Oh those are pints, not cups...

So I get these random fruit/veggie cravings every once in a while and this past week it was carrots. I went through about 2 bags of full sized carrots in 3 days, granted I had to finish them before leaving for Belfast, but still, that’s a lot of carrots. I was getting caught up on super bowl ads actually before writing this and the Doritos commercial where the guy is trying to turn his wife into a dorito made me think of how many carrots I’ve had. Honestly I don’t think it would be that amusing to be turned into whatever you eat. First of all, that would be a lot of different things to turn into and also, if you turn into a food, what can you do? Yes I’ve actually really thought about that and realized that you really can’t do anything. I’m also really curious as to how the saying “you are what you eat” came about and why, because it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Anyways, besides my slight obsession with carrots this week, it has been a fairly interesting few days.

Sunday night the girls all came over and we pretty much just took over the kitchen. Rebecca lives really far from the rest of us so it’s really inconvenient for her to walk all the way over to us just for dinner and then leave. So to make it worth her while we decided to bake a bunch of desserts and stuff before making dinner. We made apple pie from scratch and then cinnamon roll cookies. It was so much fun! For one thing they use the metric system here I think (?) and when Colleen was measuring out the 2 cups of sugar, she actually measured out 2 pints. Haha it was a lot of sugar, but we’re at least smart enough to realize that and we found actual measuring cups and scooped out what we needed and put the rest back in the bag. I don’t really know what we would have done if we didn’t catch that mistake before adding the sugar to the apples. But we mixed everything together and made the pie filling before really making a mess of my kitchen and rolling out the dough on the counter. When it can be used to make a mess and end up everywhere, flour is one of my favorite things to use. Rebecca wanted to roll out the dough so she was really the only person who ended up with a bunch of flour on her, but it was fun. For people who have seen The Lord of The Rings you will understand the reference to the white hand of Saruman, which we marked Rebecca with and she kept it for the entire night. They tried to mark me as well, but I was not having it. The pie got marked though, along with Colleen’s globs of cinnamon (she is very unsuccessful when it comes to sprinkling things) and we also used the knife to make a clover in the top. After the pie was done and in the oven Rafa joined us as we were making cinnamon rolls; except the oven didn’t really seem to want to cook them properly so they turned into cinnamon roll cookies. Either way they were really good. AS the pie was finishing up Clair and Katie joined us and it was time to start dinner. I was finally going to make the spaghetti and meatballs for everyone. I don’t think that the stove is very appreciative of me anymore after that night. I had to use all 4 burners at once. One of the girls doesn’t eat red meat so instead of adding the meat balls directly to the sauce they went into a separate pot that I had put a little bit of the sauce in. So there were 2 burners with sauce on them, one with the spaghetti, and the other one I was using to make the meat balls. It was quite the cooking experience, I can’t say I’ve ever done that before, but nothing was burned, so I consider it to be a successful attempt. As much as I know how to make all of these things, I have a meal plan at school so I don’t cook, and at home I usually just assist in making meals. There are only a few times where I’ll be asked to actually make dinner on my own, which is perfectly fine, but I usually end up having to call my mom at some point to make sure I’m doing it all correctly. It was a successful cooking night though and when dinner was ready we actually set the table and did like a family style time dinner. It was cute.

After dinner we did pie and ice cream while planning our trip to London in a few weeks. We finished putting a lot of that together in time for one of the girls to turn on the super bowl. Don’t get me wrong, I watch football, but it’s really only college football that I follow because of the UCMB, so I wasn’t that interested at all in the super bowl. Actually the great part about the super bowl is seeing the ridiculous commercials that they come up with just for that one night. Ireland though does not show the same things that ESPN or US sports channels do and there were no commercials. Actually there were 3 commentators who spent the entire time repeating everything that had happened so far in the game. Being 5 hours ahead it was getting really late for us and we had school the next day, so after the first quarter most of the girls left. By half time everyone had already gone back home and I only stayed to watch the half time show because I was actually interested in who was performing. It wasn’t terrible, and I’m pretty sure that I appreciated it more for the fact that it was the only entertaining thing that had happened since I started “watching” the game. Once half time was over I finished cleaning up the kitchen and then went to bed just to be woken up at 8 am by a false fire alarm. It was a great start to Monday, a false fire alarm 4 hours before my first class. It went off for about an hour and we were all just standing outside waiting for the firemen to get there. It worries me a lot of times when an alarm goes off here because they don’t seem to have a real sense of urgency about anything. If there was a real fire I feel like the building would be going up in flames long before the firemen got there. They actually don’t respond right away. What happens is the receptionist gets a call saying where the alarm went off and she goes and finds the people who live in that apartment to see what it’s all about. If it’s nothing, well I’m not sure what happens, because the girls who lived in the apartment seemed completely clueless as to why their smoke detector was the one that went off. So the receptionist had to go back and tell the fire department that it was from an unknown cause and then they sent over guys to check it out. It just kind of blows my mind how that whole system works. Either way going back to sleep once we were allowed to go inside was not possible. So I think I read, I really don’t know, my memory has been really foggy lately.

Monday night I went out with the girls to listen to traditional Irish music at a pub. I’ll be really surprised if I’m not sick by the end of this week, so far dinner has been either fried foods, or just a lot of food. At the pub they go around and give out free finger food which consists of chips (fries), white pudding, onion rings, sausages, and chicken nuggets. Then afterwards we all went out to a kebab shop and had dinner. So a lot of fried food Monday night, but the music was great. It was so cool to see all of their different instruments. I can and can’t tell you what some of them were. There were flutes, and actually one of the guys plays left-handed and holds the flute opposite from how we are taught to here in the US. There was also a guitar player, a lot of fiddlers, a guy playing the Irish version of bag  pipes, and a few other instruments that I can’t remember or don’t know. It was really awesome though to go out and just listen to jigs and reels that they had learned. Traditional Irish music is learned orally so they have it all memorized and they actually improvise from the base tune a lot. The music is actually all about the way that it is ornamented and that’s what makes it very unique to each musician. Someone would just start a song and others would join in and they would all be playing the same tune but in their own way, and it all fit together so well. It was incredible! I’ll have to record one of the concerts I go to sometime cause they are certainly worth listening to.

Tuesday was an uneventful day, at least from what I can remember. Actually it really was, after all of my classes I went back to my room and slept for a few hours. Wednesday night I went out with the girls to celebrate Katie’s birthday. We went back to Wagamama’s because half of us had buy 1 get 1 free coupons for a meal. We had dinner there and then went back to Katie’s and pretty much demolished a little chocolate fudge cake. It’s really true that if you put chocolate in front of girls they will eat it all. When the cake was done cooking it was just put on the table in front of us and we all just kind of took some. Ironic part of the night, we were watching the Irish version of The Biggest Loser at the same time as we were eating the cake. Once the episode was over we actually all returned home because a few of us still had to pack for this weekend’s trip. We’re heading to Northern Ireland/Belfast until Sunday. It’ll certainly be a great time, but I’ve still got to pack so this is all for now.

With Love Always