Pasta and Laundry, I Really am Living Here

It is official. as of yesterday I finally realized I am living in Northern Ireland for a semester. it only took a week and one day of being here but there was just something about doing laundry in my new home that made it hit. there was no crying, homesickness, or loss of consciousness. it was just a feeling of, in my best words, "Oh Boy...". Oh boy, i need to go shopping. Oh boy, I should get some of the ridiculous amount of reading i need to do done. Oh boy, i am cooking a pasta dinner tonight and really don't know how to cook a pasta dinner. yea that last one was probably the most scary. Laundry here is a bit different too in that there is really no dryers. at our house if it is nice out, you put your stuff on the clothes line in the "back yard"(more like back alley). if it is not so nice out, you put your things in the "Hot room". don't be fooled this room is actually really hot. it holds the water heater of the house so it is like a sauna and after putting your clothes in there on the drying racks, you yourself feel like you need to be hung out to dry as you are sweating up a storm. it is also where our host family makes their own wine at. actually a really cool process that our host dad showed us the other night as we were eating dinner.

Cooking is a whole different thing from back home. our family doesn't have the conventional oven and burner set up. oh no, they instead have a thing that i believe is called a "range". it is on all the time and it works from burning oil very slowly. it actually serves two purposes, one being that you put stuff on top of it and it cooks it, and two being that it heats the house to a certain extent. very cool. except Josh and I had no idea how to use it to cook our pasta. it is not like we can change the temperature of the thing. So as Josh boiled the noodles I browned the meet and then added the pasta sauce and had to keep taking the sauce off the burner and then putting it back on as the noodles were taking especially long to cook for some reason. after pouring ourselves glasses of our new favorite juice(tesco brand orange juice that is carbonated!!!) we sat down and enjoyed our immense amount of food. we had no idea that we had cooked that much! we now safely have leftovers for the next 3 evening and wont have to cook again until Monday!! this is working out perfectly, plus the fact that we only used half the noodles and meet so if we just go and get sauce we are set for another Delicious pasta night!!

As the weekend is approaching though we are all trying to figure out what we are going to do. some of the group wants to go to the Ulster American Folk Park which is apparently really cool plus one of the host families is performing musically at the part this weekend for a festival. I know that Josh and I are looking to go to a Rugby or Gaelic Football match sometime during our stay but we are still trying to figure out the busing situation here in Derry. it all seems so foreign even though we have the exact same thing back home.