England and its Neighbours...

...was awesome. Excellent lecturers, who were engaged and interesting and interested and lively and told good stories. I made good friends in my tutorial, even though they were few and far between. The format was the best of any I'd had. Two people would each have to present on a topic for ten minutes, and had to do extra reading for that. Everyone else had to read the primary sources, which was always a reasonable amount and usually interesting by themselves. We always had good conversations going, just all around an excellent course. My favourite by far.

Central and Eastern European Studies...

... was a mixed bag. I had lot's of fun with my tutorial group, and the lecture hall as a whole (those who showed up at least), but for the most part the lecturers were lacking. The men were great -- they were interesting, interested, excited, full of stories, of life, engaging. The women left much to be desired. They droned on, seemed to have no interest in what they were saying, and it was a struggle to get through lectures. But at least the material went deep into the subject matter! It was for the same time period as Economic and Social History, World War One-ish to the early ninties, covering a similar geographic area, looking at politics, economics, society, gender, environment, art, etc., about an area I knew nothing about. So that was good.

Economic and Social History...

... was my least favourite course this semester. It covered from World War One to the Eighties, with some residiual tails into the Nineties and the Naughts. It seemed like such a surface look at things, and the economic side was especially lacking, no more than 'things were good, things were bad, things were very bad.' I didn't really meet anyone in the tutorial, and honestly I can't remember much of what happened in them.

Dublin

Hi blog, long time no see! I'll be trying to play catch-up for a while; today will be about Dublin, because I promised you that a while back.

Dublin was a slight disapointment. It was basically JustAnotherCity, nice, fun, but not spectacular. And expensive - everything is priced and pricy. Even the two cathedrals, St Patrick's and Christ Church charged for entry.