girl goes to the doctor

After Scotland my sore throat, runny nose, hacking cough, fuzzy brain black plague carried on right up until Thursday when I was supposed to be getting ready to leave for Belfast so I decided to go see the campus Doctor. There I waited for three hours with other germy looking students before seeing a man in a carpeted office, rather than an exam room. He lifted up my shirt to check my breathing on my back and I suddenly felt like he shouldn’t be, just because the setting wasn’t correct. (Middle-aged baldies with cold stethoscopes are only allowed to prod me in sterile, tiled, white rooms with pictures of ice cream stacked in trombones on the walls!!)   He proclaimed that I have tonsillitis  and should have them removed soon (um…no?) and prescribed me lots of fun drugs. Which I shouldn’t take with alcohol-so he told me to only have a few beers when I go out. Only in Ireland. 

Edinburgh…city of tartan, torture and the booty tone.

Last last weekend I went to Scotland with one Miss Nicoley Guillen. It was great. We arrived after our separate 6 am flights loopy, cold and loopy and wandered the dewy grey streets of Edinburgh trying to find our first hostel. Favorite sights during this walk: Cockburn Street housing the lovely Cockburn Hotel, 3 men in kilts (true Scots go commando…), a guy sporting a sherlock holmes status cap with a ridiculous tartan bow on top walking two grey hounds with disturbingly crooked tails and Karen’s Designer Knit store.             

 

 

 

Buget Backpackers was found on the ghettoist part of Cowgate street and turned out to be a dorm like, campy feeling place that smelled like college kitchens and laundry detergent and was painted in numerous  highlighter colors like a pediatric dentists’ office. It was neat. The desk clerk, a scrawny iced blonde aussie was clearly smitten with Nicole because he forgot to give us our sheets and proudly stuck out his flakey skinned chin to show off a swelling chin piercing, “hey, do you like my new piercing,” she laughed and said, “yep, can we have some locks?”  It was hawt times.             

 

We were only there for the weekend but we took in as many sights as possible on our first day: The Sir Walter Scott monument (the biggest monument in le globe ever erected for a writer…mmmhmm), the graveyard (our super great Buget Backpakers tour guide, Tom Australian with both sides of his nose pierced like a bull, who had only been there three weeks made a point to take us to all the creepy spots, and also to makeout with one girl on the tour later that night and then hit on me when she was in the bathroom…creeper!) where many decadent tombstones sank into the apparently packed ground (he said if it rained for seven days straight the rumor was bones would start poking out…), the musuem where we saw a real live guillotine, ancient torture tools, a big ol’ tartan loom and the stuffed carcass of Dolly the cloned sheep (complete with hay and cloned poo), the castle (heck no we didn’t go in, I’m starting to learn the euroage and poundage required to go into all of these empty castles all reupholstered and newly stuccoed and smelling like Home Depots isn’t the mystically medievally reverent experience I always thought it be…), the writer’s museum (ah, hello, english majors?) a neat vintage shop where we had the required movie montage dress-up party, a pretty little park that used to be a sewage drain where they also drowned witches and an amazing but dead silent hat shop with thousands of hand-crafted caps set on sticks like a victorian velvet conrad island. In order to do all of these exciting things we climbed approximately 700 flights of stairs.           

 

down in dundrum: Valentine’s Day

Note: I don’t know why the formatting is so weird. Does someone more talented than me know?  

So. Even though there are many many many things to write about on this beautiful Sunday afternoon in Dublin, I’m going to write about the V-day and then pile a bunch of [hopefully] more interesting post on top of it because the only thing sadder than having a blog is having a blog dedicated to your pathetic love life (no offense, obviously, to the writer of that blog…I bet it’s great).                                      

Confession: This was the first time in my whole life I’d ever had a real life, non-lesbian, non-alcoholic, non-dairy based date on Valentine’s day. Needless to say, it freaked me out. For one, the little jerk wanted to be all adorable and surprise me with where we were going instead of just TELLING ME so I could wear the proper attire, mentally prepare myself accordingly ect.  So I panicked, naturally, and took a shower and made myself look like a cutter by slashing my legs in various patterns with my shitty razor, tried to make my hair look non-spaniel like and put on a green dress (but not a real green dress, that’s cruel). He showed up as always right on time (it’s kind of freakish, I think he may be a robot) looking all europy chic, wearing way too much hair gel and smelling all lovely.                

We left my apartment after my roommates inspected him and told him to have me home by nine. He put his arm around me and instead of heading for the bus stop into Dublin, he steered me towards the middle of campus. I was like, yes, yes, I would like to go Mc on you in the library, good call. But apparently that was wrong and also inappropriate for the vocalizing. While walking he gave me a card. A warm and fuzzy red and pink store-bought one with a bear holding a bunch of heart-shaped balloons and at the bottom of his message he signed it, “Iany.” Now, if you know me, you know that I would never succumb to such levels of coo. Iany? I had never called him that. I will never call him that. Ergo: HE GAVE HIMSELF A PET NAME. Ack. I laughed and asked if he named himself that since I wasn’t going to, he said, ‘I don’t know, I thought it sounded nice.’ His accent is very cute so I forgave him.            

Scotland Ho.

I hope everyone has a lovely Valentine’s Day (aka has a drinking buddy), I’ll write when I get back! 

 Also: If you don’t check any bags when you fly ryanair, you only get a 10 kilo carry-on, 22 lbs. So basically I’ll just be bringing my tooth brush and Ulysses. Joy. 

value systems.

Why is no one commenting on my J.K. Rowling post? Screw Ian’s CD, I SAW J.K. ROWLING.  Where are your souls people?   Edit: sorry, I’m a demanding blogger.