Experimental Living and The Post That Got Out Of Hand
I never call, I never write... Yeah, I know, it's been awhile, huh? Without any long term connections or responsibility these past few weeks I've been indulging in experimenting with different lives. Apparently those lives didn't involve posting or even spending all that much time messing about on the internet, somewhat to my surprise. It's nearly time to get back to reality though (or whatever passes for reality in Denver), so I thought I'd do something of a wrap up post.
I'm getting ready to leave Galway and Ireland and head back to the U.S. Even though it's been extra sunny and warm and everyone has been extra fun and friendly the past few days, just to make me even more heartbroken about leaving, I'm ready to go. I've been drifting around without any particular goals or anchors for long enough, and I'm getting tired of being foreign. Also, I really miss my family. It's been four months since I saw my brothers and I haven't seen my sister or my niece and nephew in nearly a year. I was originally planning on going to Spain and Germany after I left Ireland, but I was really going to have to stretch my budget to pull that off, so I'm putting the money I have left towards a plane ticket to go hang out in Kona with my sis and the kids for a couple weeks. I'm told there's room in the yurt, so that'll be groovy. I'm actually considering checking out the job and housing situation there, becuase apparently I have a thing for rainy islands, but at least that island has my family and awesome beaches. I would just be looking into it though. Since I haven't even left Ireland yet it seems a little premature to be making any other moving plans.
So anyway, what have I been up to? Like I said, I've been trying out different lives. I spent my first six weeks or so in Galway hanging out with the international crowd I'd met up with at the hostel and doing temp jobs while looking for real employment. Then the festival season ended, along with most of the temporary work, and more than half of the people I knew started leaving to go back to school. With only two months left on my visa it became pretty clear that I wasn't going to get any permanent work, so it was time to find new things to do with myself.
Part 1: My Life as a Telecommuter
My oldest brother has his own business and has hired me before to do little jobs now and then, so I wrote him a pathetic little e-mail about how I had no money and nothing to do. I figured he'd send me some copy to edit or content to rewrite. What I hadn't expected was a solid 60 hours worth of research and spreadsheets that needed to be dealt with and a number of new programs to learn. So I spent the next week in my flat and at the library and in various coffee shops staring at my computer and trying to remember how to actually accomplish real work. At the end of the week I had a stiff back, a thick file of paperwork, a nice check, and the promise of a number of smaller jobs over the rest of the summer. Not bad.
Part 2: My Life as a Drifter
After a week of solid employment it seemed to me that the logical thing to do was to skip town, yeah? The brilliant thing about Ireland is that it's really not very big. There's nowhere in the country that you can't get to in a day at the most. So I tossed some clothes and my Lonely Planet guide in my backpack and bought a bus ticket to go exploring. I Spent a few days in Cork and the surrounding area then hit Limerick on my way back, doing the hostel/backpacker thing which is fun as long as you aren't doing it for too long at a time. What can I say, I put a pretty high value on a little bit of privacy and decent showers now and then.
One of the hostels was run by some crazy Kiwis. The place was decorated with impressive amounts of All Blacks paraphernalia and the usual rules list posted in the hallways was somewhat unusual in that it said: "1. Don't Break Anything. 2. Don't Kill Anyone. 3. Please Don't Hang Towels Or Clothing On The Radiators As This Is A Fire Hazard." Rule 2 turned out to be the hardest one to follow since one of the people sharing our dorm was particularly obnoxious. Here's a tip, if you're staying in a room with 5 strangers, don't answer your mobile at 3:30 in the morning and proceeded to have a loud and really moronic fight with your girlfriend without leaving the room, otherwise your dormmates will be well within their rights to kill you with sticks. Just saying.
I was hanging around Limerick without much to do on Sunday morning so I figured I might as well go to mass. There's quite a pretty old cathedral there that is one of the oldest churches in the west of Ireland. This being Ireland and the church building being older than the Reformation I was somewhat shocked when after I sat down the very friendly usher type person handed me "The Book of Common Prayer". I've never been to an Anglican service before. It was very strange. Most things were familiar but not quite right... like some sort of bizzaro Catholicism. That would be the technical description of course.
