Back in the Homeland for Easter

It's Easter!  Which means I have four weeks off from school.  Last Easter on my break I went lambing.  This Easter I decided to come home and do 3 weeks of clinical EMS placements.

I flew home last Saturday after an exam on Friday.  I brought my camera home because I wanted to try and see if my new learned techniques from my photo tour would help me get some nice pictures at home.  So as always, my dogs were my models.

Finally a picture of Mars with his eyes open!

They stopped mid play to look at me - notice the wild hair from rolling in the grass!

Sunday I drove to the Ottawa area with my mom.  We stopped in at my Grandma's for dinner.  I then carried on and left my mom there so she could spend the week visiting.  I headed over to a cousin's place where I am staying for three weeks while I complete my placements.

For the first week of placements I worked in the small animal hospital.  The week started off quite exciting getting to see a caesarian section on a cat.  As the week continued on I got to see a lot of really interesting cases including a foreign body removal, a couple hit by car cases and lots of different x-rays (one of which I successfully positioned and imaged myself).  They let me do quite a lot of hands on stuff as well including TPRs (Temperature, Pulse [heart rate] and respiration rate) on anesthetized animals, put in a couple catheters, take blood samples, 1.5 cat neuters and most excitingly scrub in and be an extra set of hands for the foreign body exploratory surgery.  

Since it is now officially spring I didn't think about the fact it might snow and didn't really bring any winter gear except for a pair of mittens with me.  Well that was pretty silly because Wednesday morning we woke up to quite a nice layer of snow!  Although it has pretty much all melted now.

My Wednesday morning greeting

For Good Friday and Easter Sunday I spent the time with my Grandma, my mom and my dad who drove up for the weekend.  It was nice to catch up with everyone.  I also went around and took some pictures of the barns and house at my Grandma's today because the weather was beautiful.

Monday morning I start my large animal placement for two weeks.  I get to start bright and early with a big dairy herd health visit.  So I am off to review my cow reproduction notes from last year so that I hopefully have some clue what's going on!

Pretending to be a photographer

As I mentioned before, I was super fortunate to get a new DSLR camera for Christmas.  Well for my birthday, my parents bought me a photography tour.  I decided on James Christie's photography tour because it had incredible reviews. The tour goes around Edinburgh and throughout the tour he taught you how to use the manual settings on your camera, how to compose a picture as well as gives you some history about the city.

The tour started on Calton Hill.  There, James set up your camera with his "go to" settings.  They are the manual settings he suggests to use as your starting point, and then depending on the lighting and what you are trying to photograph, you can adjust those settings.  He took us to different photo locations and each location had a goal for you to achieve.

The first picture we took was of the National Monument of Scotland.  The goal of the picture was to make sure everything was appropriately centred left to right.

Probably the bluest sky I have ever seen in one of my
own pictures - already I was impressed

The next two pictures were about applying the rule of thirds.  Essentially your image should be divided into thirds both horizontally and vertically and you should position what you are photographing accordingly.

The City Skyline

Nelson Monument

The next couple pictures were about avoiding distractors in your pictures and how to draw attention into the main object of your photo.  A lot of it was about not being lazy and walking a few extra yards to get a better angle for your shots so you didn't have things in the way.

The Burns Monument

Queen Mary's Bath House - It's unknown whether it
ever actually contained a bath!

Then we were onto a part of the tour that was not really my strong suit, abstract photography.  I have a pretty organized and less abstract mind and I think that's part of the reason I found this part really challenging.  I ended up with three photos I really liked.  Two were his suggestions for possible pictures and one was my own creation.

My attempt at abstract photography

A classic rocks shot

This is a bike rack at the Scottish Parliament.  On their own they
 are just oddly shaped places to lock up your bike, but together
 they form the shape of a bicycle.

As we continued on the tour, we built on the composition techniques he had taught us and continued to focus on finding the right location for removing distractors and capturing the buildings to their fullest extent.

The offices of the Scottish Members of
Parliament - no two windows are the same

Tolbooth Tavern

St. Giles Cathedral

Edinburgh Castle

Edinburgh Castle

James would critique every single picture you took to make sure you getting the best possible picture.  It was intimidating at first, but he was so friendly that by the end I was excited to see what he had to say.  Also, as you can see, in true Scottish fashion, the weather deteriorated as the day went on.  On the next sunny day we have (which could be weeks from now!) I want to back out and shoot some of the same spots to see what I can get.  The tour was such a fun way to learn how to better use my camera to its full potential while getting to walk around and learn some more about the city I am calling home for these four years.

An adventure to the West - Ireland Day 2

After our very full day in Dublin, my friend and I took a bus tour out toward the West of Ireland.

The day started off on an odd note.  Our first rest break was at a place called the Obama centre.  Originally both my friend and I assumed that it was an Irish town or thing that happened to have the same sounding name as the current US President.  Turns out we were wrong.  We were legitimately stopping at the Barack Obama centre in Monygall Ireland.  When we entered the building there were pictures of his face all over the building.  You could buy souvenir pencils with his name on them, souvenir key chains of his face.  We found out the reason there was a Barack Obama centre, is because Obama has Irish heritage from that part of Ireland and in 2011 he came to visit.  So naturally to honour him, they built him a truck stop.

But then in the Obama centre things got even weirder.  We walked in and the first shop we saw was Tim Horton's!  In my year and a half being in Scotland/Europe I have never seen a Tim Horton's.  So being the two good Canadians that we are, it was pretty obvious we had to buy food from Tim's.  Unfortunately Roll Up the Rim hasn't made it to Ireland yet.

