University College Cork (UCC)

I was lucky to find some nice housemates and we rented a quite big perfectly equipped house, located in Sunday's Well and with a wonderful view to the River Lee. The distance to UCC was - in the eyes of our Irish fellows - quite big: 15 min walk to the Main Quadrangle.

Don't miss the Cork Jazz Festival (I think it's at the end of October). Concerts all over the place, in cafes, bars and pubs, and everything for free (except for the drinks, of course). Favourite places to go: Bars: Reardens (on Washington) and An Borg (on Oliver Plunkett); Nightclubs: Sir Henrys (on Grande Parade) and Gorbys (on Oliver Plunkett); Pubs: The Bodega (on Cornmarket), Rosie O'Gradys (on North Main) and the New College Bar on campus;

Place you HAVE to go to: Killarney, Dingle, Galway, Cliffs of Moher, Blarney Castle (Kiss the stone!), Cobh. UCC offers a relaxing atmosphere for your stay as an international student. Enjoy the time there! If you want to get into some media stuff, apply for an internship with Cork Campus Radio. You will be selected on the basis of an application form and an interview with the station manager. You'll learn a lot and it is great fun! (Say hello to Kieran, he is one of the fulltime staff there.) Search for the computer labs in the Food Science Building. They usually have the best machines and fastest internet access. If somebody of the staff is asking, just pretend to be a student at the department. Be careful with Cork's hairdressers!

The Irish (especially the Cork accent) is beautiful but hard to understand at the beginning. It is not that stiff as the British one and not that broad as the American. All in all a good and friendly mixture. Forget about the "th" by the way. No Corkian pronounces it! Since it was kind of difficult to get to know a lot Irish students and I was dealing mostly with other international students (Spanish, Italian, French...), we had to be careful not to adopt each other's mistakes and create a kind of "foreign English". Cork's inhabitants are extremely friendly, especially the elderly. It often happened to me, that an old man or woman just started a pleasant conversation on any topic (e.g. in the supermarket, on my way to UCC etc.), unobtrusive and kind of charming.

Keep an eye on the costs for heating and electricity and agree on fixed regulations with your landlord. Normally they don't have seperate electric meter, so sometimes they just estimate the costs, which might be good for their purses but not yours!