Belle of Belfast City

Hi hi everyone!
So if you're wondering about the title of this post here's the inspiration - this is my fav version but they change the words to Dublin...still the REAL song is about Belfast - I'll Tell Me Ma

Belfast was AMAZING!!!!!! I'm adding the link to the photos at the end of this post and most of them have captions that explain what I was up to this weekend. But just in case I'll give you a quick summary now.

We left early Friday morning and drove to the border where we stopped off at InterTrade Ireland which is one of the companies created in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (depending on what you prefer to call it) that are meant to sort of overcome the borders and unite the two sides of Ireland to create well...the slight contentious term of a "One-Island Economy" (the Unionists aren't fans of that term).

Anyway then we went to Belfast and had lunch before jumping back on the bus to go to Stormont, the home of the Northern Ireland Assembly where we were given a tour and had a Q&A session with a representative of the DUP. They're the VERY biased Unionist party (sort of like the Unionist version of Sinn Fein).

Next we went up to Portrush for dinner and then headed over to our hotel. At the hotel we had a crazy dance party in their bar and headed off to bed (after watching Lady Gaga's Top 50 Patry Songs Countdown).

The next morning we went to Giant's Causeway Kevin gave us a lecture on ummm....everything under the sun. A lot about folklore though.
Next we crossed the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge which was awesome!!!! And I wasn't even scared! Yayyyyy! I felt so cool. lol.

Finally, we returned to Belfast where we had lunch in the City Hall and then were given a tour of the city by a man who lived through the troubles. It was crazy, a lot of the stories we had learn t in class with Kevin actually happened to friends of this guy. Some of the most FAMOUS storied out of the troubles he was there for. It was....amazing. However, it was also one of the most depressing things I've ever gone through.

What scariest is the fact that you still need a giant fence to keep the peace. The houses alongside the Peace Wall have heavy duty gratings over the back of their house to protect them from bombs etc. How terrifying to raise your children in that environment.

Anyway...I'll maybe talk about this later but I know that relaying any of the stories would make this post go on forever.

So I'll just shut up and give you the link to the photos
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=216209&id=504857518&l=a8c8e2d54c

Just so you know..

Hey everyone. This is just a quick quick update to tell you what I'll be doing today, tomorrow and Saturday.
Today I WILL write my psych essay (not even kidding. I HAVE to cuz I have to return the books to the library today grrr).

Tomorrow and Saturday will be spent on a programme trip to the north (YYAYYY BELFAST)
So hopefully when I come back I'll have 500,000 awesome pictures from there to share with you (along with a few good stories).

Hopefully I won't get shot for being Catholic ;)

Sleepy video rants

Hey everyone. So I decided to spare you the long essay and just do a video instead.

Advanced warning though that I was REALLY sleepy when recording this so I go off one this longgg tangent about stale baguettes.

I actually re-recorded this about three times because of my angry rant at the end of it but then I just ranted for even longer each time...so I decided to stick with the original version.

Also...when I go off on that rant about Americans and voting I was unclear - I was only referring to those people who vote for a party just cuz their parents and parents' parents did. etc. etc. etc.

So without further ado...

Best St. Patrick's Day EVER

Hey heyyy

I'm totally exhausted so I just wanted to (boast??) a bit about my day! :P

Mass this morning was great! As part of the mass (this is apparently tradition) they blessed a bunch of shamrocks and we pinned them to our lapels and wore them all day. It was pretty cool. I mean an entire chunk of plant btw, pinned to your clothes. Lol.

THEN, we grabbed some food (thank you McDonalds) and went to the St. Patrick's Day parade...it's pretty weird and not very Irish at all. But that was fine by us. Unfortunately it started pretty late so we couldn't stay long BECAUSE WE HAD TO HEAD OVER TO CROKE PARK!

So we went there and sat down in the Naughton family's private box (which is one of the 4 best boxes in the stadium btw) and watched the games.
For the Hurling we decided to support Portumna because they're this tiny team from Galway. They lost :( But we're used to teams we like losing. :P

What was most awesome about it though was that each team had this star player who are both arguably the best in decades (if not centuries). Ballyhale's is Henry Shefflin and they call him King Henry (I think he was top scorer this season) and Portumna's is a guy nicknamed "The Prince" he's 21 and he's like a one man show. This guy scored a point FROM 90 YARDS AWAY!
Picture hitting a ball with a wooden stick through two posts from 90 yards away. Suck on that American football.
Anyway...so it was this huge deal and all the papers had titles like "The Prince vs The King" etc etc

As for the Gaelic Football final we were supporting Kilmurry (who also lost). BUT IT WAS SO FUN! BEST SPORT EVER!

