Autumn Summer

I knew that coming to Barcelona would be a shock to the system in many ways, one of them being weatherwise. In the back of my mind I knew that I would be living in a place much much warmer than Cork, but I don't think it ever really sank in, because once it hit November I was fully prepared to dig out my boots and my coat and my biggest jumpers and hats and scarves and gloves, only to find that Barcelona in November can hit 20 degrees, easy peasy. Heck, this time last year it was so cold in Cork that I used to layer up at least as well as Mr. Shackleton himself. But in recent times I've found myself eating ice-cream on the Ramblas, and walking down Avinguda Diagonal into the brightest, clearest sunset I've ever seen, listening to Jape (from whom I've stolen the title of this post) and watching the people coming towards me with the sun behind them, like glowing orange ghosts, features hidden by shade.

That said, it gets bloody freezing too, like when you're sitting for an hour and a half in the highest tier possible of the Camp Nou watching Barça beat the crap out of AD Ceuta below, while overhead lightning strikes the rest of the city a little further away. Going to my first football match was an overwhelmingly positive experience, made better by two main factors - i) the presence of Donnacha and Julian, whose enthusiasm for everything to do with the match - from the scarves to the stadium to the players to the opening anthem - made it all the more exciting; and ii) the fact that Messi came on to the pitch late in the game. Now I'm no football expert at all, but I know who Messi is ("we are in the presence of God" Donnacha said to me when he came on to a standing ovation), and I now know he's a pretty good footballer, having seen him set up a goal and score another within a ridiculously short space of time. 5-1 to Barça, olé!

So I understand now why Barcelona is so proud of its football team, but another thing I got an insight into this week was pride in history. I take a class in political theory here, and the course up to now has been your standard Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau-Kant-Hume affair, with overviews of Liberal Conservatism and the Social Contract and all the standard topics that I've covered in UCC. Yesterday, we moved on to Fascism. The lecturer is interesting and engaging, and the material was as well, but what I found particularly interesting was his focus on Hitler and Mussolini. Every point he dealt with - mass mobilisation, the eradication of negative liberty, the lack of pluralism - was explained with detail given about Germany and Italy, and only very occasionally would he mention Spain. This didn't surprise me hugely, but what I noted was that if revolution is mentioned in any class in Ireland, our own example is quickly given, because we're encouraged from a young age to be proud of the War of Independence and the transition to a Republic. But Spain definitely differs in this respect, and oddly enough just today I read a perfect summation of this attitude in Colm Tóibín's excellent Homage to Barcelona:

"In Barcelona, no one talks about the war: it is not romantic or heroic: it is a trauma that everybody went through, everybody fears, and nobody wants to go through again"

So just as there are two sides to every Civil War, there are two ways of reflecting on your own country's Civil War.

Right now I'm waiting for my room-mate and my friends to wake up so I can make pancakes for them, and this weekend is looking pretty sweet, between the possibility of lying in instead of getting up at 8.30 to go to college and study, the likelihood of going out somewhere and having fun, and the definite Arcade Fire gig that I'm going to on Sunday night - my first time seeing them in the 5 years I've liked them, so to say I'm looking forward to it is a little bit of an understatement!

And it's just two weeks until I put my paws back on Irish soil, for the Belle and Sebastian-Donnacha's 21st Birthday Party-Arcade Fire Part II extravaganza, featuring a visit from my Mum, a film with my sister, and hanging out with all my friends.. Again, excitement is an understatement!

Home

When I thought about writing a blog about going home, a million titles popped into my head taken from songs about Home. Home, home on the range immediately morphed into home, home can be strange in my mind, because in many ways going home for the first time was extremely odd. Having never lived in a house other than the grand mansion of Lawndene Hall before, let alone living alone in a different country, it was exciting for me to return to something I had always taken for granted. Examples include having my clothes washed for me, having my meals cooked for me, being able to drive a car, and simple small things like there always being food in the cupboards and milk in the fridge. Not only did I get spoiled something rotten when I got back to Ma and Pa, I also found I had to take a number 8 bus on Saturday afternoon, and even worse a taxi that night (during the Jazz, what were we thinking?). I couldn't just zip my T-Trimestre metro card through the Pueblo del Obispo station and be in Calle de San Patricio in seven minutes.

