You are dancing to my little red book...

Once again I find myself sitting on this same couch, my feet suffering greatly but temporarily alleviated from pain by means of the coffee table perch they have commandeered. Once again I am typing on my laptop while listening to Ben Harper’s new cd and am currently listening to the song “Faithfully Remain”. There’s another chick flick on the TV turned on by some girls. Really, you could put this moment directly beside the similar moment from yesterday and you might not even be able to tell a difference. However, an entire day and night has gone by between the two moments. A good day and a good night.

I’ll work backwards. I just returned from the Irish Museum of Archeology with Phil. It was pretty cool. It had a bunch of things that they have found from the Viking era. It was pretty crazy. They had some sick combs that were carved out of slivers of deer antler. The prongs were so tiny I can’t believe you could make them without them breaking. And then they had a bunch of weapons and jewelry and masonry and all the stuff you would expect. The two coolest things that they had there were: first, they had a canoe-type boat from like 500-100 BC. It was carved out of a tree trunk and was about 35-40 ft long but only like a foot deep. For some reason, it was awesome. Then they had these guys whose bodies had been found in some marshland which had somehow preserved them incredibly well. Like it was actually really creepy. This one guy’s face was like perfect. Other than the fact that it looked hard, and his skin had turned to like a charred black color, he could have been alive still. And you could still see like the hairs on the back of his fingers and everything. It was crazy and kinda creep-tastic.

So directly before that, me, phil, and Daniel went to get some lunch and took a real long walk around Dublin and just took in some final sights. Originally, we were looking for an Irish lunch but after examining about 8 menus, we decided to avoid low-blowing our wallets and we just went to Burger King. Phil tells me that I almost got killed by a guy on a motorcycle when I was crossing the street. I was like, dude, the motorcycle dude is lucky I didn’t see him coming cause I would probably have instinctively punched his motorcycle in the face. Yeah.

I’m trying to think what we did all morning prior to lunch…oh yeah, I slept til like 2pm. We were up pretty late last night. The night started out with just hanging out with a bunch of people in the hostel. I think, in the end, our group consisted of a French-Canadian guy, 2 german guys, a german girl, an american guy, an american girl, and two guys from florida who think they’re irish. We just hung out for a long time at the hostel and then at around midnight, we went to a pub down the street that was playing some awesome traditional irish music. I mean it definitely felt very gimmicky and completely non-authentic, but it was still fun because the live band was good and they were playing great music for doing some folky dancing. Now let’s just say that there are two facts that, at this point, are 100% true. Fact 1: Christian Roderick does NOT know how to folk dance. Fact 2: at least 50 people are now FULLY aware of Fact 1. Hah it was really fun though. I do want to say that nobody was really dancing when we got there and I’m pretty sure that I get a lot of the credit for getting the dancing going. A group of like 30 year old girls from Wales were cool enough to join in on the dancing and it was a good time. Then they made us go to some other place to dance cause they said it was more fun. It ended up being like a real dance club. The girls got us in free somehow and I pretty much had a blast dancing “Christian-style” for a while and then we left at like 3 AM and came back to hang out at the hostel some more with everybody. All in all, it was a pretty fun night. I’m always down to get my dance on!

Prior to all that, Phil, Daniel, and I went to a restaurant that was serving “Real Irish Food”. The food was great and the live irish music was awesome and it was just an all-around good experience.

And that brings us right back to the mirror image of this current moment from yesterday.

Basically though, at the moment I am very happy with having found myself able to meet people and I’ve been happy with the people I’ve met as well. One of the German guys that I met yesterday reminded me sooo much of Andy it was ridiculous. He and I ended up getting into a really intense discussion about socialism/capitalism/obama/bush/etc. It was actually pretty fun though cause he wasn’t completely close-minded about anything and I hope he didn’t find me close-minded either. I think he helped me understand some of why he thinks the way he does and stuff. But really, when it really gets down to it, there is just this fundamental difference in thinking between american capitalists and European socialists. I really believe that if they could experience the freedom of capitalism, they would realize that it’s value greatly outweighs the negative aspects of it as a system. And the more I learn about how thoroughly socialism dominates every area of your life in Europe, the more scared I become about that happening in the United States. I hope to have some more conversations similar to this throughout my trip.

Well…I don’t know whether anyone even really reads this in it’s entirety (which is completely understandable considering that it’s all kinds of long), but if you do, thanks for caring that much. I’m having a lot of fun over here and I’m also just loving meeting all these people.

I’m out for now.

Rodsies