Walk This Way

So then there was Thursday (the day of our much awaited Yeats trip.)... Needless to say this week was gonna be a busy one! After registration in the 2nd Year Mall we hopped onto our bus and headed into town (which lead to me mostly being lead around and following others due to a complete lack of spacial awareness). For our group the National Gallery of Ireland was the first stop. Naturally we began at the exhibition of Jack B. Yeats who was a fantastic artist (making the Yeats family one of the most talented families of the 20th Century in my opinion.) This was by far my favorite piece on display:

Grief- Jack B. Yeats. Source: artlisdoon.blogspot.com

We then had time to take a quick look at a Picasso painting (Still Life with a Mandolin, 1924) 

I really liked something about the impressionism of Picasso's piece. It was so stylistically innovative in comparison to any other art I'm aware of that dates from the 1920's. 

After our artistic beginning to the morning we headed to the National Museum of Ireland on Kildare Street to visit (in particular) the Bog Bodies exhibition which had inspired the poetry of the late Seamus Heaney. The exhibition was very interesting and the helpful curators talked us through the process involved in preserving the bodies and gave us information that they had discovered during their research. 

Source:irisharchaeology.ie 

We then moved onto the National Library of Ireland, to see the Yeats exhibit that they had there. There was an interesting area where you could listen to poems being dictated by famous or significant people affiliated with Yeats. Here we were able to have a nice conversation with the very friendly guide and find out more about the Yeats family, including the fact that Yeats received average grades in English in secondary school.

We had the chance then to have lunch on Grafton Street and we headed around the bookshops for what was pretty much the remainder of our lunchtime.

Spin The Black Circle

Today we went on a trip to IIT Tallaght to watch a demonstration in honour of great scientific innovation- this being science week. First we went into the bio-chem labs where we were talked through the mechanical processes that must be taken when preparing samples. We were also talked through the interesting research the lab was doing regarding the lack of vitamin K in new born infants- it involved checking feces samples... but y'know- SCIENCE!

http://gingerhaze.com/nimona

 Then we had a bit of a fainting incident which was a little scary, and we had to make our way from the crowded little laboratory to give poor Lauren some breathing space. Then it was on to a rather interesting demo of experiments that illustrated a simplified version of the major scientific breakthroughs of Galileo and Boyle-to name but a few.
It also involved a rather scary explosion of a balloon- we were asked to guess if it was hydrogen or helium.... it was hydrogen which went like this:
Kaboom
 Then we had lunch in Liffey Valley, which was nice. We then went on a hunt to the resident music shop. We spent all of our time choosing which ten vinyls and CD's we would take with us if we were stuck on a desert island.

Chloe Dancer

Yesterday was our first Zumba lesson in the hall. I won't lie, Zumba (or any form of dancing for that matter) is not exactly my area of expertise. The dancing was quite funny though, and the ridiculousness of everybody's attempt at 'busting moves' made it clear that diving in head first and giving it a shot was the only way to go about it. However, I've been dealing with a little niggling cold for about a week now and during the dance I got a nose bleed (which is a regular cold symptom for me) so I had to spend a few minutes shoving tissues up my nose before making my epic return to the dance routine.

Source:naas.olx.ie

To be completely honest I had images of us being the teenagers in those street-dance films that come into cinemas every summer, where there's a social tensions between the different classes of dance. They usually look like this:

Source:background-pictures.feedio.net

I'm looking forward to adjudicating a mace debating competition tomorrow. So hopefully that will be interesting.