Thursday with Gabriel on the Road to Cork

We got up very casually this morning, and I took a shower when the shower became available.  I got dressed and started packing up.  Packing up is fairly easy, and since I decided to wear a dress today, it was much more comfortable moving around.  Seriously people, I need to lose some weight.  I broke the hook and eye closure that holds my pants together, and it makes the zipper come undone.  As soon as I get back from Ireland and stop eating heavy food, it's diet time.

I packed up pretty quickly and took all my things downstairs to this luggage room where they keep people's luggage locked up if they have checked in or checked out and are not in their rooms.  Lauren and I went with most of the other girls to the Queen of Tarts on Dame Street (the main drag where every place we went to in Dublin was located), and we went upstairs for breakfast.  Every restaurant in this place has had multiple stories, and we are almost always stuck upstairs.  It's cool, but always pretty sweaty because heat rises.  We sat upstairs, and I got the light breakfast, of a scone, orange juice and tea, and Lauren wanted a cup to have some of my tea.  Well, our waitress was a doofus, and instead of bringing Lauren just a cup, she brought everything but a cup, like, the exact opposite of what we asked for.

***  I wrote this once, while I was on the bus, and I finished a really really long post, and apparently forgot to hit save, so I lost it all.  I'm writing it again, but this time much more annoyed, so, forgive me.  ***

We headed back to the hotel and packed up, got on the bus with Gabriel and took off for Cork.  We said good bye to Todd, who was heading off to England for other work things, and gained a really great and funny Irishman instead.  Gabriel is from Co Kerry, and speaks Irish, and has an extremely thick brogue, and sometimes waxes poetic in Irish midthought in English.

The rolling hills of Ireland in this area, sort of the south east, remind me of Montana on the east side of the mountains but before the flat plains.  It felt very much like home, with cows and horses and sheep.  The edges of properties are demarcated with lines of shrubs, which may or may not be held up with fences of some kind.  We spent perhaps an hour and a half on the bus before we arrived at the Waterford Crystal factory in Waterford City.  Leta made us wear suits, but when we arrived, the executive had already left, and thus we were exceptionally over dressed.  We marched around the factory, and looked at much.  I took pictures of nearly every station, so I can reiterate the process more fully later.  It is fairly straightforward, but I didn't know that the pieces are blown glass, not made of actual crystals.  So that was news.

Fairly uneventfully, we piled back into the bus and took off for Cork.  Gabriel calls us his little chickens, and before Leta got on the bus, he told us all about the good pubs in Cork.  He said that no one in Ireland drinks and drives.  (long pause)  Because you'd spill your Guinness everywhere!  When he says fuck, it sounds more like feck, and he said it's a big fecking mess trying to clean Guinness off your dashboard.  I don't much care for how much the Irish love drinking, because they are certainly encouraging the debauchery.

Anyway, off to Cork, which is mainly a one street town where the sidewalks roll up at about 6, or as Gabriel says, "hhhhhaaapasht," which is half past.  Some of the pubs stay open later, but most close just after midnight.  The hotel we are staying at is called the Garnish House, and it has several standing buildings, that are each like three town houses butted up together.  All of the girls and one of the four-boy rooms are all in the middle of one building, and there are a couple more boys spread across another building or two.  Naturally, because of our central location and majority of people, our building is the meeting spot of choice.  There is a kitchen, dining room, parlor and laundry room, so it's a really sweet deal.

Leta ordered pizza when we arrived, but it was going to take a while, so most of us went to get food and also alcohol.  At least we are all buying cheap alcohol for our own house.  I got some cottage cheese and raspberries for breakfast, and for 4.79 I got a bottle of raspberry blackberry cider, which is really fruity and not too alcoholic.  By the time we all marched back from the store, it was absolutely pissing rain, and Lauren and I narrowly dodged getting soaked completely because we walk really fast.  The pizza had arrived as well, so we all ate and drank and evaporated in a semblance of silence for a while.  Then we started drinking and playing games.

