Just a few more photos. Dublin by day, mostly. A little St. Patrick’s Cathedral, a little Merrion Square Park, even a little Trinity College again. Also: You should be able to get the idea of what ‘quick weather changes’ mean around here.
Full Album on imgur, or embedded view here:
Don’t wonder: Those iOS6 panorama shots of Dublin will get here also, for sure!
I joined a few societies
The first few days of Fresher’s Week were amazing. They have student societies here, which are a big part of the extracurricular activities. Societies? They’re like clubs, small communities. There’s hockey socities, debating societies, a SciFi society, a pirate party society, there’s a society for everything. The deal is that during Fresher’s Week, every society wants you to sign up for it. It’s an average 4€ and, some offer discounts, others offer free booze, others bring in Hugh Laurie for a talk. That for itself is very interesting. In Hamburg, the orientation week (equivalent to Fresher’s Week) is totally centered on the class you’re doing. It’s intense, but despite meeting many, many people, it’s not that wide of a range of people. Especially the law students seemingly never completely lose that constrained point of view.
But I can only report from the perspective of an international student, my impression is that ‘regular’ new students are pretty much left alone by the university itself. ‘We’, though, have a wide range of institutions whose highest objective is to see to our very special needs to chose from. There’s a Student2Student mentor programme, the (general) international office, our faculty’s international office, an internatioal student tutor programme and two student’s union officers. Quite a lot.
There was a lovely Welcome Reception in the Dining Hall yesterday, quite classy.
Very interesting. And the second documentary by the BBC I link here. Chapeau!
The comparison to Lady Gaga towards the end really nails it. Rammstein or other ‘shocking’ artists really seem like ‘me-too’, considering what Bowie did. I mean, what is this? Bowie pulled this off:
Cover Art of his album "The Man Who Sold the World". I believe to use it under fair use.
I expected the wifi situation in Dublin to be good. And it is. Even the smallest café or shop you might spend more than 15 minutes in offers free wifi with a not necessarily great, but pretty decent downstream. But the average (!) household in my perception has a downstream of over 20 Mbit available. This is very different from Hamburg, or Germany in general. It really isn’t that hard, Germany should get there. But with phenomenons like the “Störerhaftung” (the operator of a wifi basically is responsible for what happens by use of his wifi), this isn’t gonna happen.
Which is a shame. And embarrassing for Germany.
They don’t seem to have PINs around here, and no activation of your SIM card is required. Which comes in very handy. The cost is okay, I think. I’m with Three at the moment, and I went for a 20€ top-up which comes with free data for one month, free SMS to every Irish number and free calls to other Three customers.
I had to ‘activate’ full mobile Internet access, though. Because, disguised as a ‘security feature’, websites with adult content are blocked. Websites like urbandictionary.com. A-hem.
Besides that, I’m more than satisfied. I’ve had like two minor connection hiccups since I’m here. Compared to Hamburg and O2 for a provider, that’s just incredible. And again, embarrassing. For O2, mostly.
