who's on first, what's on second...

so the plans to go to the mountains today was foiled by the weather, as usual. we even set the alarm to get up on time to go so at 10 am we got up and it was pouring...so we ate some breakfast and sat around the house a bit and then at about 2pm it started clearing up so we walked to the DART station on tara street and took a train to Howth (rhymes with Both) there was a beautiful food market when we got off the train, so we got 2 heaping pints of strawberries for 4 euro which wasn't too badly priced then we sampled some other fruit, vegetables, as well as some breads just to kind of fill ourselves up for our little hike. fransesca and i notice kind of similar things, and one thing we noticed while on the sidewalk was all the people scowling, the irish don't seem to be happy unless they're in the pub, so we kept on smiling through this half a block of crabby pantses and i said afterward "is it just me or did those people seem a little unhappy?" she just laughed and shook her head. so then on our trek up hill up hill up hill, we saw donkeys, right inside the city limits, we nabbed some wild rosemary from someones front yard, i mean it was a rosemary tree, not a little plant, so they won't miss it. then we saw a woman pull her horse up to a little stone wall to get on his back, he was just an enormous horse. once we reached the top we finally got to the cliffs of howth, from the cliffs you look across and you can take a ferry or speed boat to the eye of ireland, or an island called something like that, it was just beautiful, the cliffs/hillside were covered in little purple flowers and prickley bushes. we only saw a few people and we could hear the planes leaving the airport but it was just very nice, more of the emerald isle, that you usually read about and see pictures of.

on our way back down the hill we happened upon a group of "knackers" which are, the really poor people of ireland. these were teenage boys, and as fransesca said you never know what they are going to do, so these boys had gone fishing in the bay, not that i would eat these fish but we thought that's what they were going to do with them, but know someone dropped one and they procceded to mutlilate the 2 fish by picking them up and throwing them at each other and just disgusting immature behavior. so we were trying to either pass them or just hang back so that we didn't have to walk near them and create a situation. this is the part of the irish that i have found i don't like, they make you uncomfortable and you saw what they did with the fish what else are they going to do...this is one of the class issues that i think ireland is working on but it is still so prevelent it is hard to know where to start and what to do about it. but it's not like our day was ruined, we both just couldn't get over the destruction and lack of respect for the fish's life.

monday, well i went to do some shopping for work clothes, i got some pants and a couple of funky shirts from the charity shop so i am good to go on that, i found that one only article of clothing i need to purchase before i leave ireland are a pair of fisherman pants, they are so cool, the are like a one size fits all pair of pants but they are funky and come in lots of fun colors, just solid colors and at 25 euro it's not to expensive. so that's about it, i'm making a spinach garlic pizza tonight as well as some fruit smoothies, so i am going to go to the supermarket and well as the fruit market so that's the word on the street. i have taken some shots of interesting graffiti since i have been here, some of it is lame but some of it is really making an interesting social statement.

so that's the word on the street here in the old stinky city, dublin is hot and humid today, as it wasn't yesterday when fran and i both were wearing scarves and 2 long sleeve shirts a piece, so you never know what it's going to do here in dublin, just like the people (sorry bad joke). but that's the word. work tomorrow so not to much else interesting planned for the next couple of days, i may go and rent dogma, seeing as fransesca has never seen it and has wanted to see it.

xoxo,
christie