I also hit the Hunt Museum there, since it was free that day. Went on a long strange guided tour with our decent docent who was in fact a nutjob German grad student. Every museum should employ someone like that, seriously.
Part 3: My Life as a Hermit
One of my flatmates is out of town, the other one is working loads of overtime. I pretty much have the place to myself. Not that I ever see either of them very much anyway. For some reason my roommates and I have never hit it off. It's not that we argue of dislike each other or anything, it's just that we've never gotten very close. Everytime I finish a conversation with one of them I'm left thinking, "Oh my god, I am the most socially inept person ever. That was so awkward." I don't think it's all me though. I've made friends with more different people from more different places on this trip than in all my previous life combined, and it has often been surprisingly effortless. So I don't know what's going on here. Maybe it's becuase I'm a temporary resident and I'm sort of invading their space. Or maybe they just aren't very friendly. I don't know. It's kind of sad, but I've gotten used to it. At least I get plenty of privacy when I'm at home.
Anyway, I've always been kind of fascinated by monks and hermits and shamans and all those sort of people who live lives of quiet contemplation. The idea of just immersing yourself in your own thoughts and just being totally in your own head and really getting to know yourself is kind of amazing. For some people, the super social types, that probably sounds like absolute torture, but for me it was sort of an indulgence. I decided not to seek people out for a few days and instead try to really think and figure some things out and just be alone. I read a lot, I wrote a lot, I meditated, I cooked interesting things, I went for lots of insanely long walks up the river and down the beach. It was really nice and relaxing. I don't think I actually figured anything out or improved myself in any significant way, but whatever.
(Incidentally, I've officially worn out three pairs of shoes on this trip. Like seriously worn out, tops coming off holes in the bottoms, everything. I don't know if it's how much walking I do or that the streets are all cobblestones and rocks or what. Or maybe Rocket Dogs just aren't built very well. Oh well, less to carry back.)
By the end of that I was seriously ready for some company, so it's good that the next week was going to be...
Part 4: My Life as a Tour Guide
My mum came to visit for a wild week of running around Ireland. The really great thing about this trip is that it's the first time that I've been somewhere with her that was clearly my home turf and not hers. I was the responsible one here, it was like a coming of age sort of thing. My mom is kind of a control freak so I was worried about how that would go, but it ended up being a really great week. She'd been to Ireland six or seven years ago on a bus tour, so luckily she'd already seen all the tourist crap and we didn't have to go to Blarney Castle or the Guinness factory or whatever. (Not that there's anything wrong with those places, they're quite fun, but not the sort of places you want to go to multiple times).
I picked her up from the bus station and took her back to my place, which had of course been frantically cleaned at the last minute. We spent the first few days in Galway and I showed her all the places here that are part of my Ireland. Then we set out adventuring. We went to Inishmore (one of the Aran islands) where she promptly befriended our charming local tour guide who was a white haired old islander, the sort of Irishman you'd see in a movie from the 1950s and that I didn't believe actually existed. I told her she couldn't keep him though unless we found a nice young Irishman for me. Further adventures included lots of trains (my mom really likes trains, I don't know why. I don't mind them, but I don't really care. I'm indifferent towards trains, I suppose) and stops in Dublin (just long enough to visit Temple Bar and to go to the Abbey Theatre to see an Oscar Wilde play. These are the two highlights of Dublin if you ask me, along with the Chester Beatty Library. Besides that I'm rather indifferent towards Dublin. Much like the trains, in a way.) Then we went up north to Belfast and Derry where we went to pubs and museums, called our money 'quid', and Mom told me some more of those insane stories she has that for some reason have never come up before. Like the one about how my great aunt used to send money monthly to the IRA and other strange facts about our Irish relatives. We also went to this brilliant restaurant in Belfast called Cayenne, based solely on the fact that we'd seen it on "No Reservations." This is never a bad reason to go somewhere. It was easily the best meal I've had this whole trip, possibly this whole year. Yay gourmet food! (And while we're at it, yay Mom picking up the bill!) After our adventures we returned to Galway and I sent her off on a bus to the Shannon Airport. She made it home safely and reported to all of the siblings that not only was I alive and well but was perfectly capable of organizing a trip. My god, my family may actually think little Katie is vaguely responsible. I'll never live this down.
