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First Week of Classes
Tuesday, June 5, 2018: The Irish Storytelling Tradition meets from 9:00 – 11:30 a.m. Monday through Thursday for the four weeks of the program. Since the first Monday of June is a holiday, our first class was on Tuesday. I met the students in the carpark outside our apartments at 8:45 a.m. to walk them…
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Excursion to Emo Court and The Rock of Dunamase
Monday, June 4, 2018: The first Monday in June is a Bank Holiday in Ireland. (Christopher Gettens – aka Christmas Glasses – followed by Nancy Wolter and me at Dunamase.)
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Orientation and Walking Tour of Athlone
Sunday, June 3, 2018 We use one of the apartments in the complex as a computer lab. It’s on the ground floor in the block across the parking lot from the one we stay in, next to the manager's office. We met there at 10:00 on Sunday morning for our on-site orientation. Jet-lag was much…
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Where Are We?
Study Abroad Ireland is based in Athlone, Co. Westmeath, in the Midlands of Ireland. When we meet Irish people who don’t live in the Midlands, and we tell them we stay in Athlone they are astonished. They almost always ask, “Why?” Why would we come all the way from America to stay in Athlone? In…
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Getting Settled
Saturday, June 2, 2018 Goal for the day: Stay awake until 8:00 p.m. without taking a nap. We arrived in Dublin at 8:00 a.m., which is midnight Arizona time. I didn’t sleep on the plane this time, so I was worried about driving from the airport to Athlone. In some past years, I’ve had to…
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Travel
Friday, June 1, 2018 This is my twelfth Study Abroad Ireland trip and I’ve given up on the idea of packing light. First, since we usually experience all the seasons during an Irish June, we have to pack for sweltering to freezing, soaking to semi-dry. I always tell students to bring one of everything from…
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The Power of Universal Connections by Brooke Graves
Recently while researching the Pennsylvania Dutch culture for a class presentation I was thinking about how disconnected from my ancestral culture I am. About a year ago my daughter who is multiracial and was identifying as Other had seen the many ancestry DNA commercials on television and she wanted to know her ethnic roots. This…
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Adventures in Revision by Julie Peterson
I've been a writer for a long time, but I've also been a massive procrastinator for a long time. If I know a project will take just an hour or so, there's a good chance I'll start it 65 minutes before it's due. So no matter how much I believe in revision, no matter how…
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Break a Leg Storytelling by Joanna Brathwaite
My mother always told me that I belonged on a stage somewhere. I participated in school plays, church plays, home skits. From a young age you could say I could have been a novice actor. I made friends easily, people were drawn to me and even though I wouldn’t consider myself Miss Popularity, I wasn’t…
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Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear by Debbie Rowe
The inscription on the side mirror of my husband’s Ford F350 says, “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” This makes me think of how big things look to us when we are young and how our memories can deceive us. For many years my mom told stories of how she and her ten…
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The Wonder of Show and Tell by Chantel Freed
There was one subject in elementary school that seemed to bring all the kids together and that was Show-n-Tell. Yes, in my mind that was a subject just like lunch and recess when I was eight years old. I would go through the house whirlwind style rummaging through kitchen drawers or dresser drawers of every single…
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Family Stories by Mario Avent
When we tell stories about our families, most stories are about immediate family or ancestors. When we were younger, we told stories about our cousins and how we used to wrestle with them in the garage for the heavyweight title belt or the time our dad hid under the bed and scared us as we…