Travelogged: Carlow and Moving to Dunmore-East

Sunday early afternoon we arrived at the Carlow train station. The train we were on was just a commuter stop so we had about 2 minutes to get all 23 of us off with all our bags. Needless to say we had to rush to get out of the way and cause a lot of problems getting bags down. We had a fairly long walk to our guesthouse which maybe would have been shorter but we were hauling everything we owned. The place we were staying at in Carlow was called the Carlow Guesthouse and was a 10 min walk from downtown Carlow and about 20 minutes from Carlow Institute of Technology. We were staying 3 to a room there and its amazing quality! We had breakfast every morning, which is your choice of eggs and sausage or bacon and tea and coffee made for you. So much better than the hostel breakfast! Once we settled in, we went out into town, but since it was Sunday there wasn’t much open. We settled on a local pub to grab an amazing dinner of sweet chili (which has become my favorite flavoring here, the Doritos chili heatwave flavor is to die for) wings and pulled pork! It was a short night after that because of all the travelling.

Our Breakfast at Carlow

Monday morning we had our Irish breakfast and then had a van pick us up at the Guesthouse and drop us off at Carlow Institute of Technology. So in Industrial Design there is an unequal ratio of men to woman in the workforce with men always outweighing the women, I’ve never really experienced that type of ratio at Auburn because we actually have more girls than guys in our graduating class for my year. At Carlow, I got to really experience the ratio. In Product Design there they have a class of maybe around 30 people with two girls total! We were given some time to chat and meet each other, and by far these students have been the easiest to talk too. They wanted to know what we’ve learned, what we were interested in doing, and what else we had seen while in Ireland. The professors then split us up into teams of two Auburn students and two Irish students, like before. This time was with Bekah from our group, and Matt and Eoghan (yep that’s another one said like Owen) from Carlow IT. Our job this half week was to observe and record how users interact with and use objects near ATMs. Now we had a talk on ethics so we know how controversial this was, but none of us were close enough to an ATM to see anything. We all played the observer role across the street or at a café half a block away to ensure that the customers had safety in their bank records. We as a group drew up or game plan and decided to start observing on Tuesday in a nearby city called Kilkenny. That night we ventured out again to downtown only to find most places to eat closed again and found ourselves eating Greek gyros for a cheap amount of euros that actually turned out to be pretty good!

Carlow IT's logo

Tuesday we did breakfast early and quickly to get to school around 9 am. Matt drove us about 30 min to Kilkenny and we ranged in lots of topics on the way there. Side note: Since the driver side is on the right side of the car it was interesting to see Matt drive with a stick shift backwards from what I’m used to. Made me wonder if the pedals were the same orientation or different as well. One more observation was that the speedometer was in miles per hour while the road signs were in kilometers per hour. When I asked about it, someone said they mostly just know the conversions and that the signs used to be mph years ago. Anyways Kilkenny is a bit larger than Carlow in size, and has a castle right in the middle of town. We walked away from it to a square off of a good shopping area to find a café called Bollards in order to observe ATM users. We all joked it felt James Bond, but it was fun. For instance, I found a lot of older people are more worried about the safety of their pins i.e. putting their hands over the pad while typing, but are the most impatient out of the age groups to get their card and money. Or the fact that almost no one put their money away at the ATM, and rather walked away while putting things away or stopped further down the road to put money away. We left town after getting all our recordings pretty quickly because we had a lot of paperwork to do before Wednesday. After a lunch break, we did all the work on the sheets we needed to have done and put our key observations on the wall for the next day. We walked back to the Guesthouse to get a small break before heading back out again to get dinner. Again as apparently Carlow restaurants do not open earlier on in the week, we had very few options we ended up getting Chinese take away and went walk to the Guesthouse to eat around reruns of How I Met Your Mother. I know, I know we live the crazy life!

Bekah, Myself, Matt, and Eoghan ( who didn't realize we were taking a picture!)

Wednesday started again like the days have been, Irish breakfast and van drop-off at the school. We had presentations of our findings in our groups, which went well enough. It wasn’t hard but it was fun to hear how everyone else went about creeping around observing. After that we had a history lecture from our Industrial Design History class played in the room, where the Irish students didn’t have to come but did anyway. I’m not sure they had too much fun, but some insisted it was better than nothing. We had a break after the lecture to go to lunch which was mostly uneventful except for a trip to the pharmacy for anti-histamines for an allergic reaction to nuts for my friend who realized her mistake right after she bit into her sandwich. We had such a big break that even after that we had an hour before we had to be back at school so we walked to the Penneys nearby. Penneys is a magical place where everything is inexpensive and made with quality that is better than what the prices make it seem. I bought a couple little things and we made our way back to school after that. What we sat through was a 2 our lecture series from 5 graduates on “Design Thinking”. It was interesting, and all 5 people had very different approaches which was refreshing. From school, we took a van home because of the rain and got back to the Guesthouse before it started raining too hard. In order to avoid walking into town in the rain, four of us pitched in to order some pizzas and have them delivered. It was a great decision!

Today was interesting to say the least. We had breakfast as usual, and got ready to leave the Guesthouse when we had a change of plans. One boy in our group got trashed the night before, and another boy from our group decided to wheel him home in a cart from the nearest grocery store. It was fine until they decided to leave the cart right outside the door to the Guesthouse for our professor to find and question everyone about. What he decided was a good punishment for the boys was to have everyone, instead of walking to the train station with all our bags, walk the 10 minutes back the grocery store with all of our bags to return the cart and then walk to the train station. It was brutal. Getting on the train and sitting down was a welcome break and probably the best feeling I’ve had all day. The ride to Waterford was about an hour, and from there we were picked up and driven about 13 miles to Dunmore-East which is on the very edge of Ireland on the east coast near the water. We are staying in a beautiful hotel, and the room that I am sharing with my friend Ashley has a beautiful view of the water. We quickly put our bags down and then went to explore the cliffs in the park across from the hotel. We then went down the coast a bit away from town to the entrance of the beach where we collected shells and sea glass and played fetch with some local dogs. Our final stop was getting lunch/dinner at a nearby café, which was a good way to end our day out before heading back to the hotel. Later on we just grabbed some beer and dessert for a snack and played cards until we had to leave the sitting area. Dunmore-East is going to be our “Spring Break” destination at the beach, and we don’t have school besides the lectures we have to sit through! Good way to start off our crazy schedule of moving every couple of days!

Note: Today is actually Friday, but the wifi in the hotel we are staying at isn't the greatest and I couldn't get the blog to go up yesterday! Read the last paragraph as if it was Thursday!