Touching Mummies, Seeing Plays, and More!

On Wednesday, I had two field trips for my Contemporary Irish Society class.  In the morning, we went to Collins Barracks, which has exhibitions of Irish military history.  It was interesting; I saw some planes they used and uniforms they wore.  Also I played with rifles.  It's okay, they weren't real.

The outside of Collins Barracks.

Then we walked to St. Michan's Church, which is actually a Protestant church.  It had a large organ inside.  We then went below the church, where there are crypts where real dead people are buried!  In the first crypt I saw actual skulls.  Then, we went to anther crypt, where there were mummified bodies.  A couple were 400 years old, but were very tall for the time, and had to have their feet cut off so they could fit into the standardized coffins.  One mummy was 800 years old and was in the Crusades.  It's amazing that it is still preserved today.  We were actually allowed to touch the 800 year old mummy's finger, which was surprising smooth (probably from being touched so much).  It's supposed to bring good luck.  Not going to lie, it was a little creepy to not only be touching a dead person, but also one that is an 800 year old mummy.  But I figured I would probably not get another chance to do that again so I went for it.

The organ in St. Michan's Church of Ireland.

Two skulls- a little hard to see due to the camera's flash.

The mummies.  The one laying horizontally in the back is the 800 year old crusader I touched.  From left to right laying vertically are a nun, a male thief, and an unknown female.

That afternoon, I had a presentation for my Ethics in Healthcare class.  My topic was on patient confidentiality, and my case focused on a man who refused to tell his wife he had HIV.  I felt okay doing it, which is good because usually presentations make me pretty nervous.  But it feels really good to get it out of the way, especially since it counts for 20% of that class's grade.

Later that night, we went to a play called "The Night Alive" at the Gaiety Theatre.  It was an interesting tale, with a unique spin on the typical man-meets-woman storyline.  It was a little hard to follow at times because I'm not quite sure I understood all the humor, and it was a little difficult to understand what they were saying sometimes due to the accents (which usually isn't an issue for me), but I got the gist of it.  It was a little weird, but the acting was good and I enjoyed it.

The Gaiety Theatre- very fancy decor.

On Thursday I had two field trips for my Ethics in Healthcare class.  The first was at this really nice hotel.  It was actually part of the 1st Clinical Trail Methodology Symposium, which is kind of a big deal.  They were so nice to us; they had name badges and booklets for us.  The speaker we saw was a really important guy, Sir Iain Chalmers (he was knighted!), and he spoke about research.  Unfortunately for me, most of it was way over my head.

We then had about 5 hours to kill until our next lecture, so we went to a cafe near the Gaiety Theatre where there was not only tea and food, but also free wifi (very important when you don't have data on your phone).  I had brought my laptop, so I worked on a paper that's due next week.  I drank some lovely infused tea, named "Little Buddha" and had a "quesadilla" for dinner.  It's very funny what is referred to as a quesadilla here.  I had one at the bar on campus the first night I was in Ireland and it was not Mexican, as it claimed to be, at all.  It was more like a cross between pizza and quesadilla. The one I had at the cafe was also not like a quesadilla- it had pesto in it, and the cheese wasn't melted.  It was alright, but I'm not sure how well the concepts of "quesadillas" and "Mexican" are understood here.

Later we went to another presentation at Trinity College.  This was my first time in Trinity, which was cool because the architecture (for the most part) is really nice, and very unlike the modernity of DCU.  This presentation was on Doctors without Borders (MSF), which is an organization I have always thought was awesome.  The doctor who spoke had been on 5 missions with MSF, including one to Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak last fall.  It was a really interesting presentation, and I'm glad I was able to go to it even though I don't go to Trinity.

Today I went to Oktoberfest (Dublin's version, of course) and tomorrow I am going to Howth, but I'll include those in my next post!