Mark accompanied to me class, so he got a good taste of the Irish school system. Most of the kids in my physics class seemed pretty surprised that he agreed to come to a physics lecture on his own free will, and that I didn't drag him there.
Tuesday(03/24/2009):
Mark went to Blarney to go check out the castle and the town. I still had some quantum physics to hammer out during the week, so that evening after dinner Mark watched a movie with Shawn and Giorgio.
Wednesday(03/25/2009):
The Wolfe Tones came to UCC to play on Wednesday night. Giovanni, Eugenio, Margherita, Mark and I went to go see them. They were pretty good and while the show had a pretty small audience, it was still a very lively show. When we got back, Mark did a search on them and found out that we didn't really see the original "Wolfe Tones", we say "Derek Warfield and The Wolfe Tones". Apparently, back in 1989 the singer of The Wolfe Tones, Derek Warfield, signed a shady business deal that basically prohibited the rest of The Wolfe Tones from recording together. So they still toured, but they couldn't record any new material. So anything that says "The Wolfe Tones" that was recorded after 1989 is really just Derek Warfield with hired backing musicians, which is what we say. Still, it was good traditional Irish music.
Thursday(03/26/2009):
After I turned in my quantum physics homework on Thursday I came back and Mark and I went out to get hot chocolate and just hang out. We also went to the Crawford Art Gallery for a while before it closed, and then just went back to the apartment to hang out. Around 6:30 I started preparing dinner. Since this was Mark's last night in Cork, I was having a little dinner party in his honor. So I invited him, Shawn, Giorgio, Giovanni, Margherita, Laura, and Eugenio over for chicken parmesan over a bed of whole meal penne with tomato sauce, garlic bread, some red italian wine and Vienneta for dessert. Laura was also kind enough to cook us a lemon sponge cake, which was so delicious! Cooking for 8 was a little different then cooking for 1 (or for 2 like I had been this past week), but it was really pretty fun. It was also nice to have my cooking be complimented by Italian women, who I know can cook really well. Although, I have to say that after cooking and cleaning up, I really appreciated my mother cooking for me for the last 19 years of my life and all the work she's had to do. So thanks Mom! After we finished dinner, people sat around finishing off the wine and Shawn and Laura went out to the balcony to smoke. I ended up going out to the balcony a little later with a glass of wine and just sitting out there in the cold night air for about 5 minutes relaxing and looking up at the moon, while listening to the strains of Cork's populace moving around down on Grand Parade. Margehrita and Laura ended up going back to their apartment early, so the rest of us guys decided to watch a movie. We grabbed pints of Beamish and watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. That has got to be one of the most amusingly bizarre movie I've ever seen in my life, and it was pretty funny as well. I'd never seen it before, but now I know where the phrase "We can't stop here....this is bat country!" came from.
Friday(03/27/2009):
I had class Friday morning, so Mark went up to Dublin before me in the morning. He visited the Guinness brewery, St. Stephen's Square, Dublin Castle, and Trinity College. Friday was my last day of classes for the semester, so I didn't want to miss them. In quantum physics we took a fun day and just talked about some aspects of quantum entanglement and applications of quantum computing and some of the stranger aspects of entanglement. We also talked about Einstein's famously wrong idea for hidden variables, as Einstein refused to believe that "...He [God] does not throw dice". I also didn't know that the ERP paper is Einstein's most widely cited paper. It's kind of funny. Einstein's theory of relativity is possibly the most important discovery in physics in the last 150 years or so, yet he won the Nobel for his discovery of the Photoelectric effect, and his most widely cited paper is the one paper that he wrote that he was actually wrong about something....besides the whole trying to write poetry, and marrying his cousin thing. After class I got on the train and met Mark outside his hostel, after doing a bit of a run around as the map on the Globetrotter's Hostel webpage shows the hostel about 200 meters North of where it actually is in Dublin. We then went and found a bar and grill that had dinner at a reasonable price and got some really delicious fried cod (I do love Friday fish in Lent) and a pint of Guinness each. After dinner we just kinda walked around Dublin and popped in and out of pubs looking for live music. I showed Mark The Porter House, but we didn't stay that long as we got there about 10 and music wasn't going to be starting till about midnight. We eventually found Fitzsimon's Hotel (which is a hotel, bar and nightclub), and just had a few pints while listening to live music, watching ESPN March Madness coverage and talking. We were both going to have to wake up somewhat early in the morning, so around 12:30 AM we went back to our hostels. I stayed at Isaac's Hostel again. When I got back to my room some people were already asleep in there, so I just climbed into my bed and started to go to sleep. However, about 2 minutes later 3 very drunk British guys came in and were being very loud which woke up everyone in the room. Apparently everyone in the room except me knew each other and were from Great Britain as the guys who woke up started cussing out the other 3 by name. The 3 drunk guys eventually got to their beds, but they were still very drunk and very loud and kept on yelling at each other and talking about their sexual exploits from that night. Luckily, I learned to sleep in bright gyms during wrestling meets in high school, so I was able to drown all that crap out after about 10 minutes and still get some sleep.
Saturday(03/28/2009):
I woke up around 7:00, checked out and went over to Mark's hostel to wait for him. When he came down we walked over to the bus station, where we said our goodbyes and he caught his bus to the airport. I then jogged through Dublin to the train station, found that the next train wasn't until 10:00 (it was 9:07 when I go there), so I got a smoothie and read for a while. I basically just slept for the whole 3 hour train ride back to Cork, and then just kinda hung out for the rest of the day at the apartment.
Sunday(03/29/2009):
Today I've just been doing wash, hanging out, doing some work and ironing out some final plans for my trip through Europe.
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