Here goes. The week of CRAZY finally recapped!
Last week, I had literally planned out, hour by hour, what I had to do from Monday to Friday. I had a ton of psychoacoustics to finish up (but that means I've got, by my calculations, at least 100 euro coming my way when I get back!) and lots of studying to do for my art history exam Thursday evening. Fortunately, I wound up not studying too much for art history and deciding that I didn't care all that much about the outcome of this "partiel blanc" (the only translation I've found is "mock exam", but it's mainly to prepare us for the unholy wrath that is our actual "partiel", or final), which worked to my advantage, considering the topic that we were given was "Explain how literature had an affect on French romantic art". I had taken the time to learn the pieces of art that we learned in class, and even read one of the assigned books to learn how the art fit into the context of French history in general. However, it didn't leave much time for pleasure reading of Victor Hugo and Baudelaire on the off-chance that the paper topic wasn't either about heroism or the revolutionary period, the two subjects that we had expected.
So, as I decided that no matter how much I tried to study, the outcome would be the same no matter what, I decided to do Christmas shopping and make Christmas cookies for my friends, instead. It was the best choice I could've made. I hit a big rough patch this month, and I really needed some chill-out time (as planned as it was) to not think about anything.
Thursday night, after getting back from the test at 9 and eating dinner, I started packing for Rachel's and my morning flight to Shannon, Ireland. It was crazy. Our flight left around 1:30 Paris time, which put us into Shannon around 3:00. We asked the lovely woman at the bus desk how to get to our hostel in Tarbert, and she asked us why in the world we would be going to Tarbert. After a bus to Limerick, a bus to Foynes, and a car to Tarbert, it was already 7:30. We were playing telephone tag with the woman all day to let her know when we'd be there, but it turns out that she wasn't around the hostel when we got there. Something about her children's Christmas concert. We hung out at the all but abandoned Anchor, where we shot pool with the high schooler Aiden and waited for Margaret at the Ferry House Hostel to let us know when she'd be around to let us in.
Luckily, we got up-graded to a 5-bedroom "suite". Collectively, Rachel and I were one of 3 people staying in the hostel.
Everything about Tarbert was SO FUNNY. The next morning, we walked around the River Shannon, getting wonderful views of the Irish countryside. Hardly any cars passed on the winding roads. As we walked back to town, we encountered a little dog, who walked with us into town, showing us the way. He would turn back every couple of moments to make sure we were still following him. SO FUNNY.
We stopped off at Enright's restaurant, a little place with "good grub" (said Brendon of the Anchor). They had about 10 tables and one menu with about 7 options, all delicious. We payed 12 euro each for bread, delicious thick chicken soup, potatoes, steak and vegetables, apple pie, and coffee. It was adorable.
We wound up just watching TV for the rest of the day, since we just felt like lazing around. We were in the living room of the hostel, where we met Sue, the only other person staying at the Ferry House. We talked about everything from Obama to abortion, and her angry passion for discussing politics was almost off-putting. While we were watching Top Gear, we saw a car that sells for 800,000 pounds, and Sue said, "You could feed a small country in Africa with that money! What is WRONG with this world???"
We also talked about her decision to come to Ireland. She came in early November from Alberta, Canada to bike around all of Ireland. She was almost at 1,000 kilometers already, and she said that it was the only way to see the country. She looked to be at the very least 40 years old, but she must've been in tip-top shape. We wound up watching at least 3 hours of TV with her, including so many strange British game shows, Will and Grace, and 3rd Rock from the Sun.
That night, we got dinner at a Chinese restaurant across the road, and it was so good. We headed over to the Anchor, and there were so many people! It was hard to imagine that this was the same bar we were in just the night before. Everyone was very friendly.
Waking up for our 8:00 a.m. taxi to the airport proved to be a struggle, especially considering that Rachel set her alarm for 20:00 instead of 8:00. We lucked out since we had told Sue what room we were staying in, and she happened to be downstairs when the driver was looking for us. He came to our room and knocked on our door to let us know that he was there. So funnnyyyy.
We quickly threw everything together and set off for Paris. Ryanair = also very funny. They play commercials on and off throughout the 1.5 hour flight. It's like the
Fung Wah of the sky, but polite and Irish and cute.
We packed everything up and headed for my house. It's a long story, but apparently not only had my host family not left yet for Brugges, but they were having a little dinner party with all of their family who live in the apartment. So we got our stuff together, got some sleep, and hit the road (/the 6) to get to the airport.
LONGEST FLIGHTS EVER. I was literally out of my house at 9 in the morning, and made it into Newark after a connection in Chicago at 5:00 a.m. Paris time (10:00 EST).
And on that note, I'm off to see if I can get more than 5 hours of sleep today. GOOD NIGHT!