First we played this great game on Colie's phone called Head's Up, where you pick a category, and hold the phone to your forehead and everyone tries to get you to say the correct thing.  You flip the phone down for a correct answer, and up to pass, and it's a pretty good game.  The harder categories were celebrities, because it's hard to get people to remember the name, and Act It Out and Accents, because we, as the people prompting, were not very good at only miming, or at doing accents.  It was a really great game though!

After that, we played one that Dale explained.  It's sort of like a lot of games, so here's the gist.  First, everyone makes up two or three noun kinds of things, and puts them in a bowl.  Divide into teams, but it's ok if the teams are mixed within the group (like counting off, 1, 2, 1, 2).  The first person drawing slips for their team will have one minute to get their team to guess the noun as possible, like Taboo, where you can say anything but the word.  The teams alternate until all the slips are gone.  You have to say the object verbatim as it is written on the card, so more complex ideas

You put all the same slips back into the bowl, and this time, you go play like charades, and act out the nouns.  It's slightly easier because there are a fixed number of objects which you have already had presented to you, but harder because now it's charades.

Third round, the person drawing slips can only use one word to describe the object.  This can be either easy or difficult, because if you don't remember all the possible objects, you end up with one person saying the same word over and over.  Fourth and final round, you draw the slips and have to use the person to your right as a mannequin to do the charades for you to articulate the object.  This is definitely the hardest and funniest round.

Ok, so we had some weird objects in our mix, because some people were already drunk when they started writing, and didn't realize how awkward the game would be if we had to describe certain things.  So our main categories became: Ireland related (Ireland, leprechaun, double decker bus, stupid American tourists, Michael's British socks -- he realized too late that British flag socks might not go over well with Irish executives, so he had to wear them inside out), animal related (dog, lamb, frog, gorilla, chewbacca, and other creatures that were difficult to discern in mime form), drinking related (Dutch Gold, Memo's on the Ave, Capitol Hill) and body part related (the gendered sex organs, boobs, butts, pubes, and worst of all was yeast infection.  WTF, drunk people!  When I said that this group are not pretty drunks, I meant it!).  There was a back story on "Alex and Todd", so Alex is one of Todd's graders at Foster, and Todd has sort of an awkwardly chummy personality?  So when someone would ask if Todd was going out to drink with them that night, he would say something like "I will if Alex is going out!" or other things that were slightly creepy in their affectionateness.  Throughout the four rounds, it was really funny to mime, people just kept pointing to Alex in the other room, and during the single word round, Reilly just said "gay" and everyone got it.

So, it all went fairly well and amusingly but mostly uneventfully until that dramatic last round with the vicarious charades.  I ended up being a charade model for a really long time, so first with Andre, he got me to gesture stripper, by trying to get me to take my own sweater off without knowing what it was that I was trying to do.  But it worked, and it was funny.  Shane also used me as a model, and I had to gesture penis, and everyone was amused by how big my imaginary penis was.

I used Shane as a model, and when I pulled "yeast infection", I was like, oh fuck, how am I going to explain this without it being super awkward and horrible?  Apparently my what the fuck face was really telling, because Andre shouted from the corner, yeast infection!  I didn't even have to act anything out.

Poor Tanner also used me as a model, and he first pulled boobs, and he just looks at me and is like, "sorry", and uses my hands to grab my own boobs.  Then immediately after that, he pulls bikini car wash, and he is like, "sorry again", and I had to pretend to wash a car and then grab my boobs again.  It was fairly hilarious, and he was a really good sport about it.

Once the game was over, which my team handily won, I went upstairs to go to bed.  The major disadvantage of being in the house where everyone congregates is that we basically moved into the frat house.  So Lauren and I listened as they continued partying, then decided to walk the ten minutes into town.  That was slightly ridiculous, because after days of bitching about wearing suits, they all wanted to put on their suits and suit up to go out.  So, whatever, you lame-os.  But Lauren and I got a great night sleep, and she's the best sleeping partner ever.