Top o' the mornin' to yeh.

It's been some time since our last post, and there are reasons for this...the foremost bein' the fact that we missed our flight from Rome to Dublin Intcont'l, which was scheduled to depart from the outdated, outmoded, and altogether dinosauric Ciampino airport at 10:50 on Tuesday morning. This, of course, delt a crushing blow to our morale, which, at that point, was already sinking beneath the eternal city's myriad abuses of our trust.

And I'm not out to make excuses for us, 'cause it's our own fault that we missed the flight. Having grown quite accustomed to breakfast on the terrace at Ganymedes's Palace, we decided we'd eat before boarding the commuter bus to Termini Station, from whence we planned on taking another bus to the actual airport. Yes, we had a plan; but the plan ran aground.

First off, Alessandro was a bit late laying out the spread; then, the first bus took forever to get to the station; and then, the layout of the station itself confused us to no end, so we ended up walking about aimlessly for about twenty minutes before freaking out and grabbing a cab.

The wrong cab.

This cabbie was a maniac. True...the cliche says that cabbies are agressive drivers. But this guy...this guy...this guy attempted to manouvre past the caribineri attending to a stalled out street-tram by weaving through a torrent of opposing traffic, putting the cab in reverse, cutting the wheel sharp and to the right, hopping the curb...

How we made it there alive I'll never know. But we did...and after discovering that we'd missed our flight, sulking for a good twenty minutes, bucking up and reserving seats on another plane going out the next day, and taking yet another bus back into the city, we decided to drown our undeserved sorrows in soda pop and golden-brown batter at the local Hard Rock (yes, the Hard Rock still sucks).

But enough of that. The Emerald Isle, for what it's worth, has more than met our expectations (which, I might add, were mighty high). Naturally, upon our arrival in Dublin, we set out in the general direction of our hostel with confidence only to end up lost and confused. But everybody...and I mean just about everybody...went well our of his/her way to set us on the right track. On our first bus, we met the Irish equivalent of our dear old Uncle Bob, who cackled, quoted Shakespeare, and showed us to our stop; the driver of our second bus pulled over upon realizing we'd gotten off at the wrong place and yanked us back aboard; we even got a free ride from an unusually magnanimous cabbie.

Out of time, to be continued!