Top Of The Mornin' To Ya!

I have made it to Northern Ireland! NOT to be confused with Ireland.  Found that out as soon as I got here.  So without really knowing it, I've just been to two countries! ;)

I'm here in Northern Ireland for the next two months, working as an outdoor activity instructor for a camp!  It's been great fun so far.  I'm part of a summer team, of 9 volunteers.  3 from Czech Republic, 2 from New Zealand, 1 from Hungary, 2 from Northern Ireland, and 1 from the US (moi).  There's some other volunteers here as well, but they're here for a whole year!  Everyone here is great - it's been so fun making new friends from so many places :)

This past week and next week consists of training for summer camp.  We have so far been training on archery, team ropes courses, scavenger hunts, blind trails (leading the kids blindly around, while a "leader" tells them safety precautions a they go), and shallow bouldering (walking through rivers, over boulders and up waterfalls and into pools of water).  For training, so far, we have mostly just been pretending as if we were the kids and the directors have been leading the sessions.  As we go, we still are kinda the kids, but get to play the director part in leading part of the session.

We live in a beautiful area of Northern Ireland, right in Newcastle.  It's a cute, quaint resort town with a beach and some "mountains" nearby. ;) They're more like hills, but at least it's better than nothing!  And the town has a good amount of ice cream parlours along the main street of town! WAHOOOO!!!  Haha I went with one of the volunteers down to get some ice cream last night and it sure is tasty!!  And then we sat on the beach and ate our ice cream and watched the sunset.  It was beautiful!  And I just couldn't believe that I was there, in Northern Ireland, just chilling, watching the sunset on the ocean, while eating ice cream.  It was perfect. :)

My allergies have been extremely bad here.  I've never had allergies really before (except at my family reunions while catching snakes!), but here, I am never not sneezing or blowing my nose!  It's bad.  But I'm starting to catch on that it flares when I'm in the grass or stung by nettle.  Sooooo I'm staying away from that as best as I can!

I went to a pub for the first time in my life!  Haha!  That was fun!  I went to socialize, while the others did their things at the pub.  But I did end up joining in the pool playing that was going on!  I teamed up with a volunteer from France and we ended up doing pretty well, if I do say so myself ;) Team Luck. That was our name.  Haha!  And then we went again to the pub.  Two times in one week - that's definitely a record for me. This time around however, we I didn't do too well at pool.  But we still had a good time :)

The other day we went to the beach after a scavenger hunt in town.  While we were in the water, someone had taken my bag and then dropped it or just threw it into a big pool of water near to where we had put all our stuff.  My phone was the unlucky piece of that bag that got wet.  Sooo it's currently sitting in some rice while I'm praying that it will be okay!  Pray with me, will ya?? :)

I also got to go to church today!  The ward was so friendly!  And a wonderfully nice family took me to church, a 40 minute drive.  That was a huge blessing!

Because we have been so busy with trainings every day all day, I haven't been able to take many pictures.  And I don't have access to them anyways now because of the incident at the beach.

Besides this picture... view from Greenhill YMCA, sunset on the beach :)

But I'll be visiting places around Ireland, so hopefully my blog posts will be a tad more interesting as time goes on :) However, for these first two weeks, I'll be just talking about training. So bear with me!

Peace and Blessings! ;)