First Days in Cork

Yesterday we got into Cork and got settled into our apartments.  I'm living with my friend Tierney who was one of my roommates last semester and we are sharing a room in an apartment of 5 girls.  One of the other girls is from Penn State, and the other two are from Loyola University.  We haven't seen much of our roommates yet, but they seem nice.  We decided to go out to lunch because we were all starving by the time we got here.  We started walking towards the City Centre, but realized that almost everything was closed because it was New Years, so we ended up eating at the only open place we could find, Supermacs.  Supermacs is kind of like Ireland's version of McDonald's, BUT they had Papa John's pizza there and most of us ordered that.  We got packages from the group that was here last year and they had some random food items like pasta and rice, so al the apartments combined the food that we got and had a sort of pot luck dinner together.  After dinner we watched P.S. I love you, and even the sole male in the room liked it.  I haven't gotten any pictures of our apartment yet, but I will post some soon.

Today, we decided to go to the grocery store to get some essentials.  We walked to Dunnes market and picked up everything from Peanut Butter (we're lucky they have it, and it does say American style right on the label), to hand soap for the bathroom.  Tierney and I then came back to our apartment and made ourselves some brunch.  We relaxed for a bit and then decided to walk around Cork before we had to meet up with the rest of the group to tour UCC.  Here are some pictures from our walk:

Once we met up with the group back at Leeside Apartments, we headed the opposite direction to UCC, (University College Cork), where we will be taking classes.  We have orientation tomorrow so we decided it would be a good idea to know where we are going, both how to get to campus and which building to go in once we got there.  Campus is really pretty, and has a nice mixture of older and newer buildings.  I still don't know what most of these are, but I'll caption the ones I do know...

The Front Gate

The Castle Building (Not the real name..shhh)

Where we can eat

The modern building on the left is the back of the Library, it must be an addition because the front looks older.

One of the views from the river side of campus

A small group of us went into City Centre for dinner, and went to a cute little pizza place.  It was pouring rain the entire time we walked there and we were soaked by the time we made it, but luckily it had stopped raining by the time we started walking back to the apartments.  Unluckily, all the rain had caused the river to flood over part of the street we were going to walk home on.  This made us a little nervous because we live right off the river and the boys live in an apartment on the first floor of the building, prime flooding location.  After a short detour, we made it back to Bachelor's Quay, (pronounced "key"), the street we live on and realized that our section was not flooded, which we were very happy about, although the river was still very close to the top of the banks.  So far no flooding, but I'll keep you updated.