I’ve been very busy this past month! I’ve mainly been focused on my schoolwork this month, so I haven’t traveled as much as I was last month, but it’s reading week which is basically a weeklong break where students can catch up on their schoolwork or travel around. I’m planning on going to London for a couple days and go out to Southend-on-Sea (where some of my family is from!) to explore as both have some cool attractions to check out. I did manage to go out to Dublin for a day and met up with some people in the Jewish community there that I’m hoped to meet up with again for Hanukkah in December (which is a week in early December before I come back to the States). I didn’t stay long in Dublin as I was there for business, but I do plan on going back just to explore more of the city. Another upcoming trip that I’m taking is up to Derry/London Derry with my anthropology class to tour the peace walls in the city and go to the Free Derry Museum; which is the second largest city in Northern Ireland and where quite a bit of the unrest and militarism was in the Troubles during the 1970s to 1990’s.

However, I have still been walking around Belfast and doing new, interesting things as I’ve started going to a class that teaches Bodhran which is a frame drum that is used in most Celtic music that has a open back where you put your hand to hold on to it and you use a tipper (or beater) along with it. Think of it like a drum stick but a little bit shorter and has round ends. I’ve only been to one class so far but I enjoyed it so I’ll probably keep going until I come back home and might even get my own Bodhran!

I did also finally get out to the Giant’s Causeway! Which was absolutely gorgeous and worth the trek of getting out there, I was afraid that it was going to rain, but it just ended up being cloudy so that was good! I’ll attach the pictures of the causeway to this email. But the causeway itself is dates all the way back to Pangaea when it formed after centuries for tectonic plates moving the continents to where they are now, so when you go, you’re walking on rock formations (which look like hexagonal rock columns) from nearly 60 million years ago! That fact honestly really doesn’t hit you until after you’ve been; to realize that you’ve walked on land formations millions upon millions of years older than you is weird but fascinating feeling. I fully recommend everyone who visits Northern Ireland to make the time to go to the causeway, as there’s even folk tales that giants lived on the coast and during a fight one of them tore apart the coast thus creating the Giant’s Causeway.