week three in review

dear friends,

the third week went by much faster than the first two and it feels like the end of the fourth week already, which means i will be home in just over a month. wacko. especially given that i am here to complete a project and i have been doing very little to achieve that aim. [ i know, blogging is surely helping in that regard].

have checked out a few more of dublin's finer restos with colleen (and now katie who is visiting) and got a hair cut at the massive american style dundrum shopping centre which i pass on my to and from work. but, by far the biggest adventure was the trip to aberythswyth to see montreal-era friend carla.

who needs a large carbon footprint and an unnecessary flight when there is a cheap and convenient ferry. aber was gonna be a multiple-transfers type destination anyway about it so ferry seemed logical. and on the way there it was brilliant, three hours on the ferry reading the guardian and sipping tea, a short train ride to bangor, and then an interesting bus ride from bangor to aber. picture a city bus that drives half way across the country for 5 quid. four hours on that bus and i was in aber. there were bday parties, an introduction to the baby guiness (baileys and tia maria), academic-town music festivals [confession: i think i secretly want to be the volvo marxist academic who brings their kids to these type of things, see also wolfe island music festival], hiking the devil's bridge [pics on the facebook], seeing the beautiful aber coast, hanging out with the wardens in the flat, discovering the fabulous tv show "the chase" [a drama/soap set in a vetrenarian's office].

and then it was time to go home. i had gotten an email that said that my 5pm fast-ferry had been cancelled due to expected bad weather but that i had been moved to the 2pm cruise-ferry that can travel in worse conditions. the only way for me to arrive on time was to take the 7 am train from aber to shrewsberry and then go from shrewsberry to holyhead [the port]. well, a delay meant i missed the shrewsberry connection so i needed to go to crewe. at crewe i got on the train and all appeared to be fine. but then flooding had blocked the line so our whole train had to disembark at barrington quay and get on another train. this is when word started to spread that all ferries had been cancelled. i had been warned by friends that this happens and holyhead has like 2 b and bs so there is no place to stay. i started looking at the departures board and considered going to manchester or liverpool which were short train rides away but the weather was nasty and i decided i should instead try to get as close to holyhead as possible. since the rail was blocked the normal course of action was to charter a coach... but all had been sent to glastonbury to deal with overflow there. after about an hour of limbo the line cleared and i was instructed to take the train to chester where i could connect to holyhead. that i did, arriving around 4pm to discover that indeed my ferry had been cancelled and that i was not getting out of there until 2am. but, things are what you make of them, so i wandered into town and bought raspberries at the grocery store and a stack of magazines from woolworths [ihave never longed for a book so much in my life but since this was stupid o'clock in terms of numbers of hours on the road, i had run out of reading material], had dinner at a pub and headed back to the station cafe for the night ahead. i kissed the ground in dublin around 6 am the next morning after broken sleep that featured walking up to an arcade game repeating "you're going to hell" over and over [ferry tip: pick a couch to sleep on far away from the arcade]. shared a taxi with a fellow canadian and spent the day watching telly.

here are some words i plan to make use of when i get back to n'america: cuppa, growler, tosser, bingo wings

back to recoding variables.
cam