STO: Getting off Scot-free

The plane ride from Dublin to Edinburgh was mercifully short, with a hangtime of under 40 minutes. I write mercifully because I sat behind 3 college age Irish guys who definitely hit the airport bar beforehand and were really enjoying themselves and seemed to have little volume control. Getting into the airport, I got an indication of how small the city was. Not only was the airport tiny, but the city centre was only a 20 minutes bus ride away. I got off at the last stop at the same time my friend, the indefatigable Dan Lin arrived.

It was an interesting time at Dan's pad. A 3rd year medical student at the University of Edinburgh, Dan lives with 3 other people including his girlfriend in a house that used to be own by a University professor. It's a place with such cleanliness and classiness of which magnitude none of my abodes which I may reside in for the next half decade is likely to match. In addition, while I was aware that Dan's girlfriend was from Taiwan, I didn't realize that all of his housemates spoke Mandarin around the house. The trip thus doubled as an exercise in Chinese, and I felt like I was visiting a country within a country, evident the moment I entered the house when I realized I would need to take off my shoes.

I think on my travels I can really divide the cities I've been to into two categories: the cities with lots of great sights that I could imagine visiting again, and the cities in which I think I would like to live in. Edinburgh falls into the latter category. Not that it is without attractions, because I really liked how Edinburgh Castle overlooks the entire city. It's a large sturdy block of ancient stone that is still nominally armed and holds among other things, the Crown Jewels of Scotland, and is situated on a hilltop near the middle of the city. There's the Scott Monument, which is a very interesting shaped structure that rises to about 3 or 4 stories that I thought was dedicated to the Scottish people, but instead is actually made for Sir Walter Scott, a prolific writer. Its rather shocking that one man who didn't hold political power could have such a grand monument - James Joyce just has a statue - and I hope my readers can give me a satisfactory answer. But overall Edinburgh just felt like a very nice walkable city, with some sweet shopping streets and lively coffee shops in which my heroine J.K. Rowling penned some of the greatest works of the 21st century. Dan may find himself living there for a few more years, and I really could imagine joining him. One of the odder highlights of my weekend in Edinburgh occurred during a beer run in a Scottish grocery store. The cashier exchanged a few words with us, one of which was "grand," and I gave him a quizzical look and innocently asked, "Are you Irish?" To Dan's surprise, he said yes and I told him how I was studying in Dublin, he said he was from Waterford and I mentioned their humiliating loss to Kilkenny in the All-Ireland Hurling Final. I felt so freaking cosmopolitan.

There is a lot more I'd like to write about, including trips to the farmer's market in Dun Laoghare (10 euro to anyone who can pronounce that correctly), Thanksgiving, and an epic night out that involved a gashed foot but right now I gotta go to bed so that I can wake up at 2:40am for a 6am flight to Berlin. I'll spend 2 nights there, then 2 in Prague and 2 in Krakow. It's a trip I'm looking forward to but very nervous, and I didn't really prepare enough for it today, so it's been hectic. Man this has been a strange time in my life and while I'll miss it, I can't wait for normalcy to return.

Take care all!

What's upcoming?

I've been doing a poor job on the blog and really haven't tried to advertise it, so at this point I think just DJ reads this, if that. But I have some good posts coming up before the year ends. This past weekend I visited my friend Dan at Edinburgh, Scotland which was really nice and I hope to summarize that one this week. I should probably have another one after my travels to Berlin, Prague and Krakow in the first week of December, and then maybe a last one about Dublin before I leave it on December 21st.

When I go home, I hope to make 3 posts summarizing the 2008 year. The first will be a sort of numbers-at-a-glance assessment of the year, including among many other esoteric figures, a count up of how many nights I spent in various cities, a count of how many UN World Heritage sites I visited (I'm excited to find out), a count of how many languages I said "thank you" in, and a quick recap of the most outrageous and odd things I've done and whatever other goofy stories I've encountered on my travels. This might include a list of the most absurd characters I've met, which is quite a list. The second will be a sort of guide on how to study or live abroad. The third will be a sort of essay on my experiences related to various relevant issues, such as globalization and cultural differences. I'm really going to tie in what I've actually studied, namely Cross-Cultural Communications, a linguistics class I took last year, Geography of Europe and World Englishes, both of which I'm taking now.

