My Erasmus course. I wanted a course that had a clear explanation, a name that I can understand and a goal to aim at. I figured that if I spoke english for a week, I would probably improve especially my speaking skills and that is the target. And some writing too: that´s why this blog is also in english.

I chose Dublin because I knew so little about Ireland: Guinness, a weird accent in english (and that wasn´t even true!) and the green colour for some reason. And the shamrock. Also I knew that I would probably never visit here on my own or with the family.

I arrived in Dublin at sunday morning. The flight was delayed because of strong winds and there was no serving on the flight, the turbulence was so heavy. But after a bumpy landing I found the right bus to the city and made it to the hotel. Sunday was sunny and warm and I walked around the city and visited The national museum of archeology. I tried to read every interesting sign next to the objects I saw, but I think I wouldn´t have understood everything even written in finnish. But there was some interesting Viking stuff, dreadful bog bodies and lots of amazing golden pieces, jewellery and other artifacts.



Monday

My hotel is near the Europass Teacher Academy and I found there easily. In my course there are participants from Hungary, Italy, France, Germany, Czech and another Finn too (we might have spoken finnish every time we chatted just the two of us...).

We started the day by some communication activities to get to know the others. Luckily I found out that I can manage with my english and that the tasks were easy and fun. We also got some tips for spending time in Dublin but if I´m about to complete the course I will have to pass many interesting sights here.

We did also an exercise called language portrait. We needed to think about all the languages we can speak or understand or just have some relation to and then place the language somewhere in our body. I didn´t quite understand the ”where does the language feel at in your body” -thing (I don´t have any languages in my stomach for instance), but all and all it was a nice task and we talked a lot.

Today there was a food fair too. All the participants had brought some food from their countries and we got to taste them. I loved the Greeks table :) I brought salmiakki, Fazerin sininen and rye chips. And guess what, the other Finn had brought exactly the same products!

After the lessons we got to go to a two hour walking tour with a guide. She was fabulous and told us many interesting and funny facts about Dublin. After todays training and the tour I have learned a great deal about Ireland and its culture. But I´m still not sure where does all the green colour come from. They said it might be the shamrock or just the fact that it´s green here because of all the raining. And it sure did rain today. The whole day!

If someone made it through here I will tell you: I´m not going to write this much every day!