DAY 7

Friday the 13^th is an unlucky day, but did we have bad luck?

Everything was completely different on this Friday, but it wasn’t bad at all.  “Atlantic Language School” had had to close because of the Coronavirus. That meant that we were able to sleep in. But we didn’t really, because of Elena’s birthday.

We had a little over two hours to get ready. We went to the kitchen around half past 10 to have breakfast with our host family. Another difference was that the kitchen was really busy because two of our host parents` grandchildren were over to spend the day with them.

Our host parents were a senior couple who really cared about us. We had two separate bedrooms and a shared bathroom. The beds were really comfy and the entire house was heated ALL THE TIME -in contrast to many other host family`s houses. Breakfast and dinner tasted okay, but the portions were often too big. A huge difference to what we knew back home was that people used to walk round the house wearing shoes.

As always, we had to wait for the bus a little longer. Never trust Irish bus timetables! We met the others down by the river “Corrib”. The river was about to burst its  banks because of the continuous rain, we experienced even  more rain than Galway  normally gets. So if you don’t like rain, Ireland is definitely the wrong country to go to.

After everyoe had congratulated Elena and a little bit of waiting, we started our walk.

Our first stop was Galway Cathedral,  a Roman Catholic one and  one of the largest in the country. The cathedral was really impressive. Many of us lit candles there and took some pictures.

Afterwards we went to the inner courtyard of Galway university. The “National University of Ireland Galway” (NUI Galway) ranks among the top 1000 universities in the world (number 259).  It was founded in 1845 and about 15.000 students from many different countries study there.We actually ran into a young woman from Spittal who was doing her biological studies at this university.

Even though Ireland is a beautiful country and we really did enjoy our trip to Galway, we couldn’t imagine studying in Galway. The reason for that is that both of us (especially Alexandra) were really struggling with the bad weather. Sometimes it was raining and storming heavily, then the sun came out and within a next few minutes it started raining or even snowing again. We think we would miss the hot summer days in Austria, where we could go swimming or wear summery clothes.

After taking some nice pictures there, our tour was over, and we had some free time until 6 pm. We had a nice lunch and went into the shopping center.

At 6 pm we met the entire class at a pub called “The Quays restaurant”. Our teachers had reserved a table there for our farewell dinner. Because many of us weren’t hungry, the employees weren’t too happy with us and neither were the teachers. We learned that if you book a table in a Pub you are supposed to eat and not just snack or have drinks. Furthermore the staff were pretty nervous and did not really know how to handle government regulations concerning the virus. After dinner a surprise was planned to celebrate Elena’s birthday. She got a cake, we all had cupcakes and everyone sang “Happy Birthday” for her.

After the nice evening we all went home to pack our stuff. We also had a nice last conversation with our host parents.

We were happy to go to bed because we were pretty exhausted after a weekfull of  new impressions.

written by Alexandra Pobatschnig and Elena Koschier