So in an earlier post I said I wanted to find a sport worth screaming for. I found TWO!

GAA is amazing. I've never been so excited in my life.
And what's best about it is that these guys are playing at the top level in the country but they're doing it just for the love of the sport. They don't get paid to play and yet they devote all this time (and many many injuries) to it.
There's a great section in the programme where they give player profiles and they list the jobs of the players etc (a lot of them are carpenters, Garda, students, school teachers etc. Regular people who do something simply because they love their team/county/sport.
I may invest in a hurley and sliotar.

OKAY, the day's not over yet though. After that we hit the pubs (and they were packed) so we went off the beaten path a bit to our secret cheap pub near Trinity. There we met up with a friend, Simon, who was in Dublin with his gf and one of her friends for the day. The back story there is that we met Simon (who is Australian but working in London) in a hostel when we went to London and somehow stayed in contact with him.
It was a blast.

BUT it was all really exhausting so now here I am, back in my room at midnight and heading to bed. It's been grand!!!!

Quick Pre-Paddy's Day update

Hey everyone,

Just letting you know what I was up to today (and all that I will be up to tomorrow) since IT'S ST. PATRICK'S DAY IN IRELAND!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, got that out of my system.

Today (Tuesday) we took part in the Céilí outside St. Stephen's Green.
Basically a Céilí means a big impromptu dance session and so they set up a big stage between Dawson St. and the Green and had irish music and dancing.
Picture a hundred odd heads in the crowd bobbing up and down as they tried to dance along with the people on the stage. And hell yes we were among the dancing tourists.

Really though we don't feel like tourists at all. Sure we don't feel like Dubliners but we are def. no longer tourists.

Next we went to the O'Connell house where they served us dinner (Guinness Stew) and we had a little Celtic Twilight concert where ND people performed. It was awesome.

So here's the agenda for tomorrow -
Wake up early
Go to St. Patrick's Day mass downtown
Go see the parade - woohooo!!

and then THE BEST PART - go see the All Ireland GAA Championship Finals in Croke Park!!!!
ND (more like Kevin) got us tickets to the finals!

Hurling - Seamróga Baile hÉil (Ballyhale Shamrocks) vs Portumna (Port Omna)

Gaelic Football - Cill Mhurie Ui Bhreacáin (Killmury - Ibrickane) vs Naomh Gall (St. Gall's)

And even better, a very rich, very generous family that has a special relationship with ND donated their private box to us. We couldn't all fit though so they chose at random and I'm one of them *HUGE GRIN*
So yeah...one of the best private boxes in the stadium for the final? I love life right now.

Let you guys know how it turned out tomorrow!!!


Maybe a pint or two will be fit in somewhere....

My mom is right...I am a person of extremes

Today I had a sudden insight, a moment of revelation perhaps, about how selfish a person I really am. (I know a hundred people will probably protest that statement after reading it but I really mean it).

I was just sitting here reading Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo and it occurred to me that I never really intended to live very long. Which I guess is weird because most people want to live as long as possible.
Now don't get the wrong impression, I'm not planning on dying any time soon. I just only ever envisioned outliving my parents so they wouldn't be unhappy when I died (and of course I worry about the rest of my family but I hoped they would have families of their own to help them cope).

Really though, I never had any solid plans for making it to old age and that's pretty selfish of me. Way to disregard others' desires, social (and evolutionary) responsibilities and most of all God's will.
I know if I had children of my own that plan would change (I'd probably want to live long for them). But for now I just can't seem to make myself care that much. Also, that may have something to do with the fact that nobody can really picture me married/with children.

Or maybe it's not selfishness at all, maybe it's actually selfless that I want to live for other people and don't care really to make my own goals...I don't know.
Again this ties into the fact that I'm constantly wavering between trying to make people love and depend on me and trying to convince them that I'm Machiavellian and self-serving and they should never really trust me. I think at this point I've successfully told every friend I've made in the past 3 years that I am not actually nice and that I'm manipulative etc. etc. etc.

What's left at the end of this is the realisation that I really can't decide whether I'm a nice person or not. That uncertainty over who I am is something that's being worrying me a lot over the past few years and in some sense it's really quite distressing.

And I can say that I suppose that not knowing who I am just makes me human but sometimes I wonder...

Gah. This is too deep for a Sunday night. I am going to go take a shower and make dinner.
I just felt the need to post this so I could get input from the people I respect (and the very fact that you're reading this means you're one of them).

I once met an old man who told me great stories...