ASIDE: Bit of Spanish humour for you there, look up those fictional metro stations in spanishdict.com to find out why. Speaking of my excellent blossoming sentido de humor in Spanish, I made my first pun in Spanish yesterday - we were drinking tea in a cafe and my friend didn't like her iced chai tea. She to me: no me gusta. I to her: no té gusta. A ha, ha ha ha.

So the strangeness of being home was one thing - after seven weeks of being a grown-up I was allowed the luxury of being taken care of for a few days, which was awesome. The next song that sprung to mind was one that I listened to obsessively during the summer, Fuel Up by Stornoway. The line in question goes it's nowhere you've been and it's nowhere you're going, home is only a feeling you get in your mind from the people you love and you travel beside. This was definitely something I experienced during my weekend in Cork. It wouldn't have mattered to me if my parents had moved into a granny flat above a Chinese takeaway in Macroom town centre, as long as we could still be chatting and looking up pictures of cats together I was happy (a family that LOLs together stays together). Equally, it didn't matter to me what I did with my friends on Saturday or Sunday night, as long as we just had the chance to hang out together again (though Mrs. Reidy's baked goods were appreciated as always).

The final one is by Villagers - can you wake me when we're almost halfway, I don't want to take this trip alone, cos I'd never reach my home. In a way going home was less about physically being in my house in Cork for a weekend, but more about the idea of the journey from Barcelona to Cork. Getting out of Erasmus Land and back to Cork Land was inherently good for me, because there are much fewer laws in Erasmus land (for example, it is perfectly acceptable to wear your pyjamas until mid-afternoon, eat entire giant bars of Milka chocolate to yourself, amuse yourself for free by playing with the iPads in Fnac and drink calimucho on the step outside your house) and it put my feet firmly back on the ground. Being away from my apartment and my flatmates and my university and my friends and the tapas and the sangría gave me the chance to reflect on all the things I still have to do here, and the aims I had before I came. And so I could return to Barcelona on Monday evening a bit more pumped for the rest of the term until Christmas. Except Aer Lingus had different things in store for us, delaying our flight four hours, which meant I left my house in Cork at 3.45pm and didn't arrive in my apartment in Barcelona until 1.45am.

Apart from that hiccup, it was a really great weekend, full of the normal expected antics like playing Super Mario Galaxy with Donnacha, having Curry and Beer night with my parents, drinking tea with Ms. Laura Hurley, being in the Bróg with all my friends and practically everyone I've ever met in my entire life being there (that's Cork for you, that'd never happen in Barcelona, except for the fact that when I was going to play on the iPads in Fnac yesterday who did I happen to see coming out of El Triangle shopping centre on Plaza Catalunya only our very own Nóirín Deady, Co-Ordinator of the First Year Experience in UCC), as well as the more offbeat antics such as doing a jigsaw puzzle (Donnacha to me: we fit together like two pieces of this jigsaw puzzle! I to Donnacha: thank God we have each other. Nobody else would have taken us. Now, I'm looking for a bit with some sky on it..), doing the Bandon Walk and having an entire Christmas dinner. Clearly a win of a weekend.

Unfortunately I didn't even have time to unpack or reflect on my lovely weekend, because the day after I got back I had to go to classes again, and work practically nonstop on an assignment I had due in to my Political Theory class on Thursday. I finished it on Wednesday night, all 1,000 words comparing the theses of Hobbes and Rousseau through Spanish. Leviatán and Del Contrato Social are no harder to read in Spanish than in English, because neither makes a whole lot of sense the first time you read it anyway.. It's one of those reading a paragraph three times before you even begin to understand it sort of things. Then I had another harrowing experience with the printers in the law library, someday I'm going to kill all law students and their useless photocopying ways. This week I also started my Spanish course for Erasmus students, and it's going really well - it's mostly Italians who think they know everything because let's face it, they're shit hot at Spanish. But there are some very nice people too. We had a sort of scavenger hunt around the Gothic quarter on Friday, which our group came last in because we didn't realise we had to turn over a page to actually answer questions and do tasks. Bit stupid of us really in retrospect.. But it was still good fun :)

Now I'm heading to Penneys, because we're having a Hallowe'en party in my apartment on Sunday and I have to look at ideas for costumes. The current one is Vampire Sarah Palin, but I'm open to suggestions!

