Edinbizzshisel

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Well, I’m in Dublin, Ireland now and a lot has happened since I last left you. I flew out on Monday from Edin-bra (people keep pronouncing Edinburgh different ways, so I like to switch it up myself) and I had a lay over in London before coming here. When I landed in London I followed the signs to “International Departures”… pretty logical considering the Republic of Ireland is not part of the UK. I get to the first checkpoint and this English man looks at my tickets and says, “Where are you heading?” I respond “Dublin”, and then he looks at me skeptically and says, “Where are you coming from?” I say “Edinburgh (pronouncing the ‘G’ at the end)”. He looks at me and says “Edin-BRE?” and I say “yes, Edin-bur-eh”. Well after he so kindly corrects my English, he sends me back the other way because OBVIOUSLY Dublin is NOT an international flight. That wouldn’t have been so bad, but to get to the local departures I had to go to baggage claim and then back through security anyway. As I was trying to find security, I noticed I could feel the ground on one of my feet to find there was a hole in one of my favorite shoes!!! I finally go through security and am trying to re-dress myself when a security woman (also English) looks down at one of my bins and says, “Uhg, now who left their boarding pass?!?” I was standing RIGHT THERE, and say, “that’s mine.” She lets out this horrible annoyed sigh before handing it to me like I needed her to remind me and that was an awful inconvenience!

After such a bad flight, I checked into my hostel and went out to find dinner. I go into this Indian restaurant and strike up a conversation with 2 nice guys a couple tables over (Jeff and Brett). It turns out they are from Australia and were in London and Edin-bur-o at the same time I was. They had rented a car and invited me to drive around Ireland the next day. We swapped numbers, and in the middle of planning everything the next morning my phone runs out of minutes. I literally run to the closest convenience store to top-up, and find out that they don’t sell minutes for my SIM card (because I bought it in London). So I try and top-up with my credit card to find they won’t accept foreign credit cards. So I told the Virgin Mobile guy “What am I supposed to do if I need to make an important phone call then?” and he put 2 pounds on my phone for free. They picked me up and we drove all the way to the west coast to Aillwee Cave and down to Tipperary then back. It was so awesome getting out of the city and seeing the countryside, and they were a lot of fun to be with! We planned on possibly getting together the next day, but I slept late and didn’t hear from them so I went on a mission to find an internet café. I walked all over the place before I finally spotted this small sign in the window of a restaurant that claimed they had free wireless. I tried connecting to it for about 15 minutes before giving up and just eating my Irish stew. While I was looking down I heard “Hi, Alex” and there were Jeff and Brett walking into the restaurant for the same reason I did! I accused them of stalking me and Brett said I was stalking them and some how I knew they would be coming to that very restaurant, but really it was a freak coincidence. So we spent yesterday going to The Book of Kells, and then watching a Cricket match at a pub. Well, they were trying to teach me the rules of Cricket, but I just learned that the other team was buggered (pronounced buggard).

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