Dark Night

Bit of Irish

At the beginning of spring quarter, I got the letter accepting me to the Trinity classes, and I checked to see what I'd need to do, visa-wise, and what I'd need to bring with me. I could stay on campus for the six weeks of the classes; the seventh week would be the week in Portugal. Grandpa was thrilled to hear my news, as were my parents and my other grandparents. Grandpa sent me a card that had a sizeable check in it and told me to spend some time in Europe after classes were over. I was talking to Cass and John about this as we had one of our dinners in my apartment, and I was surprised by the arrival of the UPS guy with an Amazon package. I hadn't ordered anything, and I was mystified as I opened the box. It turned out to be a Nikon DSLR camera with a regular lens and a telephoto lens and came with a nice camera bag. The camera could connect with my smartphone, making uploads to my Instagram account quite painless, apparently. I was dumbfounded. I rooted around in the packaging material (it was in a simply enormous box, a rare Amazon fail) and finally found a slip of paper that stated the gift was from my Knight grandparents, something to take with me to Ireland. My friends were also amazed, but we dove right in and I got some practice snapping pictures of them. I quickly wrote out a thank you note (had to look up their address, I'd never been to their home) and John posted it for me on his way home. I immediately called Stan and he was as puzzled as I was. A couple of days later, he also received one. His camera wasn't as fancy as mine, but the best we could think of was that they were trying to be real grandparents now that we were interesting. Weird.

I heard from Johanna, who had been admitted at the University of Michigan's grad program for aerospace engineering, one of the top ten programs in the nation. It seemed like a lifetime ago that I'd wanted to attend myself. Serafina was still doing well at law school. Carol was getting her feet under her at Johns Hopkins culturally; she'd hit the ground running academically. Zayna was getting ready to graduate, the first of us to be done with school and off to start the next chapter of her life. Cass, Maya and I were grimly plodding along. Ok, not grimly. We were all interested in what we were doing. It was still a bit of a slog, though. My graduate committee and my faculty advisor were very pleased with my progress, interested in hearing more about my Trinity experience when I got back, and were urging me to look forward to next year's testing. I had to pass three exams before I could start my doctoral studies:  a comprehensive oral exam, a written qualifying exam, which I actually had to do before going off to Trinity, and the University Oral Qualifying Exam, which was an in-depth oral examination of my written proposal of the dissertation research topic. I had my field mapped out but wanted to wait until my summer experience was over before whittling down to my dissertation topic. My written qualifying exam, a test that demonstrates my ability to critically summarize and synthesize literature on a research topic that is selected by the faculty with my specific research interests in mind, was scheduled for two weeks before finals. That kind of sucked, but I'd still have time to study for finals. Spring quarter was a real grind because of that. Immediately after finals, I flew to Ireland.

Dublin was a fantastic city. Most of the students were from Trinity; there were just a few international students like me, and it was easy to fall into a comeraderie. The classes weren't very difficult and my group of friends was devoted to making my time there a real cultural experience. I got a student travelcard at the Student Union, which made me eligible for lots of deals for students around the city center for food, clothing and more, and also got me cheaper fares for taking Dublin Bus, Irish Rail and the Luas system, which is the city's light rail system. I learned how to play camogie, which is basically hurling for women. Fast, full contact, skilled, and pretty brutal, it was also tons of fun. I picked up the basics fairly quickly and was allowed to play in a couple of games. Since none of my friends stateside had ever heard of the game, I gave my camera to one of the guys and he took pictures of the last game I played in. He was an excellent photographer, capturing the hardest hits and skill moves (the skill was mostly my teammates, I took some of the hardest hits. He caught a great one of me right when my nose had been broken, blood everywhere, but I got in the face of the woman who'd broken it, determined not to be a wimpy American. My nose was set on the sidelines and I finished the game. By the time we hit the pubs, my black eyes were forming, but when patrons heard I'd got it playing camogie, we all got free drinks. There were far more social get-togethers than study groups, and they all were hell-bent on sampling life in Dublin. We did a serious pub crawl, followed by brunch for the seriously hung-over the next day at Herbstreet, a full Irish composed of grilled McCarren family bacon, sausage, scrambled free range eggs, Tournafulla black pudding, corned beef hash, roast tomato and multiseed spelt bread. I tried the black pudding with quite a bit of trepidation and found it good, although one of the Irishmen told me that it wasn't usually that good. Good to know.  There were one-off experiences like a prosecco barbeque at Fitzpatrick Castle Hotel that served burgers, sausages, pork chops, swordfish steaks, and ribs, along with corn on the cob, baked potato, garlic bread, seasonal salads and the dessert, Eton Mess. The prosecco was free. I took photographs of everything; Maya would freak at this, so different from the Texas barbeques she loved.

I made a real effort to get along and be friendly; the two other American students were stand-offish and I didn't want to be lumped in as an ugly American. It required virtually no effort; the other students were fun and mostly outgoing, and as kind of a tourist student, it was a great excuse for them to go out and have fun themselves. There was the pretty much obligatory tour of the Guinness brewery, but also the Teeling whiskey distillery, the only working distillery in Dublin. I got a couple of bottles as a souvenir, one for me, one for Grandpa, who liked Irish whiskey a lot. We went to Malahide Castle to see the 800 year old castle and walled gardens; they had a botanic garden as well that was fantastic. There was Dublin Castle, in the heart of historic Dublin,  and Farmleigh House. St. Patrick's Cathedral, the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin Zoo. And the museums: Kilmainham Gaol, Dublin Writers Museum, National Museum--Decorative Arts and History, the Irish Emigration Museum, and The National Leprechaun Museum. We saw the Book of Kells, of course, and took in a couple of concerts. In the midst of this, I got the results back from the written qualifying exam. My PhD pass, what I needed to continue toward my doctorate, set off another celebration. The only reason I scored in the top tier of the lecture is that for the last week, all we did was study. Well, cram. I scraped that grade by the skin of my teeth, not my favorite way of achieving good grades, but I couldn't deny that it had been a great experience overall. And then it was off to Portugal for the field experience.