Andalucían Adventure (featuring other musings)

I find that after being in Barcelona for six weeks, I still haven't found any sort of pattern that I could describe as being "normal life". What I thought was normal life for the first few weeks was probably just settling in. The period after that brought the craziness of the Mercè and the subsequent recovery. Then there was air shows and beaching, and my first visitors, and my first visit away from Barcelona. It's quite funny, every week is completely different, in a way that life in Cork is by and large the exact same from week to week. The variables in Cork are things like gigs and the cinema and nights out, but the variables here are almost constants, in that there's always something different going on - every day I get about four invitations from different Erasmus organisers for a different club night or outing or party.

So normality has evaded me for a while, which is good and bad. It's good because I'm never short of something to do, or somebody to hang out with, or somewhere to go. Barcelona has an endless supply of attractions and restaurants and bars and cool spots, so even if I had nothing fixed to get up to, I could always just hit the streets with my unlimited Metro card and find something to do. I suppose the bad part is that stamina was never really my game, and MY GOD am I exhausted!

My actions of the last week have taken me from my apartment to all of the tourist sights in Barcelona, and to Málaga, and along the way I've slept in twice, missed one class, turned up for one class that was cancelled, got three hours sleep in one night, got twelve hours sleep in one night, went to a Star Wars exhibition, watched my first Woody Allen film, drank sherry for the first time, ate aubergine for the first time, got taken out to dinner and have witnessed my supplies in the fridge dwindle to a solo pot of jam.

All the touristy stuff went down when my friends from the fencing club came to visit. More enthusiastic visitors to Barcelona I have never seen! Our feet beat the streets of Barcelona from Barceloneta to Passeig de Gràcia, to Plaza Urquinaona where we met some of my other friends, and ordered the most random pizza ever.. It was about 22 inches in diameter, and had pepperoni. Mushrooms. Goat's cheese. Chicken. Aaaand..pineapple. Man it was weird, and kinda cold by the time we got it down to the mad windswept beach at Barceloneta to eat it, but maaan..it was good too. Over the rest of the weekend we took in Park Güell, the Sagrada Familia, Montjuïc, the church of Santa Maria del Mar, the Gothic Quarter and this awesome flea market down by the port that I never even knew existed. It's also fair to say that over the weekend a lot of tapas, churros and sangría were consumed :)

Tuesday was Columbus Day, which is a national holiday in Spain, so I didn't have any classes. So it was excusable that I slept until midday. What is not excusable is that the next day, when I did have a class at 10, I slept until 11. Oops. The rest of Wednesday was relatively successful though, in that we finally made moves towards registering at the UB to be real, actual students, with real, actual privileges like being able to get on to the Campus Virtual (UB version of BlackBoard) and take books out of the library and all that jazz. About time, says I.

On Thursday I was only slightly less useless, and actually got to my classes on time, only to find out that Contemporary Spanish Theatre was cancelled, and I didn't know about it. Oh well, it meant that I got to go have coffee with two nice girls in my class, and not have to do my mad weekly dash across the city from the Philology Department (yes, philology is a word) to the Law Department in such a short space of time. After my Political Theory class, I thought I'd be productive and practical and print off my boarding passes for my trip to Málaga at the weekend. For the UCC heads, you know how much law students typically print and photocopy, right? Well, Spanish law students do the exact same, except guess what? There is one printer for the whole law library. So that meant queuing while some wan photocopied page upon page from a book on Teoría Constitucional, then to discover that I didn't in fact know how to use the printer so I accidentally printed out 17 pages of law notes instead of a two-page boarding pass. Conclusion 1: printers are difficult in every country. Conclusion 2: law students are the same in every country.

Friday was the day that I jetted off to Málaga, and it involved getting up at 4.30am to get the first FGC to Provença to get the first metro to Sants Estació (and that was weird, because everyone on the platform was either up early to go to the airport or out reaaallly late and only just shlepping home) to get the first airport train to the plane to Málaga to the bus to Marbella to the bus to Estepona to meet my Uncle. I had such a good weekend thanks to his excellent hospitality and company, as well as those of his friends who were also visiting. Who thought you could go swimming in the sea and have a barbecue in October? For someone who's never spent October anywhere else but Cork, I can safely say not me! It was a really interesting experience to go elsewhere in Spain for the weekend, and not just elsewhere but somewhere very very different to Barcelona. Barcelona strikes me as bohemian, big, pretty, diverse and just a little bit grandiose. However, Andalucía brings you back down to real Spanish soil with a bit of a bump. Where Barcelona is modernist architecture, graffiti and millions of different people from everywhere in the world milling around the streets and the shops and the restaurants and the metro stations, Málaga is those big, rough, brown mountains surrounding thousands of second homes and bizarrely-located Dunnes Stores. Andalucía is in a way more masculine than Cataluña, and it was definitely a welcome break to get out of the city and into a pueblecito for a weekend.

