Vague memories of an Irish pub

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . February 26, 2010 . 8:19PM

When we last left our heroine, she was at an Irish pub in the awful land of Washington, D.C.: a land full of people with agendas and horribly arranged streets…

We’d moved to a larger room in the back of The Dubliner and our group was gaining people like crazy. By this time, many in the group were inebriated. I was drinking my Coca-Cola (yeah, yeah, I’m drinking caffeine again–I’ll pay for it later) and enjoying the show.

It’s not my job to tell you everything that they did or said. It’s really not fair to them. Truly. They desperately need to be tattled on, but they all have their own blogs and if they can remember, more power to them. What I remember most keenly was our waiter. In an Irish pub, anyone with any kind of European accent sounds Irish. This is particularly true when everyone in the room is inebriated. What happens is that everything is much funnier than it really is.

Because of this situation, when it came to conversing with the waiter, I thought that it was hysterical that he wasn’t really Irish (look, he SOUNDED IRISH–if it looks like a Lucky Charm and walks like a Lucky Charm–yep, I’m kidding and yep, someone is gonna take that personally and yep, someone is gonna call me names). If you’d like to call me sauerkraut, go ahead.

Anyway, I made it my mission to discover the heritage of our waiter. As such, I refused to give him my order until he would disclose. What? I was in Washington. Disclosure is the name of the game. You can’t live there and not carry around your birth certificate, right?

Eventually, he gave it up to me and my friend Sarah that he was English and French. Sarah is French so this was an incredibly delightful conversation that ended with us holding our waiter up for ten minutes while we compared family histories and had a new best friend who was now required to serve all of our food “with love” because it was inevitable that we were somehow related (me being 1/4 English and Sarah being French).

And yes, I required him to say that everything had love in it.

This was much better than the experience we had at a bar later in the week where they wouldn’t allow us in because Caleb’s license had expired and they refused to believe he was over 21 even though he was supporting a full logger beard and it was clearly him on the license. And then when the guy who refused to let us in mouthed off to Caleb and Ben and made the situation ten times worse… Oh, you want to hear about that, too?

It was a long weekend. And I met a girl named Beer.

On the Road Again

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . February 23, 2010 . 11:30PM

As an introvert, I just don’t travel well. I need a lot of sleep and a lot of time to myself. By that, I mean I need copious amounts of quiet time or I turn into a raging witch who will poke your eyes out if she doesn’t eat on time or stay warm or get enough entertainment…you get the picture.

However, there are times that even the thought of travel isn’t so daunting that I feel like I need to avoid trips. This is especially true when I know that I will see many of my friends and that the people I’m spending time with are those that have similar belief systems to mine. Well, that and I LOVE a good hotel room. Don’t you? All the little soaps and clean towels and beds that are made and lions and tigers and bears, oh my!

Leon and I had been looking forward to our trip last weekend for months. We were heading to CPAC and it was our first real trip ever without AJ. The plan was to be gone for 5 days and to leave AJ with our friend Bryan. AJ was thrilled because for him this meant: No bedtime, all the soda he could drink, video games and hanging out with the coolest person he knows. For me this meant: coming home to a spoiled child, worrying about whether he was getting enough to eat and wondering if his eyes were going to rot out of his head from playing video games.

I got over it and we went to D.C. There are so many things to blog about and they overrun everything I truly want to say. What this means is that you are going to have to deal with me blogging about it in spurts, as it comes to me, instead of a nice block of cohesive posts.

Washington D.C., from the point of view of someone whose city has little traffic issue, is a beast. I have never had to pay so much money to go such a little distance in my life. I will never, ever live there. Luckily, both Leon and I decided that there will be no politicians in this family. For the first two nights, we stayed outside of the city in a complicated little place called Silver Spring, Maryland. It was full of older homes and streets that are similar to something a 12-year old Sims player might put together. The goal was to make it to the Dubliner in D.C. Even the Jesus phone that our friend Allen had was confused as to how to get there from where we were. The miles of snow piled upon the cars and on the sides of the street didn’t aid in getting us to food any faster.

Remember when I said I don’t travel well and I get angry like the Hulk if things aren’t perfect? I was hungry. And I’d just realized I left my phone charger at home. My driving companions were fearful, but Allen is very laid back and Leon was looking forward to seeing his friends at The Dubliner. I’m pretty certain both of them were ignoring me because I was in the back seat, too, but neither would cop to this.

When we arrived, around 8pm on a Wednesday night, the place was packed. Luckily, a friend of ours thinks ahead and had reserved a whole area for our large group. Unfortunately, the staff at the Dubliner didn’t take us seriously because we had about 5 stools for 20 or so people. This led to copious time at the bar.

Which means no one remembers what happened the rest of the night.

I kid!

Or do I?

To be continued…

Cabdrivers are crazy

by Jillian @ http://blueshelled.com . September 22, 2009 . 11:57AM

During our trip to Chicago earlier this month, I did something that I’ve never done: I relied on cabbies for transportation. Thanks to the Hyatt on McCormick place and their ridiculous parking practices ($38 to go in and out all day!), we decided to use taxis to help save our wallet. Believe it or not, it was actually cheaper and a much more interesting experience than paying for parking lots and trying to find our way around Chicago.

When I say cabdrivers are crazy, I mean that they have a death wish. Freud said that we all have this thanatos, or death wish, as it were. These people take being risky to whole new levels. Let me explain.

They aren’t worried about pedestrians. The pedestrians will get out of the way if they know what’s good for them.

They will get you where you are going as quickly as they can and if that means running some red lights, weaving through non-moving traffic and honking at people that look like they might be packing heat, they’re going to do it.

Police don’t phase them. They can outrun the police. And they know it.

Letting people out on a street corner in the middle of quickly moving traffic is perfectly acceptable and, if it means they don’t have to slow down, even encouraged until one of those people says NO quite emphatically and looks at her 8-year old with the “crazy eyes.”

“One up front and I don’t care how many you fit in the back. Stuff ‘em in.”

Yep, cabbies are crazy. However, they are also polite. Many of them are downright friendly, if they talk at all, that is. Many of our drivers were clearly foreigners and their discomfort at speaking with us was clear. Being an introvert, I was fine with not making conversation.

I did appreciate the cabbie who hit on me by asking me about myself, and making flirty talk and asking about baseball, as we were clearly going to the game. He did this until I said that the Sox were my husband’s favorite team and then he quit talking to me completely.

Married women like their props, too, yo. Bring it. I’ll tell you I’m married, nicely, but I like that you gave it the college try and we both feel good. Or at least one of us does. But it’s all about me and making me feel good when I am the one giving you the tip, eh?

I enjoyed not having to drive. I enjoyed not having to yell at Leon for going the wrong way or missing a parking spot. I enjoyed being squished into a cab way too small for all of us and my mom keeping AJ calm while my sister and I laughed behind our hands.

Even if they are crazy, they do their jobs well. We got where we needed to go quickly and efficiently. I may start taking a taxi everywhere. Having a driver is a nice gig.