Part 5: My Life as an Invalid/Theater Critic
So this week was not all the different from my life as a hermit, except there's a lot more sleeping. Probably from all those trains and buses, I'd gotten sick. I had what my brother refers to as the Euro Hack. I think normal people probably call this bronchitis, but it's true that every time one of us goes to Europe we end up coughing our damn lungs up for a few days. This week's entertainment consists mainly of books and movies. I've now seen all of season 1 of Gossip Girl. I'm only a little ashamed of this. Also, Memento is a great movie to watch for the first time streaming on your computer becuase watching it in little 15 minute chunks enhances the confused wtf feeling. That may sound sarcastic, but I'm totally serious, it was great. I can't remember what all else I watched... QI, three weeks of back episodes of The Daily Show (god I've missed that show), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (nothing special, but Clive Owen is in it, so who cares. Also good prep for going to Scotland since I was no doubt going to hear about Mary's side of the story there), and yeah, probably other things that weren't very memorable. Oh, Father Ted. That's required Irish viewing, especially on the West Coast. If you don't know what I'm talking about just look it up. My reading consisted of the entire Bourne trilogy (shut up. I can only handle so much James Joyce and Flann O'brien), since I found an old set of paperbacks at the used bookstore. These books are roughly the same age as me, which makes them just old enough to have wonderfully politically incorrect "reviews" on the back cover. Particularly the second one in which "not a hold is barred as the horror of the orient is caught in a plot as crisp and juicy as a spring roll". Actually, the books are more vaguely offensive than I remembered. I still love Jason/David/Delta/Whoever-the-hell-he-is anyway.
I was feeling mostly better by the end of the week, which was fantastic becuase I managed to snag a ticket to the preview of Cripple of Inishmaan. The Druid (awesome theatre company) is mountain a new production of the play by Martin MacDonagh (the guy responsible for In Bruges) directed by Garry Hynes who won a Tony for her production of Beauty Queen of Lenane (another of MacDonagh's plays). I wrote my final paper on Cripple back when I took Irish Theatre and it's a play I really like, so I was really excited to get to see this production. It was everything I expected too. Very well done and quite polished considering it was the first preview. The most interesting character, in my opinion, is Babbybobby and the actor who played him did a good job with the role. The actor looked oddly familiar too, considering I'm not exactly familiar with the Irish theatre circuit. That would be becuase he was this guy. If you've never seen the monk who fired Desmond suddenly and disturbingly beat up on a cripple you've never seen live drama the way it was meant to be done.
Part 6: My Life on a Big Yellow Bus
And then I skipped off to Scotland. I really didn't know what to do with myself since I don't know anyone there and it turns out I didn't know anything about Scotland. I knew I wanted to go there, but my plan was no more specific than that. There may have been vague thoughts about whiskey, kilts, bagpipes, and the Loch Ness monster. Faced with this impressive lack of planning I hesitantly signed up for one of the cheap and tacky backpacker tours. I went with the "Haggis" tour company which proudly advertises itself as "Wild and Sexy" figuring if I was doing cheap and tacky I may as well go all the way. This is one of the best decisions I've ever made. There were three dozen people packed onto our big yellow bus from all over the place: India, Australia, The U.S., China... pretty much if the Brits colonized somewhere, that country was represented on the tour. No Brits though, so you can guess who most of the jokes were aimed at. There were a number of other Americans in the group, but I never seem to fall in with those groups. One of the groups were young and eager college students of the state university beer pong variety, whom I found instantly annoying. The other Yanks were a pair of young and geeky and extremely quiet East Coasters who I probably would have gotten along with alright had I gotten the chance to hang out with them. I didn't get that chance though becuase I was, not altogether intentionally, assimilated by the Aussies. Fun stuff. Our guide and driver were pretty fantastic too, although hard to describe. For the CAC folk I'll say that it was kind of like being on a tour with the Scottish equivalents of Trotter and Galvin. For everyone that means absolutely nothing to I'll just say they were extremely fun and more than a little bit mental.