So now I'm back home in sunny but chilly Barcelona, me and my pot of jam. This weekend I'm going home for the first time, so that means seeing my parents and my friends for the first time in about 7 weeks, something I'm ridiculously excited about. For now though, I really must go buy something for dinner.

Why I'm looking forward to October

Reasons why I'm excited about all things October:

1. It marks the end of my first month in September, which I got through without any major mishaps, tantrums or breakdowns, unless we count the Blender Incident, about which we will say no more.

2. October is bringing me my first visitors, in the shape of four awesome girls I know from the UCC Fencing Club. It's doubly exciting because one of them is celebrating her birthday, and triply exciting because one is coming all the way from Rome! Hurray for fencers! There'll also be a flurry of Cork madness at the end of October, when two Hurleys will descend on Barcelona, one from Madrid and the other from Strasbourg. There will be much eating of goodies and talk of lovely jumpers, and how sometimes.. When you're not wearing a jumper.. And it's quite late in the year.. You can get very cold.. Strange..

3. This month I'll also be leaving my apartment for a period of longer than a few hours - I managed to get return flights to Málaga to visit my Uncle for just €20, so I'll be in Manilva with him from the 15th to the 17th. How the Malagueños will take to someone from Barcelona we'll just have to see...!

4. I'll be taking another jaunt away from my apartment the following weekend, when I'll go home to Cork for the first time. This is something I'm really really excited about. I never expected to be such a homebird, especially in such a wonderful city, but I'm hoping a trip home will give me a bit of a reboost.. Seeing my friends and family will be awesome, and hopefully I can head back to Barcelona with renewed energy!

5. I have to register my subjects with the University before the 22nd of October, so I'll finally be an official student here. Which will mean proper access to their version of BlackBoard, the Campus Virtual. Also proper access to the library, the internet, and I'll be able to enroll at the gym, which means a return to fencing!

6. One of the UCC girls here is going to turn 21 on the 30th of the month, so that will at least mean a cake and some tapas, and the day after is Hallowe'en.. I'm not sure how or even if the Spanish celebrate Hallowe'en, but I'm certain we can think of some form of mischief to cause :)

7. Lastly, as much as I love hot summer weather, October is a good deal cooler than September. That doesn't necessarily mean I can't go to the beach or anything (I was there on Sunday after all!) but it does mean no more ridiculous sweaty metro journeys and being able to get to sleep easier at night, which is always nice :)

Happy October everyone!

Mercè and More

Last Wednesday Donnacha (boyfriend, mathematician, musician, buyer of sunflowers and wearer of nice jumpers) arrived in Barcelona. He came at a good time, considering it was firstly our three-year anniversary on Sunday, and secondly the Mercè festival was about to start in Barcelona.

From what I've gathered from official booklets, Wikipedia and actually witnessing it, the Mercè is the celebration of Barcelona's patron saint, Our Lady of Mercy. It runs from Thursday to Sunday, and this year involved a fireworks competition between different countries showcasing their finest pyrotechnics, light shows in the Parc de la Ciutadella every night, and a whole heap of free gigs. Oh, and a hell of a lot of fire.

On the first night, we went to see the gegants (big papier-mâché giants of a king, a queen, a dragon, a horse and the happiest-looking cow I've ever seen, among others) in the Plaza de Sant Jaume. It was relatively tame - just some big statues hopping around to a brass band really - it was at the finale that things really started to kick off. Sparklers and fireworks were set off in the square and the dragon started to breathe fire. Then, huge fireworks were set off from the top of the Presidencia de la Generalitat de Catalunya. Just when we were about to leave the square, a light show started. It's hard to describe, because I had never seen anything like it before, but essentially lights were projected onto the façade of the Presidencia, and it wasn't just lasers or anything - it was more like short animated films set to music. For example, it began with hundreds of multicoloured balloons swarming over a kid's drawing, then clearing but leaving enough balloons to spell out HOLA.. Then lights traced exactly the lines of the windows and doors and columns of the building, and then exploded into sparks. So it continued in this vein, and seriously, it was just completely awesome! We went on a bit of a wander, and picked up a few drinks, and went down towards Barceloneta to see what Canada could offer us in the way of fireworks (they were pretty decent). After a bit of banter down by the port, we thought to follow our stomachs to McDonald's and then our ears to a free jazz/swing style gig on the waterfront. After dancing ourselves silly we got the Metro home.

