Fire Brigade!

I was on Work Experience in the Dublin Fire Brigade Training Centre last week. It wasn't that good because we didn't get to do much. They weren't training in any new recruits that week so I don't think they had anything planned for us to do. There were three other Ty's, Heather, Andy and Amy. I got lost on my way there the first day because on the bus timetable it said the bus was leaving from Westmoreland St. but then when I went there, not a no.128 bus top in sight! I was waling around town for ages, I walked up O' Connell St. then back over O'Connel Bridge and it was just stressfull. Then, the 128 appeared what seemed to be out of nowhere so I ran after it and found the bus stop. I left Celbride really early though so I wasn't late. We got to go into a shed type of place where rooms are set out and it's pitch black, it's there to train firemen for going into a house or a building to rescue people.. Myself, Andy and Heather said we'd do it and it was so much fun, we had to find a dummie and carry it back out. For the rest of the week we sat in on first aid lectures and the were interesting at start but ten they got a bit boring because it was the same one three days in a row. Every fireperson has to be a paramedic, which I didn't know and I found that quite interesting. We got free dinner everyday and the food was so beautiful! The last day we got to go in a fire engine and get water from a hydrant to spray through the hose, that was good fun too. Paul, our supervisor, brought us to his station and it was deadly. We say everything a fireman does everyday and how the station works. Overall it was a good placement but I don't know if I'd like to be a firewoman, maybe a paramedic though!

Glendalough

Tuesday, 5th of April Amina went on a retreat to Glendalough. I was expecting it to be different... All the othr retreats we did in previous years were spent inside singing songs and thinking about our past but this year we were outdoors and we got to walk around for the duration. We walked around a labyrinth, it was a design found on the bottom of the stone. It's hard to describe but it's a design that swirls, sort of like a maze but it's a path of stones, rather than not being able to see your way out. It symbolised your life. Sometimes you feel lost and you think you're at the centre of your life but then a few steps away you don't know where you are. There were some others things like that to symbolise different aspects of everyone's life. The tour guide was so nice and she used a lot of metophors to help us reflect rather than sing songs or sitting down to concentrate. For example she said to think of the round tower as a " tower of your life" , you have so many stages in your life, the same way the tower has lots of floors. Also, she said when you're older you will have a better view of the world, the same way you would from the top of the tower. When I thought about it, it made a lot of sense! We went on a walk uphill and everyone thought it'd be a nice little stroll but the hill seemed to just get steeper and steeper. It actually wasn't that bad looking back but at the time everyone thought it would never end. It was a good day and a nice change to the usual retreats we have!