I’ll describe yesterday as one quite entropic day. I am the worst with jet-lag—it usually takes a week for me to shake it off. Thinking myself too tired the night before, I didn’t take my Advil PM, which knocks you out pretty hard. I went to sleep at around midnight and woke up at 3 in the morning. I then proceeded to roll around in bed wide awake, read a chapter of Paul Johnson’s Socrates, resorted to taking one sleeping pill (which did nothing for me), go on facebook, and contemplate the ceiling. This happened until 7:15 AM, when I finally caught a break and fell asleep. Brad woke me up an hour later and we headed to the IES center for orientation part II, which went from 9:30 to about 4:30. Of course there were many breaks, and two of my friends on the program introduced me to Joe Burger, where I had an enormous veggie burger with great fries and coffee for ten euro. It was a great deal! We ended up being a half hour late to the next session of orientation.
After orientation I headed up to the area around Trinity with a group of people to get a cell phone. The streets leading to Trinity are fantastic! So many varieties of shops, restaurants, pubs, hobby stores, you name it. I love the area more every time I see it. We then walked around the campus, which was now illuminated by daylight, and I noticed a lot of things I hadn’t the night before. It is truly gorgeous and I’ll try to post some pictures of it soon enough. Speaking of pictures, my camera is jammed. The lens will not recede into the unit and makes a strange suffering sound when I turn it on and off. I brought it to a camera store, where one of the men informed me that his friend down the street could look at it, but for 60 euro, which does not imply that he is going to fix it. I thought that was absurd and the man suggested that I keep jimmying with the lens until, by luck, it dislodges. I now sit in my apartment trying to loosen the lens, wondering whether I can spare 60 euro.
But the reality is you can’t spare any money here. We’ve been here for less than a week and all of us have blown through much of the bills in our wallets. Maybe it’s time to slow down a bit. I guess it’s hard to conserve when you are in euphoria mode, which is what Dublin is all about. A few other notable things: I found an awesome store called Secret Books and Records. You need to walk through a hallway to get to it, but it’s been opened since 1994 (I talked to the owner) and it is filled everywhere with piles of books and a respectable collection of European and American records—my kind of place. Only the record covers were on display, not the vinyls themselves. The owner was shocked when I told him that the record store in St. Louis had all of the records in their covers on display. I bought the collected poems of W.B. Yeats and Oscar Wilde, and he told me to come back the next day for a William Blake book I asked about. I then bought my phone plan and a SIM card from Vonafone. Then I went to another phone store where a nice Moroccan named Mohammed used his illegal software to unlock the phone I had already (shout out to Juan Alban for giving me his old French phone).
I then went back to the apartment and made Brad and myself pasta shells. We then went out to meet some people at a bar called MssRs Maguire next to the Liffy River. This is where my story (if you’ve read this far) moves from order to chaos, though with a rather happy ending, so no worries. We get to the bar and buy the Haus Lager, which deliciously tastes like a combination of apple cider and beer. This bar is awesome. It has three floors connected by a massive wooden staircase. There were tons of people there and I talked to some guy about how badly I wanted to join his lacrosse team (I haven’t played since the 7th grade). I was loving Haus and probably ordered four pints over the two hours I was there. But then I made a big mistake. Under the influence I tend to wander. I wandered down the stairs and then followed a group out the door, leaving all of my friends in the bar. The bouncers wouldn’t let me back in because, in one of their words: “Y’have too much on ye.” I tried calling the one or two numbers I had in my cell phone, but realized that I wouldn’t get in, so I took a cab back to the apartment. When I got home I realized I forgot my coat at the bar, and asked Brad to get it for me. I described it as dark colored with fur on the hood. Needless to say I passed out hard (not this hard). When I woke the next morning with my shirt and jeans still on, my contacts still in, I looked at the ground at the coat Brad brought back for me. It was dark colored, with fur on the hood, but it wasn’t mine. My first thought was, of course, “Oh shit!” I checked the pockets and found an envelop inside with the name Wayne Spellman on it and a small tin container of Vaseline. I wore his coat this morning and felt rather European. We went on an IES double-decker bus tour around the city, which was great! When we got there the people from the night before said they were happy I was alive.
Afterward we had breakfast at a charming little restaurant run by two Japanese people. It was delicious and will probably become one of the regular places we go to since it’s on the way to school. We got to the bar and retrieved the coat, and I gave her the one that was taken accidentally. I’m sorry for taking it and I hope you find your coat, Wayne Spellman, wherever you are.
Then we went to the National Gallery and I loved it. They had paintings there by Caravaggio, Titian, Bruegel, Van Gogh, Rembrandt, a big exhibit on William Turner and more. These were all people I learned about in Western Art last year and it was awesome to see their work in person. My favorite was a painting by Jack Yeats called Grief, which is an anti-war painting. If you examine it closely people start to form in the chaos of color, most vividly the angry face of the horseman in the middle.
Anyway, this post is quite long, so I’m going to wrap up. If you’ve read this far, thank you. Hopefully I’ll fix my camera and post some pictures. Until then…
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