Having Moved To Galway: nollaig shona duit (happy christmas to you)

it's been a while since i've written a proper blog explaining where exactly i am and how i'm doing and what i do with my time. so here we go.

first i'll explain where i am right now. i'm writing this on christmas day, sitting in my new home on dock road, in galway, ireland. i'm easting mashed potatoes and fried rice courtesy of ruth and grace respectively, listening to the beatles.

i live with four others:
grace, the canasian. half chinese, half korean, all canadian with a texan accent. WHAT???
ruth, another canadian. never cooks at home.
rachel, ANOTHER canadian. where do they all come from?
jenna, the newest flatmate, from sedona, arizona.

------------------------------end of christmas day writing. got distracted by food and alcohol--------------------------------

matt also lived with us for the past 6 weeks, sleeping on the couch, on the spare bed in my room, or in grace's bed. matt's a lovely guy from iowa who's traveling with a friend of his (brian) from home. met matt and brian whilst working for face2face, but brian ended up going up to mayo to work on a salmon farm. they both just left galway for oslo, early in the morning on the 26th. very sad to see them go. check out matt's blog: http://www.kyhnn-year-abroad.blogspot.com.

so they left five women living together in a rather small space. the situation feels... highly flammable.

i work in the childrens department at a store in town. i like the job, but i don't like working as often as i have been. i'm going to try to get a part time contract.

at the moment i pretty much just spend my time working and hanging out at the massage parlour (home).

christmas was great. went to midnight mass on christmas eve, then on christmas ate lots of good food, drank australian beer, and jumped in galway bay. it was really wonderful. exhilarating to say the least. the weather at the time was not the best. i'd say a couple of degrees above zero, very windy, and raining. it hailed earlier in the day. so it was freezing before we even got into the water. we jumped from a platform about 6m from the water, so that in itself was thrilling. add the choppy, freezing water and the weather, and it was an altogether frightening experience! but not too frightening to stop a few of us from jumping a second time. and more people have committed to going in on new years day.

anyway. here's a few photos.

getting ready for mass. 'can you do a double windsor?' confusion ensued.