The next day we thought we'd see what was going on in Ciutadella. There were loads of activities for kids - face-painting and playground things, and magicians and the like. There was also a barbecue and lots of food and drink. It was a lovely afternoon, so a group of us hung out there for a little while before myself and Donnacha took off down the park to the zoo - we had been there before, but zoos are fun and this one is particularly good, so we took our time wandering around looking at bears and anteaters and monkeys (they had this one type of chimp and I actually had to leave, it was creeping me out so much, this knackery family was throwing food in to them and the chimps were clapping for food and holding out their hand for more, and they looked so bizarrely human..). That night we met up with my friends from UCC again at Ciutadella, where there were more light shows and the like, including these mad guys dressed up in eight-foot white light-up suits, so we passed a little time there before taking off to the Forum in an effort to see Goldfrapp (we only caught the last song, but we still maintain we saw Goldfrapp!).

Saturday was the big pull for me and Donnacha, in that Belle and Sebastian were playing for free at the old Estrella Damm factory. We met up with UCC people and a pile of new Erasmus friends and went for tapas. The group was pretty huge, so naturally we split into a few smaller groups. Donnacha, Mikhaila, Caroline and I went to Via Laietana to see the correfoc - the fire run. This is where they make the street look like hell, with giant gates set up outside the Jaume I Metro station, and groups with different dragons and monsters and hideous beasties of all kinds march through and the blow fire and fireworks all over the shop. I had bought a copy of Colm Tóibín's Homage to Barcelona, in which he describes the correfoc in the late 1970s, and nothing has changed at all, so I followed his example and watched from behind a Red Cross ambulance. Now, you'd think that this is merely standard procedure at any huge parade in a big city, but we genuinely saw about seven or eight people being treated for burns - some small enough on their arms, one really bad one on a girl's leg, and another really bad one on an arse.. Needless to say we were pretty thankful that we decided to watch from the steps of the cathedral rather than inside the crowd! After that we met up with Carina, another of the UCC girls, and went towards Belle and Sebastian. Seeing as this was an unfamiliar part of town to us, it was very easy to find - just follow the flow of people wearing thick glasses, skinny jeans, leather jackets and waistcoats. The hipsters lead us to a street that was as wide as any other street, and pretty much unremarkable except for two facts - one, the giant stage erected at the end, and two, the fact that the entire street was dubh le daoine. Seriously, you could barely move, and it was entirely jammers from the stage right down to the end of the street. B&S came onstage literally two seconds after we arrived, and played a really brilliant set (for those who are interested, highlights included Step Into My Office, Baby; Judy And The Dream Of Horses; Piazza, New York Catcher; I'm A Cuckoo and The Boy With The Arab Strap). Afterwards we made an effort to prolong the partying, but really couldn't find anything solid to do, so after an attempt to get down to the beach, we abandoned town for our cosy beds.

On Sunday Donnacha and I headed up the many, many steps of Montjuïc, one of the hills that overlooks Barcelona. We chilled out up there for a while before eating in one of Eixample's many, many wicked tapas cafés. In the evening I took him out to the airport, and met Mikhaila and Aoife in Plaza Espanya afterwards to see the closing fireworks - probably the best fireworks I've ever seen, going on noise and light and longevity and wonderful soundtracking (medley of Catalán covers of Beatles songs, anyone?).

And that had me wiped! I've been spending the week more or less catching up on sleep lost from three consecutive 3 o'clock bedtimes, as well as going to classes, hanging out with my new flatmate, taking a really nice stroll down the Ramblas and chilling by the port with a giant bar of Milka chocolate, and avoiding strikes like the plague. (A note on the strikes - all day yesterday basically everything was shut off across Spain in protest against new labour laws, pay cuts, later retirement, etc etc.. When I came out of the Plaza Catalunya Metro station this morning by Carrer de Pelai, protestors had covered this really beautiful building in yellow paint, anarchist symbols and graffiti about the vaga, which just adds to whatever disdain I already had for trade unions - whatever about the strikes and the recession, that vandalism was totally needless, even if that lovely building does house a bank..) This weekend I'm going to see what the story is with joining the gym, and I think there is a street festival in Sarrià and an air show-Erasmus meeting at the beach. And it's three weeks until I go home for the weekend! :)

Week One Down

So I've been living in Barcelona for exactly a week now, and a lot can happen in a week!

