Nick Snyder: Dublin Week 4 – Castles and Barrels

This week in Ireland was another eventful one, where I was able to gain a lot more insight from my internship during the week and also see a lot more sights in the beautiful country of Ireland. During this week I got more involved at my internship, I was finally finishing some earlier assignments dealing with the AI model and was working with a new program called VoiceFlow. This online program allows me to create my own flows to implement different features into the AI Voice agent like credit card integration for online payments as well as multiple languages for it to understand. On Thursday we had an event where at The Stags Head pub in downtown Dublin, we listened to Irish Folklore and Fairies stories from a man. It was quite interesting to learn about the culture of Ireland through this since a lot of these were childhood stories for scaring children and giving life lessons to them.

On Saturday, we had a day trip to Blarney Castle right outside of Cork, which was around a 3 hour bus ride. I had to wake myself up at 6:30 AM for the 6:50 AM bus ride. We stopped at Cashel Rock along the way to Blarney Castle and it was really cool to see an old religious site that was partially intact. It was on top of a hill that had great views on the town around it and I gained an even greater appreciation for the Irish countryside. The Blarney Castle grounds were even more beautiful themselves, when we arrived to the area I had heard about possibly kissing the Blarney stone. Some of my friends in our Bucknell group did wait in line to kiss it, but it was a 2 hour wait and I really did not want to endure that. I just explored the grounds with Tennyson and Brad and we had a great time looking at other buildings, the lake, and a big herd of majestic cows. The actual grounds themselves were honestly the highlight of my entire week, I had never really encountered anything like that in the US. On the way back we stopped at Cahir Castle and got a tour of that as well, which was interesting since it was basically a stronghold.

On Monday after another judging justice class on the difference in freedom of expression in the US and Ireland, we explored the Guinness storehouse. This was an amazing experience and it was awesome looking at the giant tubs of the ingredients to create this famous beer. I tried some and was a little disappointed, but the experience itself was overall great. This week was a lot of fun and I am ready for even more Irish adventures!