The trip to Ireland didn’t start well; my airline didn’t tell me that I’d have to check my carryon during the last leg of my flight, because Europeans have a different opinion of what constitutes an “oversized” bag.  I suppose that’s some sort of comment about American obesity, Europeans?  Whatever.  So I had to check my bag which caused me to miss my connecting flight, and when I finally arrived at the Dublin airport, naturally they had lost my bag.

So I went on to my destination without my luggage and bought a razor in a nearby store.  I’m used to my electric razor, so I cut myself and I put a kleenex over the cut and it flapped in the air as though I was signaling for surrender.

But from there everything improved.  The airline found my bag the next morning and delivered it, preventing me from turning into a human bandage for the remainder of my trip. I met my friends and we hit Dublin pretty intensely.  I expected rain and fog, but Dublin was warmer than the place I had left.  I ended up with a faint pink blush filling in the peninsulas of my receding hairline.  We did some shopping, visited Kilmainham Prison--which was indistinguishable from a hostel, in my opinion--and saw the world’s oldest book, The Book of Kells, at Trinity College.  They only had a few pages on display of this gorgeous illuminated manuscript, but I really hate not knowing the ending so I broke the glass and flipped through the pages.  It turns out that Mary Magdalene had Jesus’s baby.  Who knew?

We also visited a cathedral, which sits on top of a crypt containing the entombed remains of a knight from the Crusades.  They let you walk into the crypt and “shake his hand"--in other words, gently rub his outstretched skeletal finger--which is supposed to be good luck.  “Did you wish for the Raiders or the 49ers?” the tour guide asked me, showing an excellent grasp of American football but annoying me because I have to fly thousands of miles to tell yet another person I don’t know how to answer sports questions?  This feeling was intensified the next day when the entire city dressed in insane colors and paints for a Kerry versus Mayo soccer match.  These people were crazy.  They made Red Sox season in Boston look like martial law.

Now I’m in Galway, and the plan had been to take a tour of the Cliffs of Moher, but that turns out to be all day and I need to be in Limerick tomorrow.  So instead I’m going to visit the house where James Joyce’s wife used to live, like a good literary geek.

Oh, but first: my friend Martina, who is German, says I don’t deserve my English degree because I can’t tell her what word in English means “pieces of a broken dish.” I’m pretty sure that Americans refer to this as “pieces of a broken dish,” rather than some ready-made phrase that Germans apparently have.  Does anyone know if I am, in fact, dumb, or if Americans just don’t bother making up words for stuff that just isn’t very important?  Please dish.