Day 6: September 28th, 2007

We fly.

 

Mike and I wake up at 9 am. We have to be out of the easy hotel at 10. He jumps in the shower and I pack and dress. Mike comes out of the shower and starts organizing his stuff. I sit in the window of our hotel room and watch the traffic. Earlier in the trip I'd been shouting the name of the brand of car that had been going by: "Audi, Porsche, BMW, Porsche", but this, our last morning in London, I sit quietly and watch the fog and the people. After about half an hour it's looking like Mike's got most of his stuff packed and I read the end of Lady Chatterly's Lover to him. It's beautiful and I'll post the best bits here sometime.

 

We check out and head to Victoria Station and I buy Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, which is supposed to examine the English country house society closely. As we're tripping around, I'm overwhelmingly pleased with my teeny backpack. We get tickets to Gatwick, sit with two nice American girls on the train and then find the Ryanair desk. We're there an hour early and go through security anyway. I'll take this time to examine Mike fussing in great detail, since the rest of the day is made of waiting, standing, sitting ect...

 

We enter the ribboned gates for the security queues. Mike calls a halt. He takes off his backpack. He takes off his rain coat. He starts emptying the contents of his pockets into his coat. Camera goes from the front pocket of his pants into the front pocket of his coat, is patted, removed, examined and replaced: repeat for all the content of his pockets. Mike has lots of things in his pockets. He works hurriedly for a few minutes, as people push past us, trying to get to security. He works with so much focus that it's hard no to laugh at him. He used to be more relaxed about things like rearranging, but now he knows that it bothers me to stand around waiting and watching him freak out. (My word is freak out. I just don't care about things like in which pocket in particular is my 50p piece, my camera battery or any of the other things that Mike carries around. To tell the truth, the reason that Mike has all these things in his pockets is because I make him carry them: he carries our cash, my cards and has his camera in his pocket because I've given him crap before for not having it easily accessible) Today his fussing doesn't bother me. I just mellow out, stand and wait.

 

There's a lot of waiting in our future. Our 45 min, 1:30 flight is delayed until 2:45. We wait - I eat chips and read, Mike has a chocolate muffin and listens to his iPod - and eventually arrive at the Dublin airport. We walk down a sketchy addition to the airport - construted of painted plywood - and into the main terminal. We find the bus and drive into Dublin.

 

The houses of Dublin are not as pretty and well kept as in Earl's Court, London and I get a bit scared by the sketchiness of it, but Mike's friend Mike Schmidt and Caroline (pronounced Caro-lynn) have a beautiful, large apartment that's full of light. Their place is beautiful and roomy. They have a pull out couch and everything. It was such a relief to me when we got here and had such a nice place to visit.

 

We arrived and I was sleepy, but Schimdt was really keen on seeing the city, and since it was Caroline's birthday we all headed out. We walked through a park and arrived at the downtown shopping district and had dinner at a tapas bar that's in an old shoe factory. One end of the restaurant has a wall entirely covered with shoe forms. THere must be at least 500. We had a yummy dinner of potatoes, mussels, chicken tikka and deep fried potato/cheese thingys. Mike and Schimdt drank pints of Guiness and I had cider.

 

Right after we got there more and more people started arriving. The girls were dressed in all sorts of crazy crazy clothes: beautiful dresses and amazing tights and shoes. Their hair and makeup is amazing. I would feel totally underdressed, but Caroline keeps telling me that the girls are overdressed.

 

We walk through the famous area of Temple Bar and through crowds, still subduded, and cross the Liffey river via the Hot Penny bridge. In the distance we can see the Post Office. We go to a bar that is art deco-gothic, where one of Schimdt's friends is having his birthday. We meet a bunch of people and, in particular, Caroline's friend Kate, who lives and works in Ireland because of her boyfriend, Frank, who is Irish. Kate's from Chicago and is awesome.

 

Kate, Caroline, Schmidt and Mike and I leave the bar. Rather, we try to leave the bar. Mike gets lost and just stands where he was and Caroline has to go back into the bar to find him. We walk back across the Liffey and through the centre of the Temple Bar, which is lined with bars and thick with drunk people. Drunk people like you'll only find at Homecoming in patches, but here they're everywhere. We go through the district and to a more traditional bar that's carved wood and three stories high. We go to the top and dance a while. It's full of kids who are just hanging out, drinking and talking. We leave after a while and go up the street to a more subdued bar, where, once again we climb to the top of the bar and find classy leather chairs and sit and have drinks. It's quieter here.

 

After a while, Caroline is tired - I was tired about the second bar, but hid it to the best I could - and we catch a cab through the twisty, winding streets back to Schmidt's place where Mike and I promptly fall asleep.

 

P.S. The whole night there was music I would hear in North America playing: standard, poppy, Britney, 70s flashback music. It's nice and yet a little creepy.