Me, on a Pub Crawl?

Well, sort of, in a way. Those of you at home know what a crazy party animal I am (Kelly and Beth, I can hear you laughing from here...), so last night was a bit of a change for me. The apartment and two friends of ours from the next building trekked into town to Taaffe's to hear some live traditional music (yes, Dad, as opposed to dead). On the way, someone threw an egg at us from their car and hit Shaina square in the back, which sucked, of course. To make her feel better I told her about my experience in Pittsburgh with the paintball outside the movie theatre. Always fun to commiserate over street cred, don't you think? Anyway, we stopped off at the College Bar on the way to hit the bathroom, and she ended up leaving the outer shell of her jacket in the bathroom so she wouldn't smell like egg. She said it was an old jacket anyway.

We got to the very crowded Tigh Taaffe's at about 10 and pushed our way over to where the music was. Of course, we spent much of the set being shunted about by people heading to the bathroom. The music was very good, and we sang along with a few of the songs. The musicians had an... exuberant dancer with them, who also played the whistle, and when he would dance for a song he would start in the clear space, then move through the crowd, cutting a huge line as he went (and, of course, pushing my group into an equally exuberant group of middle-aged women, who were all doing "the bump"). We left after a little while to try a different bar and met up with a big crowd of the girls from Menlo (the other residence where API people are), so we went along with them to Quay's. Quay's is a really cool bar, with all different levels and rooms, and we were able to get a section and a few tables to ourselves. I had my first Guinness on Irish soil (pictures to follow), but I admit I only drank half of my pint. There was much dancing and merriment among our group, and we got to know the kids from Menlo better, since we're usually left to ourselves over in Corrib. We all slept in this morning, and there's a market in town today, so I may check that out this afternoon.

Fun fact: Nora Devlin told me last summer that some of the bars here have hair straighteners in the bathrooms, but I didn't believe her. Last night, I saw one in the college bar, and it rather blew my mind... 2 minutes for 2 Euro rental hair straightener. Crazy times.