Looking into possible excursion ideas for next summer.

Poststructural Pub
1

Alright, so I’ve been poking around trying to get some ideas of what I can do next summer and how I can do it. I would like, if at all possible, to go to Ireland. My school has some kind of strange program where we would travel with professors from our school and they’d teach us stuff, in addition to seeing all the typical sights. I don’t like this idea because, in addition to be outrageously expensive (something like $15,000 plus tuition), it just doesn’t feel very… real.

So, I’ve looked down other avenues. The most attractive thing I’ve seen is staying with a host family, and there’s plenty of websites where people can register to advertise that they are accepting international boarders and whatnot. The prices are more reasonable than the school-sponsored summer program, but I don’t know what rent typically runs in Ireland, so I have no way of knowing if these kinds of programs are worthwhile. There’s a couple around Galway that are charging 245 Euro (312 dollars) per week, meals included. This seems to be the going rate. I particularly like this couple because they put up a picture in which the wife is playing a fiddle and the husband a bouzouki.

Anyway, I’m just fishing for impressions and ideas, here. Is this something I should continue to look into, or are there better ways of going about this? Maybe I should just attend an Irish school for a semester, rather than going over the summer?

2

Here’s one way: get a job, save your money, travel cheap by staying in youth hostels and hitching as much as possible.

djm

3

Cheap excursion=walk to pub :wink:

4

Hiya C,

I spent three months in Ireland in summer 2003; feel free to email me.

I think the best way for you to start is to decide what you want to do/see while you’re in Ireland, and build from there. For me, I wanted it to be a language and music excursion, so I attended three music festivals (Willie Clancy, Feakle, and Kilrush, and accidentally found the Ballyshannon one) and enrolled in six weeks of Irish language classes at Oideas Gael in Donegal. For transport, most of the time I used Bus Eireann (which was actually pretty good) and occasionally got lifts with people I knew (not hitching, though I was tempted sometimes). I spent a week on the Aran Islands and a week in London to round it all off, and I think it cost me about $5K all told. When I wasn’t staying at the Oideals Gael accommodation I was in hostels. You can see some (now probably out of date) information on hostels and stuff at my travel homepage, click the button on my post.