Clubs & Societies

One of the major advantages of studying at the DCU in Dublin I could make out is that there is never a shortage of sports activities, or more common, social activities. Its really a traditional campus university where everything is located at one place, be it the lecture halls, library, restaurants, super market, bank, sports ground, Entertainment Centre, Bar or heck, we even have our own theatre here! It's called the Helix and its a hell of a grand hall. What you see in the picture is an inside view. From outside it even looks more impressive. During the year they will be showing some really good classical stuff here (don't ask me what).
Anyway, there are a lot of things you could do in your freetime. I wished we had something like this in Vienna.

There are 100+ clubs or societies for any stuff you would wish to do, from Aikido to Yoga, from Cricket to Electronic Music or Fencing to St Vincent De Paul. In most cases all you have to pay is 4 € for subscription and then you are free to join the courses at certain times. Me for example joined the badminton club (which was quite an obvious decision), the cricket club (one billion indians rave about this game, now I at last need to find out why exactly), the karting club (yeah, michael schumacher started out with a small kart) and the film society (which is a real great thing, because you get to watch movies for free in big halls on campus. Or they make tours to other cinema theatres where you only have to pay 2 to 4 € to watch a movie). Some people even joined 8 or 9 clubs, which is quite crazy considering the fact that a week is not going to have more than 7 days.

Today the badminton classes started, at 8 p.m. and went on till 10:30 p.m. Quite strange timings to do sport, but once you start you don't care about the time. As there were a lot of people who joined this club, there were a lot of them present today. So we played for 10 minutes, then had a break, and then played again for 10 minutes and so on. Thats of course not what I expected, but they said after 2 or 3 weeks usually many people tend to stop coming, so you have more time and space to play as long as you want within those 2.5 hours. The next session is on wednesday. First I played with a lady, who was quite obviously a beginner, so even I made a lot of mistakes. But the next opponent was a guy who knew the game. After those 10 minutes play he suggested "perhaps we could play a game next time". And the third guy even asked for my name. Now thats what I call a good impression.

The library on campus is open till 10 p.m. and you can borrow dvds for free. Thats a great service which I used quite extensively in the past 2 weeks. Most of the movies they have are classics, like "Citizen Kane", "Easy Rider", "Seven Samurais" or even contemporary stuff like "Memento", "Donnie Darko" or "Pulp Fiction". They do have some series as well, like "Sex And The City", "24" or "Six Feet Under". Unfortunately as classes have picked up now I don't find much time to watch a movie every evening.

By the way I stopped going to those loud parties (clubs) which I didn't like anyway. Now I'm concentrating more on building communication bridges to some of the people with whom you can have a serious discussion about a movie or relationship issues. Marc for example is a movie-interested person. He even writes reviews in some local magazine at his homeplace in Hannover. But he really shocked me when he revealed that he was not quite aware of the enormous contribution people like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino or Martin Scorcese have made to the movie world. In fact he doesn't have much idea about old movies like prior to the 80s. Now I told him that I couldn't tolerate this height of ignorance and will introduce him to some of the masterpieces of that bygone era. We'll start with one of my most favourite movies, "The Godfather" (or "Il Padrino" as they call it in Italy).

Stephanie from Brussels seems to be someone who has quite a natural and likeable personality. She indeed has some unconventionals but still lavish looks which makes her a damn hot person. Like her 2 front teeth remind me of a lovely rabbit. Some dots under her eyes and on her somewhat big nose. Also, her husky voice sounds extremely intoxicating, especially when she speaks french. Thats like combining butter with spread cheese and nutella; one is creamier than the other. We already talked about being objective in generally judging the capability of women taking relationships seriously. Now the really impressive point here is, Stephanie unfortunately is quite weak in English, its not that easy to communicate with her some non-small-talk stuff like this relationship issue now. But still she managed to voice that wise comment about being objective and not generalizing too much. She is just 20, but seems to have experienced a lot in life (just my personal feeling). Her boyfriend's name is by the way Hubert (pronounced "Übaer").