First day in Dublin
Dear Diary. My girlfriend pushes me gently and whispers, "It's time to get up".
"Uuurgh," I groan, shrugging off her hand.
She leaves to take a shower while I sprawl in bed with my eyes firmly shut. Eventually, I get up and pull on the clothes I set aside the night before. The rest of my clothes are packed in my luggage because today we are moving to Dublin.
My girlfriend tells me to eat toast and a sandwich for breakfast, but I think this is too many carbohydrates. Two years ago I realised I probably have some form of prediabetes, because I pissed eight times a day (which is a normal amount now that I think about it) and always carried a water bottle with me due to thirst. So now I avoid bread because it breaks down in the body into large amounts of sugar. But today I don't bother telling my girlfriend, and just grudgingly eat the damn sandwich.
We leave the apartment which has been our home in Girona for the past six weeks. I'm hindered by my massive suitcase that's almost as tall as my girlfriend. I reckon I could use it to smuggle my girlfriend across a border if I had to. The suitcase keeps hitting walls and doorframes as if trying to cling on to the furniture, desperate to stay. As I walk down the street it keeps threatening to hit people, like an upset child.
The bus takes us to the airport. I squeeze my girlfriend's hand and say, "I'm excited to be going to Ireland."
At the airport, we join the queue for the Ryanair check-in. There's a lot of Irish families with young children returning from their holidays.
Queuing up for the plane, I smell the McDonald's food a girl is eating behind me. This is a minor miracle because a year ago, I could only smell something if it was shoved right up my nostrils. I had undiagnosed hypothyroidism, of which a symptom is a shitty sense of smell. Now I take levothyroxine. My sense of smell still isn't great, but every now and then I'm amazed that I can sense foods without seeing them first.
On the plane my side begins to feel bad. The culprit is my days as a postman when riding a bike loaded with mail messed up the muscles below the right side of my rib cage. Nothing is right with my body anymore. I suspect the muscles are over-tightened, because only stretching relieves the discomfort. Otherwise, the skin above them becomes sensitive and even the touch of my t-shirt's fabric is annoying. I can't stretch on the plane, so I distract myself by reading The Stand by Stephen King on my iPhone.
We land and get our luggage. We take a bus to the city centre, then another bus to our apartment for the next two weeks. We booked the apartment on Airbnb. Neither of us has used it before. When we get to the address, there's a problem: the apartment complex is protected by fences so high not even Legolas riding a giraffe could scale them. There’s no one waiting for us, and even if we could get inside, we don't know the apartment number. My girlfriend tries calling the host but her phone says his number is unrecognised, and we don't have internet to email him. So we stand outside helplessly for half an hour as I mentally write a scathing 1-star review for the host's Airbnb page. Eventually I top-up my phone with £10 of credit and try calling the host with my phone, and to our relief the number works (yet it didn't work when my girlfriend called it - strange) and we're able to let him know we're waiting outside.
The host comes down. He's an Irish guy called Peter. His apartment is impressive because it has floor to ceiling windows throughout. Though it turns out we won't have the apartment to ourselves as we first thought, because Peter is living in the second bedroom. But he's going away this weekend - yay! Except he's rented out his bedroom this weekend to another Airbnb couple - boo.
There's a Lidl across the road so we buy enough food for the next few days. Then we head to the city centre.
Dublin seems to be like London, but its population is only 527,612 according to the last census (although 1,804,156 people live in Greater Dublin). And most are in the city centre and drunk, judging by the number of people shouting and staggering in the streets. I reckon it's a city where alcohol is the solution to every problem.
We go to the tourist district, Temple Bar, which is full of pubs and live music. We stop at what seems to be the best pub. It's only 9.30 pm but the bar's already packed. Everyone is drunk and having a great time and singing along to the songs. I go to the bar to get my first bona fide Irish whiskey, but then I realise I don't know any whiskey brands, so I panic and ask for a Havana Club instead. The bartender squirts a sugary mixer into the rum before handing it to me. Dammit. When I'm back sitting with my girlfriend, I focus on the floor's tile pattern to distract myself from the sugary drink, which I just know will set off my prediabetes.
It turns out the sugary drink does no harm to me after all.
*****
We go back to the apartment and try to make dinner. But the kitchen light doesn't work properly. It flickers like a light in a horror film, so I use my iPhone as a torch. We eat dinner and go to bed.
Comments
2015-07-27
Get on the DART, go to Howth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howth
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