June 7

What a beautiful time I’ve been having. My last day in Belfast, as I waited for my train to Dublin, it finally began raining the sweet sweet Irish rain. I went to my favorite spot in Belfast, inside the Starbucks on Victoria Square to people watch. Ah, so good.

The night of my birthday (June 5), I met up with Jamie and Phillip and sang karaoke for the last time I will ever do such a thing in Europe for a long while. ’Twas a beautiful thing. They all had far more to drink than I did, which was also kinda the usual. It takes too much for me to feel anything, so I see it as a losing battle for the most part.

Yesterday, I took the train ride (all free and hardly checked using the Eurail pass) to Carickfergus Castle. It was pleasant to see the last castle I’d see for a few years. Then I came back to my hostel to find that two other friends, Steve and Greg, were free to meet up, so we went to a pub near the city hall and we talked mostly of my travels, but also of their future ones coming up, since the study abroad trip was only a third of the way through, and Greg would be traveling briefly afterwards.

I was going to go out to a pub after they left (curfew was 11 PM for them), but I really couldn’t bring myself to do anything beyond drink cider while huddled away in my room. Fortunately, some drunk men from Manchester (who informed me that though they were "d***heads”, they were also engineers with families in England) came in and talked away for awhile. One of them called his wife and passed the phone to me, and I couldn’t stop laughing, incredulous at it. He kept insisting that he wasn’t very drunk and wanted me to verify this to his wife. So funny.

Today in Dublin, I bought a new wardrobe for med school (thanks Penney’s) and searched for some Kilkenny Irish cream ale, which is hard to find in Ireland. This is funny ‘cause it was easy to find, and on tap, in Paris and elsewhere. It’s also difficult to find in the States, which was one reason to be particularly interested in it. Alas, I couldn’t find it, but I did get another pint glass and a memory or two. I leave for the States in about six hours (12 hours till the flight, but I wanna play it safe). I plan to get Jameson and perhaps other duty-free liquor in the airport, which is another reason to get there early.