The Bi-monthly Update

Hey folks. I'm back. Yes, I know, it has been nearly 2 months since my last post. I was going to apologize, but then I glanced at my last 5 posts and took note that there is nary a comment. So I owe you nothing. Ha. Didn't see that one coming, did you?

But out of the goodness of my heart, I'm going to post anyway. My last post was just one week prior to moving back down to C-town. I moved in with Julianna for a month, which was Fun Times. However, she does not have wireless internet (gasp!), so I was forced to utilize a dinosaur that lives in her house which she passes off as a computer. Add sporadic connectivity to the above-mentioned dinosaur, and you have a recipe for blog famine.

By mid-July, Julianna needed the extra bedroom back, so I moved to a cozy nook underneath an overpass. Well, that was the plan, anyway. But then I found out that my dear friend Hannah was moving into a little 2-bedroom house and she didn't have a roommate. So I moved in with her. This has also been Fun Times. Although we don't see each other nearly enough due to our busy schedules, it's fun to have her as a roommate. However, we do not have internet access (double gasp!), so I rarely even check my email, let alone blog.

So those are my excuses for not blogging, what are your excuses for not commenting?

Right now, I am neither at Julianna's house, nor at Hannah's house, nor at that lovely spot under the overpass. I am in North Jersey (not to be confused with South Jersey - two different worlds, people).

I got here yesterday and I'll be here for a couple of weeks working as a nanny/household manager while the current one is on a trip to Europe. If everything goes well (and I believe it will), I will be moving back here in late October/early November.

So that's basically what has been going on in my life for the last couple of months. I'll probably be blogging more over the next couple of weeks.

*Hint* If you want to hear more from me - feedback helps :)

Driving on the wrong..er..left side of the road

I arrived in Dublin two days ago and met up with Hannah, Roman, Robert, and Daniel. It was late by the time Hannah got there, so we basically just had dinner and called it a night. The next day we decided to hire a car so we could travel around Ireland and see some of the countryside. As I still don't know how to drive a manual, Roman was going to drive. But when we went to hire the car, we found out it would be a lot cheaper if the driver was 25. Roman turned 25 today, so we decided to stay one more day in Dublin and rent the car today. But when we got to the car rental agency, we discovered that Roman's driver's license expired today. This meant that I was the only one who could drive. It also meant that we had to rent an automatic, which was much more expensive. How many times have I wished I had learned how to drive a manual? More than a few.

Once we rented the car, we had to go back to the hostel to get our luggage and find out where to leave part of it. It doesn't sound that complicated, does it? But we managed to make it extremely complicated. I'm not going to go into all of it now, but 3 hours later, we were finally out of Dublin.

Let me just say that driving here was and is a lot harder than I thought it would be. It's not that big of a deal driving on the opposite side of the road, but having the steering wheel on the opposite side of the car is extremely weird. Getting a sense of the distance I have on each side of the car and parking are the main problems I have, but I'm getting better.

We're staying in Kilkenny tonight. It is a lovely little town with a river running through it and a castle nearby. Everything is a lot cheaper than in Dublin, as well. If we had more time, we'd probably stay here longer. But we don't, so we won't, so I need to leave now and go enjoy the city!

Hannah is here!

Hooray! She's finally here! After we met up at the airport yesterday, we decided to take public transport back to my flat. As we maneuvered her bags through turnstiles, on and off escalators, on and off trains, etc., we were taken back to the Great Europe Trek of '04. Ahh, those were the days...sleeping on trains, eating gelato for dinner, taking an overnight ferry from Italy to Greece, hiking 6 miles with our backpacks in search of our hostal- it was quite the adventure. But back to the story at hand!

Once we dropped things off at my place and Hannah had a couple cups of coffee (a vital part of the process), we were ready to go out again. We went with some of my friends to Mesón de la Guitarra to hear some flamenco music and eat some tapas, then on to Mesón del Champiñon for more tapas, and much to our dismay, more music. You see, the flamenco music at the first place was awesome. It always is. At the second place, however, they were playing what sounded like bad mexican country music. To make matters worse, it was karaoke. Fortunately, only one lady actually sang, but she was completely lashed and after she finished singing she continued dancing around for a while. Oh well. We still had a lot of fun.

By the time we got home and went to bed, it was around 3 am. That's not particularly late for Spain, but Hannah had been up all day after flying here from Seattle the day before! So, she slept until about 1 pm today. She's getting ready right now, then we're off to- well, I don't know where. We'll figure that out as we go, I suppose. We're going to Casa Mingo tonight (famous for rotisserie chicken and cider), followed by Populart (live jazz). Then tomorrow, we're going to Segovia. For now, though, it looks like we're off!