Kate’s Rants

hey i think it’s been over a week since my last post. sorry everyone! i guess nothing really interesting has happened to me, at least not post-worthy.

but that never stopped me from rambling on before. weird. i suppose i’m in a non-writing mood.

well, i’ve been getting really excited about going to ireland. for some reason whenever i think about it, i think about the springtime. i think it will still be pretty cold when i go there, but i never daydream about cold-ireland. i daydream about sunny, green, summery ireland.

also, brad’s roommate daniel had a FANTASTIC idea! brad and i had been talking about renting a car for a couple of days in britain to travel around a bit that way. but then daniel said “why dont you guys just buy a cheap car in ireland?” which is SUCH a better idea! brad’s roommate simon is coming over as well, so we’d be able to split a car 3 ways. and i’ve already started looking into it, and there’s always people moving out of the country or selling their car for pretty cheap.

i also talked to a girl in the hostel who bought a car here. (she’s from australia.) she said it’s probably a bit different in ireland, but we’d have to pay some sort of road tax and something else in addition to the actual car. and she said she was able to just get individual insurance (i’m not sure what she meant by that…) but she also said if we’re splitting it 3 ways, it would be totally worth it. and she also said she travelled europe by car, and it was by far the best thing she ever did. travelling by train or bus is so restricting: you can only go to the big towns and the places where the trains or busses go. and you have to base all your travels around the schedules of the trains/busses. with a car, you have the freedom to go wherever you want whenever you want. AND you’d never get stuck sleeping in a bush.

anyway, that’s the most exciting pre-news i have. we’re obviously still thinking about it, and there are lots of factors that will affect our decision. like, if we have enough money to pay rent and buy food. but i’m sure it will all work out. and i’m really really looking forward to it. ALSO we’d be saving a huge amount of money by not buying train/rail passes. instead we’d buy gas for the car.

oh, today is Burns day. celebrating robert burns, a famous scottish poet. brianne and i went to a burn’s supper on saturday, which was all fancy and we dressed up and the guys all wore kilts and it was fun. we had haggis, neeps and tatties, in addition to soup, dessert and a cheese plate. we also had a ceilidh, or traditional scottish dancing. that was good fun but unfortunately the ratio of guys to girls was small, so the girls had a play the part of the guys a lot. oh well. there was also a funny little quiz about how much we knew about scotland (kinda) and our table WON! (i dont know how we won, because when they were reading out the answers, it seemed like we got most of them wrong! haha) anyway, we got two bottles of wine for the table, so we each had a couple of glasses. we didn’t get any whiskey for free, but there was a bar where you could buy some if you wished. i didn’t wish to. but since today is burn’s day, the hostel had some at reception and gave me a little shot of some. it wasn’t very good, but man that stuff warms you up. they also served haggis (haggis pudding actually, which is deep fried haggis and looks DISGUSTING) at the cantine at work. i decided to skip that, since i had good haggis at a fancy hotel on saturday. i can only eat so much animal insides.

tomorrow i’m going to:
-get my laundry done (yeah, it’s free for longtermers in this hostel! woo!)
-go to work
-buy my BUNAC IRELAND ticket/packet
-buy a bus pass
-find out about ferries to dublin from scotland
-probably join in the going-away/birthday party for some people in the hostel.

saturday i’m going to:
-sleep in ahhhh.
-maybe go buy some new work pants
-go watch curling with jenna?

curling: some weird scottish sport that sounds hilarious. we signed up to play in the edinburgh decathalon, but we don’t have enough people for a team, which is a bummer, so we’re probably not going to play. but it would have been SO FUNNY because it’s like giant shuffleboard on ice. and yeah, none of my work friends or i have ever played it, so we’d be even sillier.

but jenna and i decided that if we dont play, we might go watch. cause i really want to see what we are missing. so we’ll see if that happens. maybe we can convince lynsay and lucas to come watch with us. and then we can all go out on the piss. hahaha i’m turning british. (not really though.)

anyway, that’s about all i have to do or say.

the end.