Firstly and most importantly, I found an apartment. It's in the Sant Gervasi neighbourhood, just three train stops from Plaza Catalunya, which is pretty sweet and means that I can leave the house fifteen minutes before a class starts and still be there on time! It's a three-bedroom apartment, and I share it with an American girl (who owns the apartment) and a Russian girl. Both are lovely, which is great. There are also some furry flatmates in the form of Milo the black pug, Softie the big ginger and white cat, and Riff Raff the little kitten who looks like a squirrel! It's a fun place to be, and a really pleasant place to come home to.

Secondly, I started college in the University of Barcelona on Monday morning. Because I'm an Erasmus student, I don't have to register my subjects until October, and because of that, I went to as many classes as I could in order to decide which would suit me best. After taking some cool things and some absolutely awful things, I settled on Contemporary Spanish Theatre, Political Theory and Comparative Political Systems. It's pretty hard to follow everything the lecturer talks about, but I'm sure it'll get easier as time goes on. The lecturers are also all really, really nice, so that makes it easier already. The other Erasmus students in the classes are also all really sound, and it's very easy to get talking to people because all international students want to speak Spanish and make friends, because of the basic fact that having friends is lovely, so that's cool.

Thirdly, I went out for the first time in Barcelona. Myself and two of my UCC friends went to a bar called Vallhalla, between Plaza Universidad and Plaza Catalunya, because we were invited to an Erasmus event on Facebook. So we naturally assumed it'd be a nice enough bar, where someone would be sitting with a European flag or at least some sort of a sign with ERASMUS on it.. But no.. Our first thought was that it was like the Bróg in Cork, but about a hundred times more scummy. The tables were sticky, the music was loud, the lights were low, and people had evidently spent many a good night in there picking the foam out of the seats. And not an Erasmus organiser-type in sight. After meeting two other confused-looking students, girls from Poland, we decided to stay for the laugh, and get some sangría, and have the chat.. So that we did. Now nobody can disagree that €2.50 is a good price for 700ml of sangría, but perhaps not when you take into consideration that it was served in a beer glass with a handle, and poured out of an unmarked plastic bottle that clearly used to hold Coke, and also tastes mank. All in good fun though, and the Polish girls' German friends soon arrived so that added even more to our number, so it turned out to be a pretty fun night after all!

Other than those key events, I've mostly been getting to grips with my neighbourhood, the metro, the city, cooking for myself, cleaning for myself, etc etc etc. It's going well. I like it, and I'm happy, and I'm hoping it'll just get better from here :)

This Is Not A Test

It is 7.23pm. The sun is making its merry way to setting for the night and is casting long shadows of trees on the softly lit fields in the distance. And I am listening to Gangsta's Paradise..

I'm in my brother's room, finally making some sort of effort towards packing. On Monday I leave for Barcelona for ten months of missing my friends and family and boyfriend, ten months of being thrown in the deep end of university classes through Spanish, ten months of dealing with continental European bureaucracy, ten months of cooking for myself and cleaning for myself and taking care of myself.

But cheer up Livi! My expectations of my Erasmus year have been built up to inordinate proportions over my two years of university education by fresh-faced newly-returned students gushing about how it was "the most amazing experience" of their life and how you meet "the most amazing people" and do "the most amazing things". Needless to say, I'm slightly sceptical that living in Barcelona won't be as amazing as they all say it will be. But we mustn't be cynical. What I'm hoping to get out of this year is a better understanding of the Spanish language and culture, some interesting and fun friends, and the opportunity to travel around Europe to visit other Erasmus friends. If I can get that much then I really think I'll return happy, which is the most anyone can hope for in general!

I set up this blog not just to keep people posted on what I'm up to, things which I hope are many and varied. It was actually my cousin Lucy's idea. In three weeks from today, Lucy will move to New York. The interesting thing is that when Lucy was my age, she moved to Barcelona for a year. So we're hoping to offer some sort of parallel starting afresh-themed viewpoints on life in cities internationally recognised as being big and exciting, by two girls from the same city nationally recognised as being small and exciting (at least in comparison to other Irish cities!). And I guess we also hope that people interested in what I'm up to will also be interested in what Lucy's up to, and vice versa.

I could promise you an amazing blog experience, but I think I've underlined the dangers of that, so the best I can wish you is happy reading :)