JM and I arrived in Dublin with no trouble at all; I even managed to sleep on the plane. JM doesn't really fit in airplane seats, though, and as a result he got kneecapped by the duty free cart in the middle of the night--hard enough to knock him into me and wake me up--and I don't think he slept after that. Poor fella. We checked into our hotel over near UCD where JM's conference is, and fell into that lovely deep sleep brought on only by zooming across so many time zones. I woke up in fact thinking of Athens and Prague, two of the last places my body gave in to such immobility.
Of course we woke up starving, and I made the rookie mistake of ordering food at the hotel lunch bar--18.65 euros. I was staring at my cold fish when I looked up to see JM's sister KM, who had just decided to walk to our hotel after arriving from London. Our phone wasn't turned on (oops). We took a bus into Dublin and walked all round, ordered three cups of foamy chocolate, and wandered over to Trinity where we found a used book sale. Picking up the 1931 title The Art of Mime for .20 euros made me feel better about my lunch error. The three of us sat on a bench and watched some fellows play cricket and then made our way back to donnybrook where KM is staying. She and I bonded over our love of aesthetically-pleasing groceries by going to one and fawning over all the baked goods and fresh, brightly packaged yumminess. I always find it strange to notice which foods are imported from the U.S. Here it was jif peanut butter, stove top stuffing, and aunt jemima pancake mix. Maybe europeans feel the same way about nutella. I doubt it.
In any case, to our moms and dads: we're here. Everything is great. Ireland does look a lot like eastern Tennessee. And apparently JM and I missed a midwestern earthquake.
