3/20

I’m 21 now. It feels weird. Awesome, but weird. I’ve been really busy lately and my body is just flat out exhausted. I’ve acquired quite the dislike for buses. 5 hour bus ride to and from Dublin, 2 hour ride to and from Killarney, then a 7 hour bus tour around the Ring of Kerry all in the past five days. It’s been crazy and I really need a massage.

 Other than that, though, I’ve been having a great time. Dublin is a beautiful city and probably the only one I could seriously see myself living in one day that I’ve encountered this far into my trip. It’s far from the traditional Irish towns I’ve gotten used to in the past four weeks. I can see what the Cork locals meant when they said that it was a tourist’s town. But oh well, that’s any big city for you. St. Patrick’s Day there had the entire place in an excited uproar of a party and the town’s excitement rubbed off on me. Everybody was just hanging out in the streets dancing and drinking and having a great time - it was almost nostalgic. I would love to find a way to come back next year.

My parents wired me $200 for my birthday and told me to take my friends out to a fancy dinner for my present. We found this Italian restaurant in Cork called Il Padrino. Seriously the best dinner I’ve ever had. It made me really excited to be in Italy tomorrow. Speaking of Italy tomorrow, I think it’s the coolest thing ever that I’m going to be at the Vatican for Easter Sunday. Isn’t that awesome? First St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, then Easter at the Vatican. I picked a good time to come here.

I’m not sure how often I’m going to be able to get on the internet to update this blog, but I promise I’ll be on it whenever I can even if it’s only for a short update. As of right now, the tentative schedule goes like this:

5 days in Rome, 2 in Prague, 3 in Athens, 4 in Freiburg/Berlin, 3 in Paris, 3 in Amsterdam, 4 in Barcelona/Seville, 3 in Portugal (gonna see the family heritage at the Azores Islands), 3 in London, then back to Cork for a couple days til I fly back into San Francisco to meet my family. Since my car is already parked there, if I’ve got any money left over in my bank account I’m going to make a trip down to LA to visit Anton and Chi-Z. Right now all signs point to me moving back to Portland, but we’ll see. My mind seems to change a lot.

Wish me luck. Should be a fun trip.

PS. All of my Dublin pictures are on my personal laptop which has since taken a shit. I don’t know what happened, but right now my laptop is out of commission. Hopefully I’ll be able to retrieve those pictures from my hard drive. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed. I’ve got a good buddy of mine back in Reno who seems to do a lot of magic with computers and he’ll be able to bail me out again for when I have to buy another computer. Here is a good one to tide you over.