After a long day of travel from Belfast and a stressful weekend of getting settled in to our new apartments, Team Cork is officially here. Madi and I have overcome a lot of adversity in our first few days here, and I can honestly say that we would not have made it without the help of some awesome strangers. (Shout out to the elderly Irish women from the bus who told us where to get off and walked us to the store we were looking for on our first day here.) It has also been great meeting our new teams and people from our local college, Cork Institute of Technology. The staff from CIT have been very helpful making our transition to Cork easy.
I am honored to be playing for the Neptune Basketball Club, and even from my first few practices I can already tell the level of passion that these guys have for this team. I have learned a lot about the history of the team and it is awesome to be playing for such a respected and historic Club. I was also able to watch a tournament over the weekend that our younger team played in, which was great to get a taste of the local basketball talent. This town is surprisingly very big on basketball which has created a lot of buzz surrounding the arrival of us as Victory Scholars to Neptune and Brunnell this year. While at the tournament this weekend, we were constantly introduced as “the americans” and everyone seemed to know who we were. Madi and I must stand out like a sore thumb because people we haven’t met kept coming up to us asking if we are “the americans” that they have heard so much about. I can’t wait to get to know all the locals here throughout this year because everyone has been so welcoming.
Most importantly, we are finally starting to figure out the bus system of Cork. Aside from our 10 minute walk to school, we have to take the bus literally everywhere, which I am not quite used to yet. The town of Cork is genuinely one of the coolest places I’ve ever been to and has literally everything we could ever need. After multiple trips every day during our first week here, we have mostly begun to understand the city layout and can semi-successfully navigate the great city of Cork. With our school having around 9,000 students and University College of Cork having around 20,000 students right up the road, the town has a great college town feel. Coming from a college of around 2,000 kids back in the States, this is definitely going to be a change that I am excited to experience. Now that school is getting started within the next week the town has been buzzing with energy. I’ve already met so many great people and I can’t wait to meet more as school starts to get underway next week.
