A happy return home!

Finding your way back to PB in Hungary can be depressing. Just ask Tristan.

I encountered a similar unwelcome surprise coming back home. I WAS LOCKED OUT OF THE FLAT. My deadbolt key doesn't work, and to my surprise, our landlord had come to fix our laundry machine and turned both locks on the way out. With Mike cruising the Nile, Tristan and Rock on siesta in Spain, and the harsh night breeze in my face ... I had to call my landlord to have him let me in the next day. Instead of a putting my feet up in the flat, I had to spend the night in a hostel.

But Ireland was WORTH IT! Great country, great friends, GREEN HOLIDAY.

Here's a brief recap of what made the holiday special for me.

1. Free Titanic Tour in BelfastWe got to see where the Titanic was built in Belfast. Of course, it's not there anymore ... it's in the bottom of the Atlantic. But the guy giving the tour had some great stories - he loved the Titanic more than I love taffy ... and I'm a man who enjoy's his taffee.

2. Partying it up in Dublin.

First of all ... that's not coffee in those cups ... it's SECRET AGENT BEER. Whitty, weren't we? Dublin was an entire weekend of similar shinanagins. We were denied a "free dublin tour" because our group was too large, so Louie (below mark's crazy hat) acted as a tour guide and gave us a surprisingly accurate 2 hour tour of the city before hitting the guinness storehouse. We took over the hostel common room (40 of us, and 2/3/4 ... others), got kicked out of st. stevens green because one HERO tried to crack open a beer in front of a cop, and brought life to every pub we stepped in to. Not to mention ...

3. ALMOST THROWING DOWN WITH A GANG of 16!! year old's outside the hostel on Paddy's day.
8 of these clowns thought it would be great to come from the convenience store down the street (no doubt where they were asking tourists to buy beer FOR their underages asses) and pick a fight with the 8 of us chilling outside the hostel. Pretty sure they didn't know we had 30 odd rowdy mates downing beers inside. Their grand opening? "You guys are GOBSHITES". The last time I heard that was from the old BBC show father ted. (for those of you who have seen the show, I told them to "feck off" then casually sipped my "DRINK!!")

They escalated things, slapping and shoving a few of us, then one of them took a cheap shot to the face on Craig. I'm pretty sure if some cops weren't approaching to break things up things would have gone VERY sour. The only reason we didn't want to engage was that are SMALLEST guy was around the size of their goliath.

Plus we outnumbered them 4 to 1 ... good odds for any GAEL.

Sorry for taking so long to post, but my first midterm was today. When I wasn't procrastinating preparing for that, I was too busy watching the NCAA tournament.