Away with the Fairies

Hello ILE Families and Friends! On Monday, the students were well and truly settled into Dublin and began making friends with both Irish and Spanish students that are doing different summer camps in the same school. Monday was a typical class day for the ILE students. They had five full classes before lunch time. Angie started by doing two literature classes with everybody. In the first class, the students learned about the life of WB Yeats. Casey did a quick recap of what she had learned and said that she was interested in the inspiration that Yeats used for his poetry-which was the rough landscape of where he was brought up. The next class the students had was Irish American Studies with Taryn. Since the students had been in the country for ten days now, Taryn felt it was necessary for them to know about the slang that was common in Ireland. Students were warned not to go home "Up the Duff" and were advised to steer clear of anybody that was "Away with the Fairies." Next, Angie came back in for her second literature class of the day. In this class, the students learned all about Ulysses. It worked well, as some students have mentioned they may be interested in visiting some locations-such as the bookstore that Leopold Bloom went to in this novel and they will have free time to do this in Dublin on Saturday. Lottie left the class saying she found it interesting that there were no periods in one of his chapters! Finally, Dan came in to teach the students how to count in Irish and numbers up as far as 100, (Cead-Kay-ud). Now fortunately for James, once he gets to Galway, not only can he introduce himself to all the Irish girls, but he can also give out his number. This class was in preparation for an intense game of Bingo that has been planned for the next class day with Dan. After lunch, the students had three hours free time. Jenni and Kathleen made use of the shopping center being so close to us and decided to buy some new clothes to look fabulous in for the next disco. Thankfully there was a Starbucks close to the school, so many students were able to keep updated with parents, siblings, boyfriends, girlfriends and in some cases prospective girlfriends, but we won't start naming names now! In Kings Hospital where we are staying there is a recreational room with table tennis set up and Mar and Raquel are most likely going to be professionals by the end of the trip with the amount of table tennis they are playing. Of course the boys have a television in their dorm, so a few boys spent some time studying the Irish accent through the TV, which I'm sure Anica, Anne and Rachel will be jealous of since they are trying to perfect their Irish accents before returning to the states. Although Rachel seems to have arrived to Ireland with plenty of practice on her Irish accent so she has it almost nailed. Everybody arrived back to the school in time for dinner and went straight into practicing their drama afterwards. All the characters have been picked and the scripts written. It is just practice and costumes that need to be completed. From what little I've stolen a peek at, let's just say these drama presentations will be interesting. As usual, the students went straight into dance class, which they all love thanks to their amazing teacher Scones. This time they were only doing the first half of a dance, because from past experience we concluded too many steps can not be comprehended in our 40 minute time slot. The trouble was they would have to remember all these steps for the next dance class. This should be fun. The dance was the eight hand reel and is typically a more advanced dance class, but we felt the students we have this year were such naturals they could handle it. After dance, Angie had organized a work shop for every student on Northern Ireland in preparation for our trip to Belfast and the Giants Causeway on Tuesday. She gave the students details on the troubles that happened in Belfast in modern times and what life was like growing up in Belfast. Since Angie had grown up right in the middle of Belfast in the 1970's and 1980's, she was almost too qualified to let everybody know what had happened. It was early to bed tonight, as it was early to rise on Tuesday for our incredible northern tour.

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