Newgrange

The weekend before last i went to New Grange. It is a 5000 year old tomb! It was a bit of a bus ride to get there but as you can see from the pictures it was a beautiful day!

This outer wall was actually rebuilt from the original building material in the 1960's though a process called reverse architecture ( If I have remembered correctly)
The New Grange sight and the other smaller tombs around it are just in the middle of a bunch of farm fields.
Some of the large rocks around the outer edge have carvings still visible on them. The stone leading to the entrance is apparently very famous for its carvings (below). The docent claimed there were 3 interpretations for the carvings on the entrance stone. One is that it is a map of the Boyne valley where Newgrange sits. Another is that the swirls represent the shortening days of winter before the winter solace and the lengthening of days after. The final interpretations is that the ancient people of the Boyne valley were just high on some sort of natural drug : p. I think this last hypothesis is a bit of a cop out. But none the less amusing to consider.


What Newgrange is most famous for is this light box at the entrance. On the winter solstace (if it is sunny!) sunlight shines through the box and up a 20 or so foot tunnel and light up the inside room. We got to acyually walk inside and they had a demonstration of what it would look like by using electric lights. It was pretty impressive since the tomb is pitch black otherwise.

I went with several other interns from Trinity. From left to right: Kong, Tornique, Michelle, Scott, and David.


While waiting for our bus to arrive we went into the visitors center. It was very artistically done.
Overall it was a fun trip

Work

So it's time to say a little bit about the actual internship I am doing at Trinity now that I have settled in a bit. Trinity hall is a beautiful campus with lots of lovely old architecture. The actual building I work in however, is quite new. It was completed about 3 years ago. The building is kind of wedge shaped. It is called CRANN (I can't remember the acronym but it involves the word nano) My research group has a small lab on the fourth floor. This is where I prepare most of my samples before I take measurements on them. Most of my group is Italian. One of the post-docs is Irish but the Italians have given him an Italian sounding nick-name by changing his last name (Flavin) to Flavinio. There are all very welcoming and lots of fun to work with. So far most of my work has been on spectroscopy. I am looking at a molecule which switches in the presence of UV light. It is pretty cool because you can actually see the solution change from clear to purple after a UV light is placed next to the sample. In oreder to analyze this property in different solvents and see how it affects other molcules I use two machines. One which analyzes the absorption of samples and one which measures emission of the samples after they have been excited with a specific wavelength of light.
This is the view from the lab. Below are the machine I use to take emission spectra with and the box where I carry all my supplies from the lab to the instrument room

Inis Oirr-the island of rain and rocks

Last weekend I got up early on Saturday morning in the Snoozles hostel in Galway. I took a bus up to the pier and got on a ferry to the Island of Inis Oirr.














As we arrived on the Island it began to rain. I didn't mind so much since I actually haven't seen too much rain since I got here. We had some lovely soup and thick brown bread for lunch in a pub. Then we started our hike around the island. There were so many rocks! I have never seen so many rocks in my life! The two irish interns who were with us both hhad a different explanation for why there were so many rock walls. ( Some walls fenced of fields that were more rock than gress.) One intern said that the land just got more and more divided up as sons inherited land. The other said that during the famine there weren't enough jobs so people just got paid to build rock walls. Either way there were a lot of them.

Laundry

Given that Ireland is known for its rainy weather I wouldn't have thought that hanging your laundry out to dry would be very popular. However I seem to see them everywhere. The first picture was taken in Doolin on a reasonably sunny day so it didn't seem to strange. However the next 2 pictures were taken in the ouring rain of Inis Oirr. I have even seen laundry lines near the city center of Dublin. My favorite clothes lines were the ones that seem to be in each stone walled backyard of the houses along the train tracks.

The Cliffs of Moher

Wow! O my goodness! Wow! Soooo beautiful! That was pretty much most of what I said during the 2 hour walk we took along the Cliffs starting from Doolin. I hope my pictures can give you a taste of how beautiful this place is. It is a place too beautiful for words. We were lucky to have a beautiful sunny day to see them.