Since this post is clearly becoming The Post That Got Out Of Hand, I'm going to limit myself to a few highlights here. I'll tell you the full story next time we chat, especially if you buy me a drink. Or maybe I'll add details when and if I sort through and post photos.
-There are some foods and drinks that Scotland is supposedly famous for: Haggis, Whiskey, Irn Bru, and the deep fried Mars Bar. I tried them all and what they all have in common is that they taste like they are probably fatal in any significant dosage. Of the four the whiskey is the clear winner.
-The first rule of Whiskey Club is you don't talk about Whiskey Club. The second rule is try not to spill any of it as we pass the bottle around the bus, 'cause that's just a waste.
-There is a fairy dance, used to bring out the fair folk. If this never appeared in a D.I. skit it should have. There is also an accompanying techno song.
-I can't remember why dipping our heads in an icy cold river sounded like a good idea, but it must have because 3/4 of us did it.
-If you meet some English guys in a pub near Loch Ness and they invite a bunch of you to go see their boat, ask how far away it is before you go. If you do ask and they say it's 3km or possibly 3 miles, they aren't sure, consider the fact that it is 1 AM and eventually you will have to hike back. Also consider the fact that you all have to be up at 8 AM to catch your bus. Go anyway, becuase it will be fun. And becuase they're from Manchester, which means they have amazing accents.
-When recovering from the previous point, it is perfectly acceptable to blame the Aussies for the entire thing.
-Went to see a local production of Macbeth. It wasn't very good, but it was in Scotland, so that's something right?
Part Whatever: My Life Trying to Get Packed and Organized to Go Back Home
This is proving to be far more trouble than I'd expected.
I'm getting ready to leave Galway and Ireland and head back to the U.S. Even though it's been extra sunny and warm and everyone has been extra fun and friendly the past few days, just to make me even more heartbroken about leaving, I'm ready to go. I've been drifting around without any particular goals or anchors for long enough, and I'm getting tired of being foreign. Also, I really miss my family. It's been four months since I saw my brothers and I haven't seen my sister or my niece and nephew in nearly a year. I was originally planning on going to Spain and Germany after I left Ireland, but I was really going to have to stretch my budget to pull that off, so I'm putting the money I have left towards a plane ticket to go hang out in Kona with my sis and the kids for a couple weeks. I'm told there's room in the yurt, so that'll be groovy. I'm actually considering checking out the job and housing situation there, becuase apparently I have a thing for rainy islands, but at least that island has my family and awesome beaches. I would just be looking into it though. Since I haven't even left Ireland yet it seems a little premature to be making any other moving plans.
So anyway, what have I been up to? Like I said, I've been trying out different lives. I spent my first six weeks or so in Galway hanging out with the international crowd I'd met up with at the hostel and doing temp jobs while looking for real employment. Then the festival season ended, along with most of the temporary work, and more than half of the people I knew started leaving to go back to school. With only two months left on my visa it became pretty clear that I wasn't going to get any permanent work, so it was time to find new things to do with myself.
Part 1: My Life as a Telecommuter
My oldest brother has his own business and has hired me before to do little jobs now and then, so I wrote him a pathetic little e-mail about how I had no money and nothing to do. I figured he'd send me some copy to edit or content to rewrite. What I hadn't expected was a solid 60 hours worth of research and spreadsheets that needed to be dealt with and a number of new programs to learn. So I spent the next week in my flat and at the library and in various coffee shops staring at my computer and trying to remember how to actually accomplish real work. At the end of the week I had a stiff back, a thick file of paperwork, a nice check, and the promise of a number of smaller jobs over the rest of the summer. Not bad.
