I'm SO excited! I'm so...so... scaaared.

That's right, I feel a little like Jessie Spano minus the caffeine pill addiction. Today was our first department meeting and while going through the class offerings, I was so excited I could hardly keep still. Adrian Frazier is the Director of the program, and for those of you from JMU, he reminds me a bit of Roger Hall. They both have this sort of assured arrogance about them, but you can't help but like them, because the arrogance I speak of is dodgy and flits in and out of view.

There are very few of us. Three Americans, one Albanian, and the rest are Irish (I think, I didn't get to speak to everyone today). We met two of the professors outside of Adrian. The first was Eva Bourke, who runs the Poetry workshop. She's very soft spoken and seems to live in a different atmosphere. I think I'm going to really enjoy her. Today she said, "We have to be careful with one another in a poetry course" and it really struck me and I thought it was quite nice and so true. We have an assignment this weekend to write down things that strike us, snippets and whatnot.

We also met Mike McCormack, who teaches the Fiction workshop. He might be a bit more direct in advising, but how do I know at this early stage? He gave us assignments as well, 200 words each on our favorite album, movie and book. We also have a reading assignment of two novels. Conveniently, this is how I've made a new friend and classmate. Anna from Baltimore went with me to discover Galway's bookshops, so we each bought one novel, will read it, then switch with the other. On top of all these things, we must submit an autobiography of ourselves as writers, a total of 600 words. So guess how I'll be spending my Saturday? I must confess, I'm really looking forward to it. I might even cook (gasp!) of course, that means I'll have to buy something other than pasta...

After school, the meet and greet and finding pretty much all the bookshops in the city, Anna and I met up with my new international friends and walked down to Galway Bay. It's a fishing village and very picturesque at points, where others are... not so much. You have the multi-colored buildings lining the street and the sometimes more colorful boats bobbing around in the docks, and then you see a sign about some sort of contamination on the north side of the green. So we stay on the south side and walk down to a small beach full of shells and shards of glass bottles. Two boys were putting up a tent in this unlikely place, a man was drinking from an unidentified bottle while slumped up against a wall and there was a girl in a bikini sunbathing. She even went in the water! Now, as I type this, I'm sure you're all thinking, holy crap, it's so cold over there! My friends, I got sunburned, in IRELAND, today. It's been sunny the whole time I've been over here. I'm assured that it will rain tomorrow though. We'll see.

This evening, we went out to the pubs. Or pub, rather. We got invited to one place that was doing an 80's night by some very eager Irish boys. We declined and went to another with live traditional music. It was dark, full of old men and fantastic. After a pint, we headed home and passed by a Papa John's that sold hamburgers, yes, hamburgers. There must be some mistake. I will investigate this further through my travels. But, as I'm safe and sound now and it's very late, I believe I'll start a reading assignment and go to bed.