra calcium deposits. There are also big boulders just sitting around, which I like to think of as glacier droppings. As the glaciers oozed by, they left behind boulders from other parts of the world while they melted.
Next: The Cliffs of Moher! Actually the third highest, but who cares when they look this awesome!!
I don't actually know where this was, but it was pretty =)
So that concludes the rest of my excursions away from Dublin. I have a ton more pictures from these trips. When you have a very large storage capacity on your camera, it's easy to just keep snapping. The hard part will be picking through all the photos and printing only the good ones. Don't worry, I'll keep the rest and share all =)
Later,
Anna
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