Part 2: My Life as a Drifter
After a week of solid employment it seemed to me that the logical thing to do was to skip town, yeah? The brilliant thing about Ireland is that it's really not very big. There's nowhere in the country that you can't get to in a day at the most. So I tossed some clothes and my Lonely Planet guide in my backpack and bought a bus ticket to go exploring. I Spent a few days in Cork and the surrounding area then hit Limerick on my way back, doing the hostel/backpacker thing which is fun as long as you aren't doing it for too long at a time. What can I say, I put a pretty high value on a little bit of privacy and decent showers now and then.
One of the hostels was run by some crazy Kiwis. The place was decorated with impressive amounts of All Blacks paraphernalia and the usual rules list posted in the hallways was somewhat unusual in that it said: "1. Don't Break Anything. 2. Don't Kill Anyone. 3. Please Don't Hang Towels Or Clothing On The Radiators As This Is A Fire Hazard." Rule 2 turned out to be the hardest one to follow since one of the people sharing our dorm was particularly obnoxious. Here's a tip, if you're staying in a room with 5 strangers, don't answer your mobile at 3:30 in the morning and proceeded to have a loud and really moronic fight with your girlfriend without leaving the room, otherwise your dormmates will be well within their rights to kill you with sticks. Just saying.
I was hanging around Limerick without much to do on Sunday morning so I figured I might as well go to mass. There's quite a pretty old cathedral there that is one of the oldest churches in the west of Ireland. This being Ireland and the church building being older than the Reformation I was somewhat shocked when after I sat down the very friendly usher type person handed me "The Book of Common Prayer". I've never been to an Anglican service before. It was very strange. Most things were familiar but not quite right... like some sort of bizzaro Catholicism. That would be the technical description of course.
I also hit the Hunt Museum there, since it was free that day. Went on a long strange guided tour with our decent docent who was in fact a nutjob German grad student. Every museum should employ someone like that, seriously.
Part 3: My Life as a Hermit
One of my flatmates is out of town, the other one is working loads of overtime. I pretty much have the place to myself. Not that I ever see either of them very much anyway. For some reason my roommates and I have never hit it off. It's not that we argue of dislike each other or anything, it's just that we've never gotten very close. Everytime I finish a conversation with one of them I'm left thinking, "Oh my god, I am the most socially inept person ever. That was so awkward." I don't think it's all me though. I've made friends with more different people from more different places on this trip than in all my previous life combined, and it has often been surprisingly effortless. So I don't know what's going on here. Maybe it's becuase I'm a temporary resident and I'm sort of invading their space. Or maybe they just aren't very friendly. I don't know. It's kind of sad, but I've gotten used to it. At least I get plenty of privacy when I'm at home.
Anyway, I've always been kind of fascinated by monks and hermits and shamans and all those sort of people who live lives of quiet contemplation. The idea of just immersing yourself in your own thoughts and just being totally in your own head and really getting to know yourself is kind of amazing. For some people, the super social types, that probably sounds like absolute torture, but for me it was sort of an indulgence. I decided not to seek people out for a few days and instead try to really think and figure some things out and just be alone. I read a lot, I wrote a lot, I meditated, I cooked interesting things, I went for lots of insanely long walks up the river and down the beach. It was really nice and relaxing. I don't think I actually figured anything out or improved myself in any significant way, but whatever.
(Incidentally, I've officially worn out three pairs of shoes on this trip. Like seriously worn out, tops coming off holes in the bottoms, everything. I don't know if it's how much walking I do or that the streets are all cobblestones and rocks or what. Or maybe Rocket Dogs just aren't built very well. Oh well, less to carry back.)
By the end of that I was seriously ready for some company, so it's good that the next week was going to be...
