I had a mini-holiday this weekend! On Friday I took the bus down to Kilkenny to meet up with the French girls, Julie and Erell, we met in Galway. I also proved myself as the most reliable friend in Dublin since I was the only one that showed up. (LAME, guys.) The bus ride is about 3 hours from Dublin and fortunately for me I had one of those silent and stoic bus drivers so I had no idea where I was the whole ride (thankfully Julie met me at the stop).

This is actually a photo of the greasy smudge left by the dirty hippie dreds sitting in front of me.

Callan, not unlike Sonoma County, seems primarily known for all the famous people it has produced for a town of less than 2,000 people. These include: John Locke (but not that John Locke), the guy who designed the White House, and some strange connection with the founder of Coca-Cola (which would lead me to believe that their economy would be doing better…but it’s not. Wha-whaaaa.)

For Julie’s birthday a lot of people met at their house to pre-party and play King’s Cup (FLASHBACKS) before heading into Kilkenny (the nearby larger city, has a castle) to paaaaaarty. In typically student-party fashion, almost no one was actually Irish.

First we headed to some place called Ryan’s where, as I later discovered on the bus ride back home, Ireland’s top rockabilly band was playing: TV Jones and the Tomahawks. We didn’t know this at the time but thoroughly enjoyed them anyway (read: danced our little heart’s out). Ryan’s was overall a vastly better pub experience than any I’ve had in Dublin, mostly because it was filled with genuinely friendly Irish folk, exactly the way you picture them. After this we headed to a dance club called Pegasus, that was instead filled with slimy sleazy slutty clubbers (exactly the way you picture them). Pegasus was actually really cool because it looked like a converted church and had all these levels and nooks and dramatic lighting. Of course I failed to take any pictures.

The next day had some epically depressing weather so we tended to stay inside and keep warm. Most of the people at Julie and Erell’s house work with this volunteer arts and community program called KCAT, which seems completely awesome and there should be one in every town. The campus was closed but Julie took me through the grounds and we also visited The Workhouse, which I gathered to be a farm but at one point was a massive deathsite during the famine. Spooky.

Regardless: farm animals!

That night we went to a local pub, where the owner was holding his son’s 21st birthday party! This was awesome, if only for the people watching. The birthday boy’s name was Derek and for some reason had a bloody lip when everyone was singing to him. The DJ had a hard-on for ABBA and overusing his smoke machine. Good times were had by all.