Prawn Flavored Blog Post.

So apparently three blog posts a week is coasting, two is disappointing and one is simply unacceptable. At least according to Sam and Jenny. 

Which is shocking because they both know how lazy I am. 


Anywho, here is a forced blog post, if you pick up on any general contempt...you're very astute, good job.
So I recently found out that my sweet roommate Manon and her friend Leslie, both Frenchies, read my
blog!! I think that's very nice since I can never bring myself to read other people's blogs.

I tend to get bored.

So I'm always very flattered when I find out people are reading this blog and I was extra flattered in this case since Manon and Leslie speak English as a second language, and I'm sure it's a bit tedious for them to translate all of my colloquialisms.  




Well I've decided to dedicate this blog to food. 


One thing I've noticed about Ireland, and have heard is the same in England and Scotland, is their obsession with meat and cream. I had no idea, although it seems quite obvious now, that the simple, American dinner, meat and potatoes, is Irish. I mean I always assumed that was a 1950's, microwave dinner type of thing.

(Of course I knew potatoes were Irish, check the background of this page)



Anyhow, I have deemed this place the land of meat and potatoes, everything they make here has the addition of animal products in some form.

I went out for Chinese last night with an American friend, Zach, and he ordered vegetable chow mein, and I ordered vegetable curry. I've never had a curry like this. It was definitely vegan, but instead of a typical curried coconut milk sauce, my vegetables were in this weird sort of gravy.

Dear readers, if you could see the expression on my face while merely explaining this you would understand that this was not a good thing. I'm not a really big fan of gravy, I think it has it's time and place though (Time: Thanksgiving. Place: mashed potatoes.) and in my Chinese food, let alone a curry dish, is not one of them. 

Needless to say this was an Irish take on Chinese food, and I was the victim.

Zach and I were discussing chip flavors that we've noticed while here;


-Prawn
-Bacon
-Roasted Turkey
-Cheese and Onion

....just to name a few.

They have an obsession with Prawn flavored things here. I've noticed it in other forms besides chips. 

Also, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are an American thing. My Irish flatmate saw me making one and said, "Wow, you guys really do that?" 

Also, the peanut butter here comes in "American style". 

Zach was telling me that peanut butter itself is known as being very popular in America, much more so than the rest of the world.

I guess peanut butter is our marmite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmite).


Last night Radhika and I went on a falafal hunt TO NO AVAIL.

We found this chain called "Abra Kadabra" that served falaf amongst hamburgers, french fries and tacos (they call themselves a "mexican restaurant"). BUT they don't have hummus, yogurt sauce, tahini or any other seemingly compatible sauce option for falafals. Nope instead they offer garlic sauce or barbeque.


I had been drinking a bit and when the man behind the counter said this i quite bluntly replied "Eww that's so gross"

and then there was a moment of awkward silence where I just stared at him.....I mean in retrospect I probably shouldn't have blamed this poor guy who, in his attempt at money making, unfortunately has aligned himself with such a sad excuse for a restaurant, but due to my mild intoxication these rationales were pushed out of my mind and replaced with disgust for the lack of cultural diversity evident in this country.

what the fuck is garlic sauce?



and who doesn't know that you eat falaf with either hummus, yogurt sauce or tahini?


needless to say Radhika and I booked it outta there and instead bought crappy pasta and couscous at the local grocery store.

So to sum up Ireland in regards to food. It's boring. But that's probably just because they put so much time and effort into developing their beverages, and honestly dear readers, when it comes to Irish drinks, I haven't any complaints.

Classes, Crawls and Candy Bars

So I've been getting a lot of flack for not being more diligent with this blog. But I think four posts in just over a week is pretty impressive... but you know, whatever.


Anyway,

I've made it through my first week of classes at Trinity!!! Trinity is completely different than Pratt. First of all, 3 of my 6 classes meet once a week for an hour. No more of that 3 hour bullshit thank you very much!! The other 3 are film studies classes and they all meet for 2 hours twice a week. BUT that's because one class is the screening and then the other is the lecture. And there is pretty much no roll taking.