Part 4: My Life as a Tour Guide
My mum came to visit for a wild week of running around Ireland. The really great thing about this trip is that it's the first time that I've been somewhere with her that was clearly my home turf and not hers. I was the responsible one here, it was like a coming of age sort of thing. My mom is kind of a control freak so I was worried about how that would go, but it ended up being a really great week. She'd been to Ireland six or seven years ago on a bus tour, so luckily she'd already seen all the tourist crap and we didn't have to go to Blarney Castle or the Guinness factory or whatever. (Not that there's anything wrong with those places, they're quite fun, but not the sort of places you want to go to multiple times).
I picked her up from the bus station and took her back to my place, which had of course been frantically cleaned at the last minute. We spent the first few days in Galway and I showed her all the places here that are part of my Ireland. Then we set out adventuring. We went to Inishmore (one of the Aran islands) where she promptly befriended our charming local tour guide who was a white haired old islander, the sort of Irishman you'd see in a movie from the 1950s and that I didn't believe actually existed. I told her she couldn't keep him though unless we found a nice young Irishman for me. Further adventures included lots of trains (my mom really likes trains, I don't know why. I don't mind them, but I don't really care. I'm indifferent towards trains, I suppose) and stops in Dublin (just long enough to visit Temple Bar and to go to the Abbey Theatre to see an Oscar Wilde play. These are the two highlights of Dublin if you ask me, along with the Chester Beatty Library. Besides that I'm rather indifferent towards Dublin. Much like the trains, in a way.) Then we went up north to Belfast and Derry where we went to pubs and museums, called our money 'quid', and Mom told me some more of those insane stories she has that for some reason have never come up before. Like the one about how my great aunt used to send money monthly to the IRA and other strange facts about our Irish relatives. We also went to this brilliant restaurant in Belfast called Cayenne, based solely on the fact that we'd seen it on "No Reservations." This is never a bad reason to go somewhere. It was easily the best meal I've had this whole trip, possibly this whole year. Yay gourmet food! (And while we're at it, yay Mom picking up the bill!) After our adventures we returned to Galway and I sent her off on a bus to the Shannon Airport. She made it home safely and reported to all of the siblings that not only was I alive and well but was perfectly capable of organizing a trip. My god, my family may actually think little Katie is vaguely responsible. I'll never live this down.
Part 5: My Life as an Invalid/Theater Critic
So this week was not all the different from my life as a hermit, except there's a lot more sleeping. Probably from all those trains and buses, I'd gotten sick. I had what my brother refers to as the Euro Hack. I think normal people probably call this bronchitis, but it's true that every time one of us goes to Europe we end up coughing our damn lungs up for a few days. This week's entertainment consists mainly of books and movies. I've now seen all of season 1 of Gossip Girl. I'm only a little ashamed of this. Also, Memento is a great movie to watch for the first time streaming on your computer becuase watching it in little 15 minute chunks enhances the confused wtf feeling. That may sound sarcastic, but I'm totally serious, it was great. I can't remember what all else I watched... QI, three weeks of back episodes of The Daily Show (god I've missed that show), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (nothing special, but Clive Owen is in it, so who cares. Also good prep for going to Scotland since I was no doubt going to hear about Mary's side of the story there), and yeah, probably other things that weren't very memorable. Oh, Father Ted. That's required Irish viewing, especially on the West Coast. If you don't know what I'm talking about just look it up. My reading consisted of the entire Bourne trilogy (shut up. I can only handle so much James Joyce and Flann O'brien), since I found an old set of paperbacks at the used bookstore. These books are roughly the same age as me, which makes them just old enough to have wonderfully politically incorrect "reviews" on the back cover. Particularly the second one in which "not a hold is barred as the horror of the orient is caught in a plot as crisp and juicy as a spring roll". Actually, the books are more vaguely offensive than I remembered. I still love Jason/David/Delta/Whoever-the-hell-he-is anyway.