Hot Chocolate and a Boston Cream

After our adventure at the Obama centre, we continued our journey toward the Cliffs of Moher.  The Cliffs are Moher are spectacular cliffs that stretch for 8km along the Atlantic Ocean and at their highest point are 702 feet.  As we got closer and closer to the cliffs it started to get really foggy.  Finally we stopped and it was so foggy we didn't even realize we were in the parking lot.  The tour guide told us that we wouldn't be able to see the cliffs and gave us a ticket for the interactive cliffs experience in the visitor centre.  But my friend and I decided to try our luck and see if we might be able to catch a glimpse of some of the cliffs.  Well our tour guide was right.  We saw essentially nothing.

You can almost see a cliff

Apparently there are cliffs there

Since we didn't get to see the cliffs, the tour took us to lower ground to try and see their bases.  We could almost see them, but definitely not what we had hoped for.  But realistically its Irish weather, could we really expect it to be nice and sunny?  My friend and I now have a joke that we can say we have been to the Cliffs of Moher but we can't say we have seen the Cliffs of Moher.

The outline of the Cliffs in the distance

After the cliffs our next stop was the Burren.  The Burren is 250 square km of rolling limestone hills and flatlands. It was incredibly stark but also incredibly beautiful.  Opposite the Burren we were also able to get a view of the Atlantic Ocean.  The waves were huge, with nothing between Newfoundland and Ireland to stop them.

We continued on from the Burren toward Galway along a road called the Wild Atlantic Way.  Our tour guide suggested not attempting to read while on this road because it is so twisty and hilly that people often get car sick.  The road goes along the Atlantic coast resulting in some spectacular views.  The road is also quite narrow, with a pretty impressive drop on the one side into the ocean.  We were going along quite happily until we met another tour bus in a fairly narrow section.  The two busses couldn't get passed each other.  So our bus driver started backing up the Wild Atlantic Way.  I would like to point out that at this point in the road, we were on the ocean side, with a road shoulder of maybe a foot and a half, followed by probably a 50 foot drop into the ocean.  So it was quite tense on the bus.  After backing up for 5-10 minutes they finally found a spot where the two buses could pass. Our bus driver deserved a ton of credit.  I wouldn't have wanted to back up a car around the corners and hills that he had to, let alone a full sized bus.

We made it to Galway without any further adventures.  Our tour guide gave us a walking tour of Galway and then we had a bit of time to ourselves to explore.  We had dinner at a really cute little restaurant which had phenomenal fish and chips.  After that, we headed back to Dublin.

We flew back to Edinbugh Monday morning at 6:30 so my friend could go to work and I could make it to my lectures.  I will admit that wasn't the most alert I have ever been for lectures.

4:30am Dublin

Although the weather was definitely not in our favour we had a really fun time in Ireland.

Dublin - Ireland Day 1

After a very difficult exam Friday, a friend and I flew to Dublin, Ireland Friday night for a weekend away.

We arrived in Dublin around 10pm, checked into our hostel and then decided to go out for a walk.  We walked about the Temple Bar area.  It is essentially a few blocks of wall to wall bars and pubs.  When we walked through it around 10:30 there were people everywhere and the streets were packed. Clearly the place to be on a Friday night.

View from my hostel bed

The next day we got up quite early and started touring around Dublin.  Our first stop was the Samuel Beckett Bridge.  It was designed to look like a harp, the national symbol of Ireland.

Our next stop was Trinity College.  We walked around the outside of the campus for a while.  We then decided to pay to enter the Book of Kells exhibit and look at the Old College Library.  The Book of Kells is from the 9th century and is an intricately decorated copy of the four Gospels of Jesus.  Random fact: It took 185 calf skins to make the Book of Kells.  The detail that went into making the book was incredible.  And the library was stunning.  It may have been my favourite stop of the whole trip.

Trinity College 

Trinity College Courtyard

The Old Library

The Old Library

The Old Library

The weather on Saturday was very rainy.  So after Trinity College we decided to grab some food and head back to the hostel to try and dry up a bit.  Once we finished we headed back out with the plans of going to look at two different churches.  That's when things got interesting.  As we were walking from our hostel toward the turn off that headed in the direction of the church, we noticed a ton of police followed by a huge number of people.  It turns out we managed to end up in the middle of a protest!  Throughout history, Irish citizens haven't had to pay for water, but now they do.  So this was a protest against the water charge ahead of their upcoming election next week.  My friend and I watched for a bit with the assumption that the line of people would come to an end fairly quickly.  But boy were we wrong!  After a while we gave up and ended up having to cut through the protesters to get where we wanted to go.  Good thing we didn't try and wait them out because they estimate there were 20 000 people marching!

Following the police ahead of the protestors

Here they come!

St Patrick's Cathedral

After our church exploration we headed to Dublin castle to look around.

Dublin Castle

Dublin Castle Gardens

After looking around the outside of the castle we headed towards the main shopping street.  That's when we ran into the protest again.  But this time, it was the final meeting place where they were listening to speeches so we ended up having to walk the long way around them because there was no way through.  We then strolled through St Stephen's green, stumbled across the famous Doors of Dublin and finished our touring with an impromptu stop at the Irish Natural History Museum.  

All the doors along the street had unique plaster work and
were painted many different colours

After our long day of walking we were very tired.  According to my friend's phone we walked almost 18km over the course of the day.  So for dinner we found a nice pub that seemed to be pretty popular with the locals and a little less touristy.  We both did the proper Irish thing and had a pint of Guinness with our irish meals, Lamb Stew and Shepherd's Pie.  It was a nice finish to a very full day.

I will post about our Sunday Ireland adventures in another post!