First Weekend in Cork

On Saturday morning a group of four of us decided to go to the UCC athletic complex called the Mardyke to workout.  For those of you who know me, you may be surprised that I'm going to workout of my own accord, but luckily my friend Megan is here to motivate me because she is a workout machine.  The Mardyke is amazing.  It is huge, with multiple changing rooms, multiple workout studios and fitness gyms and three levels of workout equipment.  We found some treadmills over looking the gym and decided to run there.  I ran a full 5K which is probably the longest I've consciously continuously run, because running sucks.  I'd much rather run to chase a frisbee or something.  One other nice thing about the Mardyke is the showers are HOT! You are guaranteed a hot shower here unlike our apartments where you never quite know what the temperature is going to be.  No one is allowed to take picture inside the Mardyke but I took some of the outside so here they are:

Slightly curved panoramic view of the front of the Mardyke

Front Entrance

As we were looking for the weight room, we looked out the window and saw a practice or try-outs going on, and I realized that it was Men's Ultimate Frisbee, so I creeped for a while, and saw a new drill they were doing that will probably be very useful for us back in the States.

After the Mardyke, the Peer Support group on campus, which just helps students get acclimated to living in Cork, was doing a tour of the City Centre and would point out all the important places like grocery stores etc.  The tour ended at Tesco, one of the grocery stores so we stopped in there to grab a few things.

Tierney and I made dinner for ourselves, the gourmet meal of chicken nuggets, rice and broccoli.  After dinner, the group went to a pub to meet other international students at an event sponsored by the Peer Support staff. When we were at the pub, I realized they were showing the biathlon race on some of the TV's so I watched some of that.  We stopped for Ice Cream on the way home at Supermac's which is like a European version of McDonald's or Burger King and is right next to our apartment building.

On Sunday a group of us were going to go to the Church just off campus, that we had seen people getting married in earlier in the week.  We walked all the way there for 12 o'clock mass and it said that they didn't hold service out of term, so we decided to wander since we didn't know where another church was.  We still had 20 minutes until noon so we figured we might run into another church, otherwise it would just be a fun adventure.  We walked down some side streets we hadn't been down before and saw some cool graffiti.

We also found lots of other cool places like an old church,buildings still decorated for christmas, and a sweet shop. 

We stopped back at the apartments and then gathered the entire group to walk to a park, which ended up not being interesting at all, but was close to campus so we decided to take some more pictures there while it wasn't raining, and we got our first full group picture.

Sunday night we went to Ana and Hannah's apartment for the first family dinner of the semester, we are going to try to start doing family dinner every Sunday, with each apartment hosting on a rotation.