in between travels

it's still a bit cold here in london in the mornings. That's one more reason for waking up late. Heh.

since dublin, it's been a trade-off between quality and quantity of sleep: didn't sleep too well in dublin coz a) the bed was quite small (and when it's me saying that, u better believe it), and b) my room was right under the eating area, so i could hear people walking/ chairs dragging etc above me all the time. Arrrgh. Back here, I haven't been able to catch up on sleep, coz various things keep cropping up eg. the bloody irritating guy who delivered zun's kayak this morning who kept on buzzing the freaking loud doorbell. Double arrrgh.

anyway, more on dublin. Apart from bad sleep, the hostel was quite nice. It's new and clean, the staff are very friendly, and there's free irish (english) breakfast. The showering facilities aren't that good (there was only 1 shower for my 12-bed dorm), but that's like the only thing bad abt it. Apart from the bed, of course.

as for the city, well, after visiting dozens (it should be dozens by now) of european cities, they all start to look kinda similar. Especially when the city in question is in an english-speaking country less than an hour's flight away from the UK (FYI, the flight across the irish sea took less time than the coach from central london to stansted airport). It really felt like I hadn't left the country; they even have the same high street stores, for one thing.

the best part of the trip was going with my american dorm-mate (we were sharing the same bunk bed) to an irish pub at temple bar on sat night. It was quite friendly and best of all, it wasn't smoky coz the govt just banned smoking in pubs a few months back, but for a while I felt quite out-of-place coz I was the only asian in the entire pub. But at around 1plus the staff put on 'you'll never walk alone' and the whole pub (and I mean the whole pub) started singing, me included. The feeling was amazing. That moment alone would have been worth the cost of the whole trip.

there were a couple of other highlights, most notably this museum called the Chester Beatty library which is actually this guy's private collection (which has about 20000 items) and had a terrific exhibition on religion; spent so much time there that I actually forgot that I was hungry. On the whole though, dublin was pretty much an ordinary european city, except for its shopping and pubbing scene, both of which are activities that I don't really do. What I did end up doing was walking all around the city centre for a couple of days. Reckon I'm pretty familiar with the place now (for what good that does me). And the feeling I got is that dublin is definitely a city that's on the up; there's still lots of derelict areas but everywhere new buildings are springing up, as befits the capital the EU's fastest-growing economy (well, at least before the recent enlargement).

so that's dublin in a nutshell. The last couple of days have been spent on various activities eg. meeting up with ucl ppl, going to the ucl econs finalists' farewell etc. Haven't really had a day to sit down and do absolutely nothing (my favourite activity) yet. Maybe today will be that day. Although there's a nagging voice in my head (the same one that compelled me go to dublin) that's chastizing me for even thinking about bumming around when I have less than one month left in this place.

I probably need an exorcist.