During week 2 in Dublin, I started to get the hang of things. Over the weekend, we took a trip to Kilkenny and got a tour of a massive castle, filled with art and restored to as close to the original as possible. I thought this was really cool and interesting, and personally would love to live in such a big castle. After the tour, I walked to a cathedral and was able to get some great pictures. We then went to a local pub for some food before getting back on the bus and heading to Wicklow for our hike. The monastery in Wicklow was breathtaking, and I thoroughly enjoyed walking around the surrounding area, despite it pouring rain as soon as we got there.
Aside from the end of Saturday, we have been having much better weather with little rain, and sunny skies. My roommates and I decided to take advantage of this by going across the street to the basketball court where we played a couple games of pickup, and even met some new people. The weather has allowed me to go for walks around UCD, and I even spent some time doing work in the sun on a bench on campus.
On monday, we had our weekly class in the morning, followed by a tour of the National Museum of Ireland. This museum had some of the coolest artifacts I have ever seen from the bronze age, iron age, and more. One of my personal favorites were the bog bodies; almost perfectly preserved bodies of people from between 400 and 200 BC. While slightly creepy, I had never seen anything like this before.
During the week, I resumed my internship. Last week I went through a lot of training, tours, and set up, however this week I was able to get into the lab and start doing experiments and collecting data. Now that I am trained to use the nanoindentation machine, I will be able to collect and analyze data using different types of soft tissue and contribute this data to graduate students for their thesis papers, and to the lab itself which is exciting.
As far as life outside of work and academics, I have been getting used to cooking more often and making routine trips to the grocery store. I was also able to attend a soccer game for Saint Patrick’s FC. I had never been to a game in person before, so this was definitely a very cool experience and I hope to be able to go again this summer.
