Ireland / My Bday

Ireland was a crazy good time.

After a long overnight flight, a long layover at Heathrow, then another smaller flight to Belfast, I finally arrived. I met Brittany at Queens University where she works and got to see her in action, fiddling with some metal stuff in a wave tank (anything more detailed is beyond me). Then we went to her awesome flat where I met her flatmates Catherine and Alasdair, two awesome awesome Scottish folks. Side note: Alasdair has a small extra roll in the film The Eagle, which was filmed in their small hometown. I was pretty jetlagged Thursday night so we kept it low key with some take put from Thai Tanic which wins my award for best pun name. The food was superb.

I was too happy to sleep in until the early afternoon on Friday as Britt was at work all day trying to get a lot accomplished before we skipped town. Catherine and I hung out pretty much doing nothing until Brittany and Alasdair (who is Catharine's boyfriend and Brittany's coworker) came home. They were all kind enough to take me out that night to their local pub The Botanic Inn or just The Bot. The Bot was an experience. We were all in jeans while most of the local girls were in dresses and heels, completely overdressed for the laid-back pub, which ended up playing a lot of classic and country American songs. Needless to say we had tons of fun drinking and dancing, especially at the stroke of midnight which marked the start of my 24th birthday.

Brittany and I got a late morning start to our road trip, due to the previous night's outting - that's right britt, I'm calling you out - but hit the road in our backwards car. Driving on the left side of the road and the right side of the car is soooo much fun! There were a couple close call where I would drift over a line, but was just fine otherwise. We drove down towards Dublin (but didn't stop there - sorry Virg, didn't find your hat) and more south to Glendalough. I'm not sure exactly what it is (wikipedia it if you're interested) but there was a cool old cemetery and a tall tower. Britt and I got our photography on and took a nice stroll into the woods. It was a neat place to spend my bday afternoon. We then drove all the way west to Galway where, thanks to Brittany's excellent navigational skills, we did not have trouble finding our hostel. I muscled Britt to come have a birthday beer with me on the main drag filled with pubs. We had a delicious time, talking about nonsense, until these two olderguys came up and wanted to know what we were arguing about, which they thought was politics. I was just admonishing Brittany for not applying to grad schools in California. They were pretty funny, but we headed back early so we could be well rested for our day of sightseeing on Sunday.