So I missed two classes this week. (Sad, I know) but one of them was intentionally. It was the screening class for Streetcar Named Desire, which I've already seen. The other one was due to a time mix up but it's alright, I only missed the reading of the syllabus, and once again, NO ROLL TAKING.


So I love my classes. My 3 Film Studies classes screened "Easy Rider", "The Thing" and "Streetcar". And having seen the syllabi I'm excited for the rest of the screenings. GREAT MOVIES.

And my psychology classes are fascinating too, and only an hour long :)


So academically, I'm totally digging Trinity. Although I miss Pratt and, all in all, I'm glad that it's my school, Trinity is a nice break from the intense, nerve racking, breakdown-inducing, seemingly endless work that culminates as Pratt Institute.

On to the crawl....

So on Thursday My friend Radhika (an American from Berkeley) and I decided to do a pub crawl. A pub Crawl is this amazing tour where you pay €10 and get led around to the best pubs/clubs in Dublin. We went to three pubs and two clubs. Club entry is usually €5-10 but it was free for us on the crawl. And the drink menus at all of these places had reduced prices just for our group. Also, a free shot was given at each place!! That's 5 free shots people.

 The Pubs we went to all had in house music that was great!! They play a mix of Irish folk, classic rock and Indie music. They all played Mumford and Sons which I thought was pretty cool.

 The first drink we bought!! This is Radhika, she's awesome!

 This drink tasted awful...at first. Radhika and I had high expectations because it's a cider, but we were disappointed by how vinegary it was. But it totally grew on us.

 

Radhika decided to get some artsy shots of our first legally purchased pint.

The band at the second pub was great too! They played some irish drinking songs and some beatles. I love banjo accompaniment! They were also playing 90's songs like Jumper and such....banjo can give any song some cultural, folksy depth.

Part of their decor was bicycles. But, as you'll see below, they had some awesome wall art.

Radhika and I might have overdone it a bit with the scenic picture taking.

We were told by our tour guide to get the Whiskey and RED lemonade at this pub, apparently they're the only place with red lemonade. Since whiskey sours are my favorite drink, Radhika and I took his suggestion. It was good, but I've made better whiskey sours with regular lemonade... Oh but the whiskey was delicious, very smooth.

This is fellow pub crawler John. Seriously the life of the party, this Aussie was instantly friends with everyone on the tour.



The third pub we went to had dance hits and beer pong downstairs. As well as wall to wall posters.

Radhika and I checked that out for a bit.

But we grew tired of that scene as pretty much everyone was obsessed with beer pong and not dancing. So we decided to head upstairs...

Brian was playing upstairs. Brian is a staple in this pub, and people come out just to see him every Saturday. This was a Thursday...I don't know why he was there performing but thank god he was because he rocks. Seriously he's a great entertainer. He started out singing some Irish songs which had the whole pub stomping a foot and clapping to the beat.

The man you see on the left side of this picture was about 60, and on vacation from Manchester. He told us that he and his friends always come to this pub to see Brian when they're in Dublin. This man would lean in to me and my friend in between verses to let us know what the next line was.

And there's John, seriously LIFE OF THE PARTY!!

Brian had a lot of remixes that he personally wrote. One of them was a 9 minute mash up that started with "I'm gonna be" by the Proclaimers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3tNylJr7Z4),

but instead of going "da da da" We yelled "Bottle of Vodka, Fuck the Neighbors!"

This was the title of brian's mash up and he incorporated those lyrics, as well as others about drinking, into like 6 popular 80's/90's rock songs. He said, "It's like when you're having a party, and the neighbors stop by to complain about the music. "

He had the whole pub singing along, seriously great entertainer.

We both wanted to get pictures with Brian before we headed out.

We took this on our way to the next stops, the two clubs.


We did not take any pictures at those clubs, but they were fun. I think the third pub was undeniably the best though. It had a sense of pub comradery that made it impossible to not have a blast there.

At the first club we were pestered by an Irish man who was following us around the dance floor dancing like TWO WILD AND CRAZY GUYS

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH9sAENQNV8

finger pointing and everything.

He later told us that we were, "the prettiest birds in the place. And I mean that in the most insensitive way."