STO: Popping the Cork

Two weekends ago (10/31-11/1) was the one and only real Ultimate tournament of the fall. Come to think of it, I didn't play a tournament in Beijing so it was my first tournament since our pathetic performance at sectionals last April. UCD was sending two teams down to Cork for one of Ireland's biggest tournaments that had every single university club in the country, as well as possibly all of the other club teams and a club team from Belgium and another from England. All in all 22 teams were enrolled and I think we were seeded like 6th. We knew it was a down year for UCD with most of the previous year's stars graduated, but I was hoping my American expertise could sneak up on some people. I headed down by bus with Jenna, an ultimate player from Notre Dame, early Friday and we roll into Cork around 5, 2 hours ahead of everyone else who are taking the much more expensive train. So we're in the bus station, rather disoriented, and realize we don't know a thing about Cork, where we are, or where we're staying. So we wander around the city with all of our bags and decide to get a drink. Oddly enough, we walk 2 whole blocks without seeing a pub, before finally stumbling into this nice little place that happens to have the cheapest pint in town. This place sold all pints, including Guinness and this other lovely Irish dark stout Beamish, for €2.90 until 9pm. By comparison, pints in Dublin range from €4.40 to €5.50. So we took advantage of that and were semi-buzzed by the time our captain Dave called with instructions on how to get to our hostel.

Our hostel was actually very nice as we had completely booked 4 rooms, although you can imagine what the state of these rooms were by the end of the weekend, after dirt and grass from frisbee mixed with lots of college-age heavy drinking Irish folk. Friday night was also Halloween, and though I decided not to dress up, we all pregamed extensively and then went out. Perhaps the highlight of the pregame was a King's Rule (started by Jenna) in which we had to say "in my pants" following every single sentence, lest we take a drink, in my pants. It was a very fun time and several people got noticeably crazy, in my pants. One of the senior members of our team, Ciaran, who would be turning 26 the next day, dressed as Superman, in my pants. The only problem with his outfit was that he would have to take off his entire costume to take a whizz, in my pants. I think you get the idea of the rule, in my pants, and I think I'll give it a rest now.

(in my pants)

So I actually managed to get a fair amount of sleep that night and was a bit chippier than other members of our team when we awoke to go to the fields. This was the first time in my life that we took a bus to get to the fields, but it all worked out well. We were separated out into A and B teams, although this resulted in both teams being severely understaffed and did not leave our A team as competitive as it should have been. Our A team had just 10 players on it, and our B team was completely woeful and got shut out in their first game. We then got to play our archrival Trinity as our first game, and I gotta say, this was our, and my, best game. As the secondary handler (an American grad student was the primary), I threw two nice hucks for scores, caught another huck for a score, and didn't make a turnover. The highlight though was on the last point, where we were up 7-6 playing to 8, and I poached off my man into the lane and got the D. We won that game but it was all downhill from there. We dropped our next game against the best team in our pool, this Belgian club team that smacked us down, and then narrowly lost to University College Cork. This game sucked because it necessitated us playing a 4th game that day, and our captain Dave got injured on one of the last points catching a score in the end zone and pulling his hamstring. That fourth game ended up being just brutal, and although I made a sick layout catch off an errant pass and drop by Jenna, we lost again and ended the day demoralized, exhausted and rather injured.

