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March 19, 2007
St. Paddy's Day @ Dublin
Carnage! If you ever go to Dublin for St. Paddy's day be prepared to face a hoard of drunk Irish and tourists :)
It was a bit of reunion with a few people from the past Cambodia & Vietnam trip, as expected it was a superb reunion. Everyone was quite well behaved, considering the event and location. I think because we started drinking at 1:30pm and didn't stop until 3am in the next day, everyone sort of paced themselves quite repectably - who would have thought. Yeah there were a few of us who got blind drunk, but none had to be carried home.
We tried to catch the parade, but can't see anything, the entire city was a choker and we got stuck on people traffic jam. After seeing some flags, top of people's head, some big dinosours and a drag queen we decided to give up on the parade and head straight to the pubs.
Here we caught up with the rest of the crew. It was such a weird scene getting together again with the people you met on your travel halfway around the world, it was a bit unreal to be honest. We watched the final matches of the Six Nations where Ireland had a good chance to win it, France won it in the end by the point difference (of just 4) but the atmosphere was crazy regardless. It was so much fun, the Irish soon forgot the result of the Six Nations and partied away through the night.
We almost didn't make it back home on that day. Either Opodo or Air France stuffed up our booking and put us on the 18th May flight instead. It was the day after St. Patricks day, flight was fully booked. They put us on stand-by, but 30 minutes before scheduled take off, Air France couldn't check us in because the plane was overloaded. Time was ticking and we are still hanging around the check-in desk. The check-in chick told us if we want to go to that flight we can't check-in our luggages which means throwing away our shampoo, hair gel etc and the my Swiss army knife (arghh). My only consolation was that I was supposed to lose that knife ages ago in Hanoi. Anyway no one knows wether the plane can take off and the pilot was still talking with ground control & the engineers to resolve the issue.
The clock was ticking and our chances are becoming really slim. Flurry of phone calls and finally about 15 minutes before scheduled departure they give us a green light (God knows how, maybe they had to dump half the fuel or something like that) and had to refuse 2 guys below us although they had full tickets, but they did show up later than us. Naturally the departure gate was on the other side of the aiport, we had to race through the Dublin Aiport. We were the last persons to be admitted to the plane only to be told by the pilot that they couldn't take off yet because the plane needed to be de-iced and the contractors that supposed to do that were totally unprepared despite the weather forecast, and I bet they were hung over from the night before as well! So after all that, the plane was 1 hour delayed.
Posted by vhadiant at March 19, 2007 07:46 PM
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Comments
Hey,
I just got lasered 1 June, and I'm pretty sure we went to the same clinic ;o)
I Hope your vision is all okay now. I really wanted to know more about your experience after the operation. For example I was wondering how long it took for your vision to get stable. E-mail me if it's okay, it'd be nice to exchange some lines...
Cheers,
B (www.blumilany.blogspot.com)
Posted by: Blumcsi at June 21, 2007 10:37 PM