I was feeling mostly better by the end of the week, which was fantastic becuase I managed to snag a ticket to the preview of Cripple of Inishmaan. The Druid (awesome theatre company) is mountain a new production of the play by Martin MacDonagh (the guy responsible for In Bruges) directed by Garry Hynes who won a Tony for her production of Beauty Queen of Lenane (another of MacDonagh's plays). I wrote my final paper on Cripple back when I took Irish Theatre and it's a play I really like, so I was really excited to get to see this production. It was everything I expected too. Very well done and quite polished considering it was the first preview. The most interesting character, in my opinion, is Babbybobby and the actor who played him did a good job with the role. The actor looked oddly familiar too, considering I'm not exactly familiar with the Irish theatre circuit. That would be becuase he was this guy. If you've never seen the monk who fired Desmond suddenly and disturbingly beat up on a cripple you've never seen live drama the way it was meant to be done.
Part 6: My Life on a Big Yellow Bus
And then I skipped off to Scotland. I really didn't know what to do with myself since I don't know anyone there and it turns out I didn't know anything about Scotland. I knew I wanted to go there, but my plan was no more specific than that. There may have been vague thoughts about whiskey, kilts, bagpipes, and the Loch Ness monster. Faced with this impressive lack of planning I hesitantly signed up for one of the cheap and tacky backpacker tours. I went with the "Haggis" tour company which proudly advertises itself as "Wild and Sexy" figuring if I was doing cheap and tacky I may as well go all the way. This is one of the best decisions I've ever made. There were three dozen people packed onto our big yellow bus from all over the place: India, Australia, The U.S., China... pretty much if the Brits colonized somewhere, that country was represented on the tour. No Brits though, so you can guess who most of the jokes were aimed at. There were a number of other Americans in the group, but I never seem to fall in with those groups. One of the groups were young and eager college students of the state university beer pong variety, whom I found instantly annoying. The other Yanks were a pair of young and geeky and extremely quiet East Coasters who I probably would have gotten along with alright had I gotten the chance to hang out with them. I didn't get that chance though becuase I was, not altogether intentionally, assimilated by the Aussies. Fun stuff. Our guide and driver were pretty fantastic too, although hard to describe. For the CAC folk I'll say that it was kind of like being on a tour with the Scottish equivalents of Trotter and Galvin. For everyone that means absolutely nothing to I'll just say they were extremely fun and more than a little bit mental.
Since this post is clearly becoming The Post That Got Out Of Hand, I'm going to limit myself to a few highlights here. I'll tell you the full story next time we chat, especially if you buy me a drink. Or maybe I'll add details when and if I sort through and post photos.
-There are some foods and drinks that Scotland is supposedly famous for: Haggis, Whiskey, Irn Bru, and the deep fried Mars Bar. I tried them all and what they all have in common is that they taste like they are probably fatal in any significant dosage. Of the four the whiskey is the clear winner.
-The first rule of Whiskey Club is you don't talk about Whiskey Club. The second rule is try not to spill any of it as we pass the bottle around the bus, 'cause that's just a waste.
-There is a fairy dance, used to bring out the fair folk. If this never appeared in a D.I. skit it should have. There is also an accompanying techno song.
-I can't remember why dipping our heads in an icy cold river sounded like a good idea, but it must have because 3/4 of us did it.
-If you meet some English guys in a pub near Loch Ness and they invite a bunch of you to go see their boat, ask how far away it is before you go. If you do ask and they say it's 3km or possibly 3 miles, they aren't sure, consider the fact that it is 1 AM and eventually you will have to hike back. Also consider the fact that you all have to be up at 8 AM to catch your bus. Go anyway, becuase it will be fun. And becuase they're from Manchester, which means they have amazing accents.
-When recovering from the previous point, it is perfectly acceptable to blame the Aussies for the entire thing.
-Went to see a local production of Macbeth. It wasn't very good, but it was in Scotland, so that's something right?
Part Whatever: My Life Trying to Get Packed and Organized to Go Back Home
This is proving to be far more trouble than I'd expected.