The night was very interesting, as there was a big tournament party in town. Now I'm generally all for drinking heavily after a day of Ultimate, and generally do, but these Irish kids just had nothing else on their mind. They didn't really care about the tournament the next day, cause it was just a useless fall tournament for them, whereas it was my one and only tournament with these guys. So I called it a night at 11, before they even freaking left. I was alone in our hostel room and slept like a baby, it was awesome - until Ciaran (on his 26th birthday) came back to the room with this girl Rachel (18). Let's just say they acted as more than just friends, woke me up, and I tried VERY hard to go back to sleep. Well I think I actually succeeded, and the next time I woke up was at 3:30am when the rest of the team was returning from their night out. At this point, Ciaran had migrated over to our captain Dave's bed for some reason, and Rachel had gotten dressed but for some reason didn't return to her room but joined Ciaran in Dave's bed. So the rest of the team comes back, and they see the two in the bed together and start laughing out of control. Now somehow Ciaran and Rachel are both totally passed out and don't even wake up to that, even when Dave comes in and cries murder over the fact that Ciaran and Rachel are in his bed. He basically kicks Ciaran awake, who calls them all arseholes, and denies any sexual misconduct. Dave delivers the memorable question, "Where shall I sleep tonight? You were wanking in your bed all last night and you've been boning in mine!" Rachel was silent the entire time and probably wished she could apparate. Then Dave rips off the blankets, exposing a clothed Rachel and a naked, and unfortunately sprung, Ciaran. You can imagine the commotion that created. The night ended with another hour of us chilling in another room discussing the events of the night (I actually got out of bed to attend), and then everyone was extremely tired upon the 8:30 wakeup (morons). The best part of the morning, without doubt, were the expressions of Ciaran and Rachel the next morning. Ciaran got up first, from Dave's bed, and just goes, "ah what the focck" and slaps himself on the forehead. A few minutes later, Rachel sits up from Ciaran's bed, and rubs her eyes open. I go, "good morning Rachel." She looks around, totally avoids eye contact, and then gets up and bolts for the door. Oh my goodness it was a shameful walk of shame.

We sucked that day too, basically due to the fact that we were down to 7 and a half players (Dave was injured but tried to play anyways) and most of them had gotten no sleep, and one of them had gotten some unrestful sleep. We lost our first two games, where I mostly played cutter because my legs weren't quite fried, and then went down quickly in our last game against a super shitty team. It was 8-6 when the cap sounded, so game to 9. We had been playing the sloppiest game ever, but we were like, fuck this let's win, and scored the next point easily to make it 8-7. Then the opposing team turned it on their half and we capitalized to send the game to universe point at 8-8. So we pull to them again, and they just march downfield on us with nice easy short passes to in cuts on the force side. They weren't doing anything special at all but we were just so tired that everyone was wide open. They seriously completed like 10 easy passes and before we knew it they were right at our end zone and TWO of their players were wide open behind the forceside cone of the end zone and the pass goes between them. One person calls for it, goes right to it and the disc just hits him right between the arms and drops. Everyone is stunned, mostly us cause we had played absolutely no defense on that point. So we get the disc back up, and with me, Dave and Ciaran handling, we just play extra extra conservatively and move the disc upfield in like 15 throws and finally Dave hits Olly on the break side for the score. So it was a great ending to an eventful but rather shitty Ultimate weekend.

POL: Live from the election

It's 12:21am here in Dublin as I sit here watching SkyNews and listen to British people talking about our election. They're calling it 8-3 right now in McCain's favor, with Kentucky gone red and Vermont stamped blue. Stay in touch as I'll be editing this all night.

12:31: It's 7:30ET and polls should be wrapped up most states there. West Virginia has been called for McCain, so it's 13-3, but Obama has a sizable lead in Florida which is very promising. The correspondent from Washington D.C. has a giant, McCain-esque chin.

12:40: Apparently the polls close at 8ET. Right now SkyNews is showing a Brit interviewing a black McCain supporter

3:03: Yeah I took a break. Ohio and Iowa have been called for Obama, so I'm going to go ahead and call the election for OBAMA. Bababababababababamaaaaaaa. I had envisioned this live blogging being more exciting and informative, but the UK feed coupled with a poker game really dampened those hopes. But hope is still alive, cause change is in the air.

The Next Day: So I was awake at 4am when the election was called for Obama. It was a really exciting time, although it would have been much more exciting obviously if I was in Georgetown, where a bunch of people ran to the White House ala the time we beat UNC. I slept in until 2pm today and basically did nothing all day, skipping all my classes. Hey, every so often you need a mental health day like this.