I see you have decided to visit my blog. Maybe you got lost? 

Never criticize a rifleman until you have walked a mile in his shoes. That way he’ll be barefoot, and you’ll be out of range. – 2nd Target Company

Does that quote have anything to do with my blog? Not. In. The. SLIGHTEST. 

 

…so what was i doing here? oh yeah…ireland

Now, I’m about to write a whole lot about travelling. I have done more of it than most, but am still very inexperienced. Even if I weren’t, my temperament and demeanor mean that anything I write here will be almost, but not quite, entirely unlike someone else’s experience. This of course means that not only will my experiences be unhelpful, but that they will actively work to shift one’s expectations to that which will not fit one’s experience. That said, if there are any particularly dedicated masochists in the crowd, they may want to stay for the dumpster fire/trainwreck/brutal murder of the English language & sentence structure that is to follow.

On May 14th I found myself standing outside an airport with a ludicrously large fountain Ski (its amazing, your life is incomplete without it. (by this I mean that once you discover it you will invariably gain unpleasant amount of weight and therefore have found what will “complete” your life. (He’s saying it’ll be the death of you.))) and absolutely no clue where to go. After roughly ten minutes of standing on the curb simultaneously dreading someone trying to talk to me and desperately hoping that someone will try and talk to me so that I may find out where I am supposed to go, I finally realized that a good move would be to follow the people, and the people were going into the airport. This conveniently enough took me right where I needed, and only a minute or two late.

Now, you may wonder what that has to do with my experience in Ireland, and I am happy to tell you that it has absolutely nothing to do with my experience in Ireland. I am putting into context these next few sentences about my expectations for Ireland. One does not read ^ that ^ and expect to find someone who has the slightest clue of what to expect. 

I realize that I have given literally nothing but contextualization up to this point…and if you aren’t a fan of context…that sucks because right now I am contextualizing further contextualization. (its so meta! (not really, don’t listen to everyone on the internet who calls something meta, they don’t know what it means. (I know I certainly don’t.))) A precursor to my enjoyment of anything is that I do it with people I enjoy. Apparently I have an excessively low tolerance for most obnoxious behavior, and so find that I very much do not enjoy most people. In fact one might say that rather than liking most people, I dislike most people, and they would still have enough room to say that I have enough disdain for most people that I can, at a moments notice, write off entire groups of people. Remember this, as it will come up very often. 

Two generalizations came to mind in the first few hours of the trip, generalizations to be reinforced for some time – Nothing takes the luster and excitement out of travel quite like an airport, and nothing takes the promise and potential out of a person quite like meeting them. I’ve been to the UK before (actually I’ve been to a lot of Europe before, but that’s a ramble for another time) and I was quite depressed by my time there.

I described my companions, those who I would be spending the next two weeks with as inflicting upon me their “dull, driveling, dronings”. I laid out my expectations for Belfast as follows:

In reality, I don’t anticipate much to be different. The UK is not remarkably unlike home. They have fun accents, are shorter, and drive on the left, oh and have more reasonable portion sizes. Other than this, people are much the same, just with a different take on history.

Me…like a month ago

Upon arriving in Belfast, I was equally uninterested remarking “This is a city. I have a bit of dislike for cities, too many people, too little privacy.”

With beginnings like these, one cannot help but be bewildered that I found some of the most excellent people I have ever met on this trip, and that I would find myself enjoying my time more than I could have anticipated.

Now let that be a lesson to getting lost on the internet!