Week 2 Play Time!

This post is dedicated to my play time during that second week (June 21st- 26th)

So everyone needs a little playtime right? Well during the day I might be stuck inside but only until 5 or 6! And guess what? The sun doesn't set here until after 10 so I still have plenty of time to go exploring, when I'm not too tired that is.

Monday I wanted to go for a run, so I hoped a bus to City Centre and made my way over to Trinity College where I found a park called St Stephen's Green. It was really pretty and is said to be the most famous park in Dublin. Here are a few pics I took as I did a few laps around the park.

 The big brick arch is the entrance to the park. It was really tall... though you can't really tell from the picture. The park had your typical lawns but it also had a very pretty pond in the middle where there were a few swans! I love swans and they are all over the place down here. There were also a lot of cool statues and fountains.

After running I decided to go exploring in the shopping center right next door. The "mall" looked super cool from the outside! And on the inside it only got cooler! (if that's a word?) so awesome!

Outside on the street I saw a few of their cars....?

 Or it's really a tourist mobile but I still thought it rather cool. The guy pedals it like a bike.

Also along the street were a few street performers, playing the guitar and singing, and then there was the statue man. I saw him outside the bookstore window and had to laugh!

He moved! Really he's not a statue and some teenagers were poking at him. I wonder what he's made out of... ;0)

Sometime later that week, I don't really recall when now that I think about it but I went into City Centre again after work and this time we hit up Henry Street. It's a shopping district filled with all sorts of your typical European mall stores. I met up with my roommate Nicole and we explored the local fashion.

Oh so sexy in our barets!

WOrk it girl in that animal style!

I did a half squate to make sure that it was blatently obvious how tight my floral skinnys were :0)

I almost bought this one! ugh! I just wish it wasn't 70 Euro!!!

Totally digging the bows right? hot?

After our little fashion parade we happened across this Bar?

It's called the "Church Bar"... why because it is actually an old church that when was no longer in use they turned into this super fancy pub/restaurant. We decided to give the place a shot. We walked in and saw that they had done a good job at keeping the "churchy feeling" inside

but don't be fooled... it's still a bar

And fyi... the Irish hamburger here was delicious!

And it also had one of the fanciest bathrooms I've ever seen!

After the restaurant we went back out to the streets looking for a good time ;0) We hit a few more stores, including Elvery's where I bought my Gaelic football/hurling Jersey and sweatshirt. Which by the way are all very very cute! I wanted to buy half of the store tho. I love sporting good stores! Well it's time to end the tale for now! Peace out!

Starting week 2, First week of work

This post is dedicated to my first week of work... explaining a few of the things I'm doing and who I'm working with.

Monday (June 21st) I had my first day of work! It was really exciting :) As before mentioned I had previously met quite a few people there and was shown where to go so that took a lot of the nerves away. Due to school being out during the summer here there is not a whole ton going on in the lab so it is a little slow and on top of that there was a school wide meeting that all of the staff had to be there was hardly anyone around. Niall (my supervisor) put one of the grad students (Sarah) in charge of me and the other intern (Malinda). I spent the first few hours doing the homework that Niall gave me to do (yes... I got homework) and it was really slow! Later in the afternoon I observed/minimumly helped Sarah with her research project. She showed me how they use an ultra sound machine (worth 10k+ Euro) to look at the brachial artery (artery in the upper arm) to look for signs of heart and artery disease. It was really cool!

Tuesday (June 22nd) I spent the morning studying again but luckily Sarah saved me by introducing me to Paula who was doing a few tests for her research. Once again my role was minimal in helping Paula I simply clicked a few buttons on the computer but it was better than sitting at that desk all day! Paula had an athlete do an interval bike test and looking at lactate levels among other things. I am finding that I really like research and all of the proceedures. Granted I've only been here two days but even back in school I thought reading research papers was exciting. But now seeing it in action is pretty cool. The grad students seem to be pretty laid back and for the most part are willing to show/teach me things in their free time. Niall is pretty cool too... :) everyone here loves him. He took an hour out of his extremely busy day to go over a lecture for us on the mechanisms for heart disease.

Wednesday (June 23rd) Nothing much occured today. Javier who works in the tech office showed us how to callibrate the metabolic cart. Aka the machine where you do exercise testing. Probably the longest day ever!

Thursday (June 24th) Today was pretty cool. I finally met the other Intern MaLinda. She seems really nice. She is from Arizona and is not very happy with this internship. She actually has no interest in exercise science but in nueroscience and psychology. So why did she end up here? Because the EUSA program has a lot of ... lets say glitches and they wouldn't change her location at all. Oh well... it's only 6 weeks and like $5000 right?

     Anyway, so this morning MaLinda and I went over to to the Heart Smart program that is run here on campus. Basically this a program designed to help recovery patients that have had heart attacks, surgery's or other proceedures done on their heart learn about taking care of themselves and exercising. They get together 2x's a week to exercise together. The group is about 60-70 now and they are some of the most fun Irish people I have met! It's as the local's would say "good craic" and no I don't mean the drug crack. Craic is a slang term that is used every where here! and no one know's exactly what it means. Expect loosely translated "a good laugh/time" and normally use it to refer to their weekends in the pub but on other occassions as well. So I basically stood around and watched old people suffer as they exercise :) muaw ha ha ha... ok jk I talked to them, made sure they were feeling alright and did a lot of slagging. Slagging is another Irish slang word meaning teasing. They Irish love to tease and you can tease them right back! It's pretty fun to hear them banter amongst themselves as they're puffing away on the treadmill or whatever.

