Peace & Conflict in Northern Ireland

It is currently Sunday, May 28th, and this will be the final blog post for our trip.  All we have left is a group dinner at The Norseman and making our flight tomorrow morning back to Chicago.  If we believe the step tracker on my phone, I've walked 172,327 total steps on this trip (with the highest day clocking in at 18,785).  I think I speak for the entire group when I say we all learned a lot in the course, both in educational settings and in less formal discussions and conversations with those who live here.  I also think it's fair to say that the students all learned something about themselves on this journey.  By the way, they have been amazing, and I want to thank them for being (mostly) on time, always making curfew, and for generally following the rules we put in place to ensure everyone's safety and my sanity.  A special thanks to my wife Jennifer for her excellent navigational skills and remembering to count students on a regular basis so we didn...

The day has finally arrived! This is the one day that we have absolutely nothing planned as a group so the entire day is our to explore the city of Dublin. However, a hiccup occurred with the sightseeing bus so we had to trek to the bus at 9am in order to get our individual tickets for the day. Once that mission was accomplished we boarded the bus and began our tour of the city. Me and two of my fellow travelers spent about an hour on the bus, gazing at the sights. Dublin is by far the most crowded city we’ve seen so the bus was completely full. Our view on the top of the bus let us see sights such as Phoenix Park, The Guinness Storehouse, and the many bridges that cross the river Liffey and connect the North and South sides. What stood out to me about Dublin was the fact that the buildings aren’t the typical skyscraper one would find in larger cities. Rather, the ambiance and liveliness of the city seems to come from the people and the closeness of the city rather than from the busine...