Mike and I wake up when Schmidt walks in. I shout "Get off me Mike!" because I think I'm sleeping naked and Mike has me pinned. Both are true, but the addition of a beautiful blanket difusses the situatation.
We have breakfast and finish Caroline's milk. We went through 4L of it. For this I am sorry. We start to head out, but before we go to the hallway to put on our shoes I look out the window: It's pouring. Cats and dogs. We grab our coats and hightail it to the bus station after having to, very conviently for me, stop and buy a latte to get change for the bus.
We get on a bus. The bus driver is super friendly. He tells us all about how to get where we're going, that he'll call us when it's time to get off and transfer and then CHATS with us. Super nice guy. We ride the bus until he shouts - it's still pouring and there's way fewer people on the streets than yesterday, but still a lot - and then get off. We stand under a sign for the bus we want and wait until it appears. The first driver shakes his head and points to the "Out of Service" sign. The second smiles at us, tells us to climb on and drives us around the corner where the line starts, rather than the end point, which is where we are. He asks us where we're from and he's from Romania (!!). The city is crawling with nationalities trying to get a piece of the boom.
The next bus driver is as nice as the first one and shows us where to get off and then gives us directions around the block to our destination. It's stopped pouring by this time. Where are we headed? Do you think I would take Mike to Dublin but not to the Guiness factory? :)
On the way there we're stopped by a blonde woman in an Audi looking for parking. The only reason I'm mentioning this is because her skin was orange from selftanner. It's a phenomenon: orange skin. The richest dressed women with the nicest handbags have the orangest skin.
We race around the Guiness factory's 7 floors from 11-12:15. Our flight is at 3pm and Caroline's house is a 45 minute bus ride away and her house, and our stuff, is half way across town. After Mike drinks his free pint in the rooftop bar that overlooks Dublin with Joyce quotes all around the windows - James Joyce - we catch a cab. The cabbie tells us all about the real "Dubbers" and the problems the posh women create as they try to dash across the road for a sandwich and about hanging out in the St Stephen's green on Sundays when he was a kid. We get to Caroline's. The cabbie says, "You better start leavin'."
We race to the apartment, grab our stuff, say goodbye to Caroline, run to SPAR - the food/drug store - for some sandwiches and catch the bus. We get to the airport, suffer the obligitory wait and arrive in Edinburgh 15 mins early.
We catch the bus to downtown and find our hostel. The second we hit the street they call Princes Street I was happy. Then we climbed the 74 stairs to our hostel, which is on the 5th floor, past the RAB Social club door - their floor smells like pot -, past the Centre City Hostel - their floor is lit and clean - and into a painted, dim, disorganized receptiony looking place where our visa doesn't work and the key they give us needs some serious convincing to get us into a room whose floor terrifes me and where the carpet is pulled up in the corner. I wouldn't recommend it to a rat, and neither has anyone else, which has saved us from stepping on rats.
We ditch our stuff and I navigate us to Mussel Inn, where I had dinner with Joyce a couple of years ago, by memory. We have a marvellous meal. Then we go in search of a phone card - it's my mom's and Mike's dad's birthday - call them and then sleep.
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