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So I experienced a few firsts last night.

1. I almost got denied entry into a pub in Ireland.
2. I puked for the first time in Ireland.
3. I met my first gay Irishman in Ireland.

In that order.

On Friday, my American roommate Julia went back to the US, so I'm officially alone in Ireland. Luckily, I have inherited one of her best friends that she made during her year here, Marie. Marie is a fun, out-going Irish lass who willingly accepted the challenge of entertaining me in Ireland (she says that she's going to make me her bitch, which I think is a fair trade). Last night she called me up and told me to meet her and some friends at the Skeff. Since I had spent all of my weekend so far either sleeping or cleaning, I figured it would be a good chance to get something fun in on the weekend. I scarfed down the better half of a pizza (due to an inadvertent 4 hour nap, I had only eaten a bowl of soup that day and knew I'd need more in my stomach if I were going to drink with Irish folk) and headed out.

I was unaware of the strict Irish dress code for weekends. You can wear practically anything you want during the work week, but on Friday and Saturday you need to get fancier. I walked up to the Skeff and the bouncer looked me over and stopped me. I thought he was going to ask me for ID and I was going to be pissed because I obviously didn't bring my passport out with me, but he just pointed to my shoes and said, "Hey buddy." I was confused and just said, "I'm sorry, what?" He heard my American accent and I think took pity on me and said, "Just remember to wear nicer shoes next week."

I got inside and met up with Marie and Co. I grabbed a Smithwicks but halfway through it I started feeling ill. I had no idea what was causing it. I had taken the Irish equivalent of a Benadryl before heading out, as well as that pizza I ate quite quickly, and thought that maybe one of those were having a bad reaction with the beer. My forehead got all sweaty and I excused myself to go outside for some air but before I got there I realized that, nope, I needed to barf instead. So I ran to the toilet and said goodbye to that pizza, allergy medication, and Smithwicks. I felt like such a tourist puking in a pub, especially since when I got out of the stall a bunch of dudes were staring at me like I was a baby who couldn't hold his pint. (I was even more a tourist than I realized because later while walking around Galway I noticed that most Irish don't puke in toilets, they puke on the sidewalk or on the sides of buildings, etc.)

We stayed at that bar for a while, and I got to realize that the Irish have inconsistent taste in music. For every ABBA or Madonna or Katrina and the Waves "Walking on Sunshine" they played, we also got the Macarena and Aqua's "Barbie Girl". Side Note I: I kept saying during "Walking on Sunshine" that they were a one-hit wonder, and Marie's boyfriend Mike kept saying that they had another big song. I just went and looked it up, and I realized that he must be talking about Katrina and the Waves 1997 Eurovision-winning song "Love Shine a Light" which explains why he would be familiar with it but not me. If you decide to YouTube this to hear it, the song isn't that great. I'd recommend checking out her 2008 Dance Remix version instead or the Xenomania Club Remix (it's so goofy!) Side Note II: Americans think that there are a ton of reality/talent shows on our stations, but it's seriously the only thing people watch out here. Today I watched about 20 minutes of The All Ireland Talent Show before having to change the channel because I realized that Ireland might not actually have any talent, and the next station up had Dancing on Ice (in the UK, they don't just make their stars dance, they make them dance on ice! It looks really dangerous.)

Since I had puked and rallied, I started asking Marie how everyone knew each other. She pointed to John and said that he used to work with her at a pub, and he knows Mary and Brian because his boyfriend goes to blah blah blah I didn't hear anything else because I was trying to figure out if I had heard her correctly say that John had a boyfriend and that maybe I had just encountered my first gay person in Ireland. I didn't push it because there is still a bit of a language barrier and I wasn't sure if maybe "boyfriend" is a term used differently over here, and I wasn't even completely sure I had heard her correctly so she might not have even said "boyfriend". I'm very particular with trying to listen for subtle clues in determining if someone is giving me information on someone else's sexuality. A similar thing happened when my mom was talking to me about my cousin and she said that a recent sad situation happened where Ronnie's partner died from a bad reaction to a medication. I knew that Ronnie was not in a law firm, and partner is a weird thing to call a girlfriend, so I assumed she was dropping a hint that he was gay but I had to wait another year before this conversation came up again and my mom explicitly stated that it was the man that he lived with and confirmed he was gay.

A group of us moved on to another pub later that night and Marie asked me what I fancied in the people out that night. I thought that Julia had told Marie I was gay, but now I was realizing that she probably hadn't, so I told her I fancied "your mans" over "your wans". She was like, "Oh, well we'll have to get you to hang out with John and Brian because they're both gay! In fact, they went to a gay bar when they left the Skeff!" Success! Confirmed! This is going to be extremely helpful because I think you really have to rely on other gay people in Ireland to find out what's happening in this town. When I first got here, I decided to use my powers of Internet to find out if there are any gay bars or gay ANYTHING in Galway, and I did not have much luck. Marie had warned me at one point a while ago that the Irish aren't all that technology-friendly-- she said she was the only person she knows with a Facebook account. Even if you look up restaurant websites, they're normally quite rudimentary. So it's not a surprise that when I had been investigating gay bars in Galway, all the links would take me to sites that hadn't been updated since 2006 or made reference to bars that hadn't existed in over 2 years. So I figured I'd just not really experience any Gay Gaelic. But now that might be changing. But if someone wants to make a Big Gay Tour Book for Ireland, there is a desperate need for it.

So that was my first big night out in Ireland without any American assistance! The rest of it was fairly standard-- left the pub, got drunk food (Supermac's was way too busy so we got Chinese food... I got fried rice, the rest of the people got fried rice and chips, which apparently come with EVERYTHING out here).

OK, I just got a weird whiff of cat urine in my bedroom, and I don't think that's a sign of a stroke so I'm going to have to look into what could be causing this.

Also, I'm sorry that I've been negligent on new posts. The road to an inconsistently updated blog is paved with good intentions, I assure you. I'll try to be better, or at least go out more so I have more fodder.