I once met an old man who told me great stories
Of legends of old who played hard for the glory
Of lifting the cup in that moment of triumph
His memories kept me enthralled

- Fields of Glory

So I know that all I've been doing lately is complaining about how sick I am and actually, I'm sick again. But then I realised that apart from my various illnesses and emotional breakdowns none of you have the slightest clue what I've been doing, and I've been doing quite a lot.

Facebook is still being mean to me so instead I'm going to just upload a few photos for now and some videos that I took.

This post is going to be pretty long so here's the SparkNotes version for those of you who don't have the time.

1. Jon and Phil visited!!! - Super fun and got to show them around Dublin and took a trip out to Howth. They were great company and I loved having them over.

2. Irish House Party - A night of traditional Irish music and dance in a lovely pub downtown.

3. CLASS TRIP TO THE WEST!!! - What a weekend! We went almost everywhere in the west in one weekend and did the whole Ring of Kerry. Undoubtedly some of the most spectacular pictures from my entire stay in Ireland so make sure to check those out!

THE MORE DETAILED DESCRIPTIONS

1. Jon and Phil's visit. - So when you consider how fragile my emotional state was in the days leading up to their visit their timing was nothing short of a miracle. It was so great to get to show them around and it was fantastic to have someone who knows me as well as Jon does around.

We spent Saturday, Mon and Tuesday in Dublin doing some touristy things (like the Guinness and Jameson tours) and some slightly more authentic things (like a trip to McTurcail's pub with Maura who is AWESOME and I'm so glad I finally met her). On Sunday we went to Howth and did the cliff walk and the weather was just spectacular!

So here are a few pics from those days -





IRISH HOUSE PARTY -
I'll let the video talk for themselves...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC_9cdMNDko
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLb31Sm9-b0

CLASS TRIP TO THE WEST -

So last Friday - Sunday was our first of two programme trips in Ireland. This one was to the west of Ireland. We left early on Friday and had lunch in Adare (in Co. Limerick). We drove the whole Ring of Kerry over the course of the weekend and spent Fri and Sat night in Kenmare. At some point we stopped the bus and walked out on a bog to get idea of what a bog is actually like (mushy and shaky btw).

On Fri night we had a giant jenga and pool tournament in a pub there courtesy Senator Mark Daly (who's in the the right hand side of the picture with Allison pulling out the Jenga piece [first pic] so you can see why we all adore him).


The next day we did a walking tour of Kenmare and saw this ancient celtic stone circle and were given lessons in Hurling and Gaelic football (and I didn't suck at them)!!! It was awesssommmeee. Hurling is the coolest sport everrrr.

Anyway..then we hiked the hilly national park between Kilkenny and Kenmare.

We went sight seeing all over and sang the fight song on the beach Daniel O'Connell's summer home was on.
And then we went to DINGLE!!! (For some reason I adore Dingle, I think it's not so much to do with Dingle itself as the running jokes that come from it).

It appears I have limits....

Superwoman here posting on Ashley's behalf. Why isn't Ashley free to post her own blog entry? Possibly because she's huddled in a corner crying.

It seems that she has reached the end of her rope. So what happens now that her rope has run out? Well, she lets go, she falls about 40 feet and gets knocked unconscious, then she finally catches up on all the rest she missed and wakes up just fine and dandy!

See, the thing is, Ashley has this complex where she feels the need to be a superhero for everyone around her. She must always be strong when they're having problems, and always bright and chipper when they're trying to have fun. But the problem is that Ashley is far from a superhero (and I would know). She has problems of her own, lots of them. She also has work and assignments that she worries about. She has rough days too and believe it or not she even needs sleep once in a while (who would have thought).

But apparently she doesn't really get the concept of her own humanity. She knows it, but she doesn't really GET it. She continues to make her world revolve around everyone else until she becomes so exhausted that she spends five hours in her room crying. Then she sleeps it off and starts the cycle all over again.
Even now she's muttering under her breath that everyone has problems and that obsessively helping others seems like a damn good one to have. Someone needs to smack her. Seriously. She's just going to keep doing it and she knows it.

Also, it's mildly masochistic the way she finds some way to throw herself in front of a bus for someone every single day. Figuratively of course, but don't doubt that she really would throw herself in front of an actual bus (and buses here don't stop). I suspect though that a real bus would do less damage than these imaginary ones...

*

Love you all, I'm going to go pack my bags for my class trip and see if I can make it through tonight in a mildly sane mood. Schizophrenia aside I seem to be recovering well from my nervous breakdown of 4 days ago.