    Afterwards I sat in a pilot meeting (pilot meaning trial run) on Lorraine's research project. In the afternoon Javier showed us (meaning MaLinda and I) how to do a VO2 max test. The purpose of the test is to measure fitness level as defined by your bodies capacity to use oxygen during maximal exercise. It is pretty intense because they have you running about 12k/h up a hill. And guess who the subject? ME! I really enjoy them actually and I got to see that since the last test I did I actually improved my fitness level a little bit. Which is cool. After the test we met with Niall again for another lecture.

Friday (June 25th) Today was really really slow. I did nothing besides sit in with Sioban as she worked on a client. Sioban (pronounced Shavon) is an athletic therapist, or America's equivalent to an athletic trainer. The athlete was a futball player and had been having back problems. She is really good, and it was cool to watch her work. After working with him she gave my shin a death massage because I had complained about shin splints. I was sore for like 5 days afterward! Ugh!

And it's not a good blog if there are no pictures right? well here is just one of my desk!



TTFN

This takes forever!!! Weekend #1

Last night I had anticipated catching up on the whole week at once and very clearly that didn't happen! It is just too hard to limit myself to only a few photos when everything is so gorgeous! Not too mention it takes forever to upload pictures onto this thing! So anyways this will clearly be a while. So here's where I left off...

Friday (June 18) we spent the day wandering around Dublin... nothing too exciting happened this day that I can remember, so instead of telling a long story I'll just put up some pictures of things we saw. We also went to an art show which was pretty cool and that was about it.

This is Dublina we didn't go inside but it's very pretty on the outside.

The connecting halves of Dublina

I'm not sure what this building was... but i thought it was gorgeous!

I love the intricate design on all of the old buildings! they were way cool

This is the fashion portion of the art show

Super cool photograph

This photo belongs to a whole mural that was dedicated to the poem and story in the beginning of Alice and Wonderland where the walrus lures the clams in and eats them. it was pretty neat.

This was the audio section of the show... it was just two speakers and a chair in the middle of the room and it looked kind of creepy to be honest. This is Maggie listening intently.

Saturday (June 19th) we went to a street fair for a short while. Well technically it was the national championship for street performers. So they had supposedly the best street performers from all over the world there. It was pretty cool. I arrived before the others and caught a juggling act. It was pretty cool.

He juggled fire... impressive right?

Then we got sausage dogs...what better way to enjoy the fair?

they had a kids playland that i really wanted to play in!

This is me and the other girls that met me there. We were sitting for the USA breakdancers.

SOOOOO..... My blogs are really out of order due to my lack of organizational skills and my inability to keep a journal :) therefore you'll have to go to another post to see the events for Sunday.  

Week 1 Continued (slightly belated)

Wow so I'm not so good at this. I just realized I haven't finished ANY of my blogs so far! ha ha I really need lessons on this.

I was looking through my pictures and realized that I left a lot out of the first week that was really great so I thought I'd just throw them in now with maybe breif explanations of what is going on. I didn't have to work this week so I had the entire week to prepare for work, sight see, sleep, etc. The week went really fast and I no longer really remember everything that we did. But fortunately I took over 500 pictures in the first week! Don't worry though I won't put them all up here. I'm not promising there won't still be an overwhelming

amount though!.

First of all I need to mention that I met some girls when I first got here that I have been hanging out/sight seeing with. They are really chill and come from all over. First of all there is Jenny and Rachel from Virginia, Maggie and Mandy from Wisconsin, Kim from Philly, Megan from Oregan, John from upstate NY, Julie from... I don't remember where, and then much later on my roommate Nicole will start to enter some of the pictures as well. I'll introduce them all in the pictures as we go. There is also John from upstate NY as well that comes around with us every once in a while. He's a really great guy.

Because I can't remember what happened when and why here goes nothin! (literally :))

!I take the Dublin bus everywhere I want to go. It can be annoying and frustrating because the routes and times are not really clearly designated and the city is not really easy to navigate because while you might start out on Swords road in less than a mile it turns into Drumconda and then to another name... I can't tell you how often i'm lost.

The first night here we took it easy and just went to pub just down the street from us.

This is Jenny

Jenny, Megan and Rachel

This is the Pub. Everyone here is super nice.

After the Comet we went to the Beaumont HouseLoved the "toilets"

The next day we hoped on the bus and went sight seeing in City Centre (downtown Dublin). Sight seeing involved getting lost as we walked around taking random pictures of cool places.

On the bus!Megan, Mandy, Maggie, Rachel

We're not in Utah anymore

Ah... cheesy

The architecture here is amazing!

I love the scenery!

This is part of a gov't bldg

The whole city revolves around the pub, Guinness, and gambling!

The next day some of us (not including me) had interviews and so we met up for a late lunch afterwards in City Centre. We went to this American style diner there! It was ok...

Jenny and Julie. Very cuteMeet Megan and Kim

Afterwards we went to Trinity College. It is just off of the main street in City Centre and is like a haven in the city. The College and all of the main buildings are really old. I'm not sure what era they're from but it's been around a while. The architecture is amazing and when you walk in you feel like you've left the city all together. We spent a few minutes walking around but weren't able to go into any of the buildings.

Ain't I cute?

Well folks that's a wrap for this evening! I'm beat!