Today was a wonderful sunny day in Dublin. Yesterday our professors said they were unavailable today, so we had the day off. My theory is that they wanted to be out playing golf. One of my housemates suggested we go out to a town called Bray. There's a mountain of sorts there called Bray Head. We packed our lunches and took the train this morning out there. Bray head was...well...a little steeper and taller than we had imagined! We earned every morsel of lunch! The view was beautiful. Well worth the hike. I spent the afternoon in a little town called Dalkey. I go there on occasion to climb in the old quarry, but for the first time I got to explore the town. Lovely little shops, a castle, a few pubs, a church and a coffee shop or two. My friends actually had to work today, so to kill time I bought Pride and Prejudice, planted myself in a coffee shop and read for a while. Let me tell you that this is most surely NOT something I would normally do, but I quite enjoyed sitting there reading and sipping my latte. Kevin picked me up around 6:30 and we drove to the quarry. I climbed two climbs tonight, one called Thrust and the other Dipthong. Thrust is rated as HVS (hard very severe). HVS pushes me to my limits. Dipthong is only severe; comfortable enough but with a few tricky spots. Kevin will be my climbing buddy this summer as Chris and Richie are both jetting off on extended holidays.
Tomorrow it's back to the old grindstone. I'll be in school most of the day...wishing I was out in the sunshine again! We're going to quantify the RNA we isolated the other day. The other day we isolated DNA and RNA from cervical cancer cells. This class is a lot more demanding than the last. A nice change of pace, I suppose. Biotechnology is pretty new to me, so I'll have to work extra hard for the next few weeks. Learning without struggle is not learning at all, right?
Keep in touch!