He also kept asking if we wanted him to "fuck off". After like the 10th time he said that, and the bird comment, I said "Listen man, you can hangout. We can be friends. (I shook his hand). But we're not going to hook up. Just so you know."

Then he walked away.

And there was this very strange punk/scene couple on the dance floor. Their moves were.....interesting? It was like a car accident, you just couldn't look away. You know when you see kid's shows/movies where they have embarrassing parents who start dancing really cooky and uncoordinated? That was this 20-something couple.

Like, Elaine from Seinfeld comes to mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xi4O1yi6b0


The next club was moderately uninteresting. But still fun nonetheless.

After a long night Radhika and I walked the 30 minute walk back to her place in 35F, windy weather. and then crashed. Also my alarm didn't go off the next day but I still managed to make it to school in time.


PUB CRAWLS KICK ASS.


Well Friday was a long day. I had to run to school since my alarm didn't go off and by 6 when I was all done with classes, I was starving. I saw that my bus wasn't coming for another 15 minutes so rather than wait in the cold I elected to cross the street and check out this touristy magazine shop. While I was observing all the weird Irish/European goods I stumbled on something. An accidentally vegan chocolate candy bar. To a vegan this is a rarity. To a starving, relatively hungover American vegan in Ireland this is a miracle. And for only €1!

Yeah I bought it. And it was delicious.


Well I'm going to end this post here as it's definitely long enough.

Have a good day dear readers,


Love,
Chelsea

Pictures!!

Before I start this post I'd like to explain my previous blog posting. I was going to delete it. It is the incredibly embarrassing product of my Pratt friends taking advantage of my enamored state by encouraging me to blog when I really just shouldn't have been anywhere near a computer at all. But after some thought I came to the conclusion that this is a blog about my Irish adventures, and anyone who thinks I'm going to come to Ireland and not drink is clearly a fool and they can go read another blog regarding ostriches or something. Also, not to brag or anything, but I am a pretty funny drunkard.

Moving on, 

So where I last left off I had just gotten to Trinity off my plane, we're talking Thursday morning. I didn't get internet until midday Saturday because, even though it's an ethernet connection, you still need a password and username, information that was given to us late Friday. However, you also need an out of date computer because it took a whole days worth of trouble shooting to configure my mac to the internet. A whole stressful, lonely, incommunicado day of downgrading my brand new macbook pro's internet browser. 

But, obviously, it works now. 

These are pictures of the park/street right next to my dorm. All of the streets in Dublin are about this width, which makes riding in the huge busses a bit scary, especially when they pass people in the same lane, which, I'm pretty sure is meant for only one car at a time. 

This is one of the views from my flat. If you disregard that ugly gray rooftop it's actually quite beautiful.

This was a strange little band playing in town centre. Fun fact, after I took this picture they followed me, playing their strange instruments and singing in gaelic, for about a block. Although it was only a block it felt like a lifetime.

These friendly leprechauns are always on this corner, right across from my school, every day. It seems like a pretty fun job actually, definitely warm (yeah, it's been chilly here).

  This is the view coming into town centre from the top level of the double decker transport. All of the busses here are double deckers and expensive considering I take it to get to school and back.
€1.90 a ride :O
It's a pretty nice ride though, nice way to see a good amount of Dublin.

These are just some scenic photos I took while walking into city centre/Trinity yesterday (about an hour walk). I love the houses. They're all very big and yet they have such a cozy feel. Must be all the red brick. 

I found an Asian market yesterday and was delighted when I saw their stock. As a vegetarian/vegan household, most of the grocery shopping/cooking my dad does is Asian. And this brand of sauces is a staple in our house. In the orientation for the international students they told us about an "American" candy store which only carries American products. They said that finding a comfort food that you would have at home can ease homesickness. I've seen tons of American candy here, especially kit kats, but this weird, Asian sauce stuff was what made me think of home. This little market is definitely going to be where I do most of my shopping.

So those are the only pictures I've taken so far. I'm still settling into this strange foreign land, and I promise there will be better ones to come once I get my bearings a bit. 

Goodnight dear readers,

love,

 Chelsea.