We finished our holiday at Crossogue on Sunday and Mark, the owner of Crossogue, drove us in to the Dublin airport as we had learned that all the trains were fully booked due to Dublin hosting the finals of the galic football games. After ariving home, we had Monday to recouperate before classes started on Tuesday. I wasn't nearly as sore as I thought I would be, thanks to some Arnica gell I took over with me!

Since then, its been classes and labs taking up inordanent amounts of time.  Hard to believe that four weeks have passed already.  This year's schedule is understandably the busiest yet with labs in micro and pathology four days a week.  We had our first exam in pathology last week; just a quick 26 question multiple choice test.  It's the only class which truly has "continuing assessment."  All the other classes, microbiology, parasitology, and pharmacology consider the two term exams as their continuing assessment.  As I figured, pharmacology seem like the most challenging class, partially because I have never had previous classes in the subject.  Its also the most difficult subject to study.  I wish they gave us more examples and cases to work through so we could use the material rather than just memorize it.

Thursday afternoons are probably the most entertaining of our classes.  The pathology professor gives post mortem demonstrations and we have a chance to see pathology in action.  The prof is hilarious, swearing in class, making jokes, and somehow making a boring subject almost fun.  He has tons of experience and loves collecting photos of strange specimens so his lectures are very case based.  Last week, he was talking about how to submit histology specimens in formalin and went on to say that alcohol could also be used as a preservative.  To prove his point, he set up an experiment with 6 different types of alcohol to see which would preserve the best.  One of the samples went into hard cider and after he filled the specimen container, he passed the open  bottle of cider around the class...no sense in wasting it!  We get to view slides made from all these samples in lab today.  Apparently, double strength gin has worked best in the past!

Although most of my time is spent in classes and studies, Tiff and I have managed to see a couple of movies recently.  We initially tried to see Oliver Twist, but it was sold out when we arrived so we changed to Pride and Prejudice.  Both of us really enjoyed the film.  It ended up being a much better movie than Oliver Twist, which we saw the next week.  Thankfully, films are one cheap form of entertainment in Glasgow.  Tiff and I both have our Orange as our mobile network and on Wednesdays they have a two for one promotion at the large theater downtown.  You just text in "film" to the number 241 and they send you a numerical voucher to show to the ticket person at the theater.  With our student discount, that comes to £1.75 each (about $3); less than a drink at the pub!

Our class this morning was canceled (of course we didn't find out till we were all in the classroom) due to the computer network being down.  All the profs use powerpoint for their lectures so with no computers he couldn't give his lecture.  It might have been nice if I'd brought study materials along, but I didn't plan on having much free time today so I only brought today's notes.  The computers are back up, so you can thank them for giving me a spare hour to write to you.