Brussels and Dublin

Alright, well we made it to Brussels ok, obviously. The first night in Brussels, we just walked around for a bit and got to know the city. We both kind of decided that we liked Germany better than Belgium, but it was fun anyway. After a somewhat late night of walking around and stuff we went to bed. Funny story about that night. I woke up at 4:30 am and I had to go to the bathroom really bad. Being a hostel and all, the bathroom was outside the room, so I got out of my bunk and went there. On returning, I found that I had forgotten my key to get back in the room. The reception was closed at this point, and I didn't really want to knock and wake people up, so I just decided to wait outside the room until someone came out. There were 14 people in this room, so I figured someone would need to go to the bathroom or something soon. And I was right. Someone came out at 5, and I gratefully went back in the room. I just couldn't believe I had forgetten the key. I felt pretty stupid.

Anyway, the next day, it was raining all day, so we went to the museum of musical instruments. This was really cool because they gave us headphones, and I was like "Oh great, it's going to be a self-guided tour with some droning voice in a French accent in my ears." But it was actually something different. At each place, you could see the instruments through the glass, then if you stood in the right spot, the headphones would intercept a radio frequency that was playing the particular instrument we were looking at. We spent about 5 hours in the museum before we got hungry and left. It was one of the coolest museums I've ever been in. Also, I introduced Andrew to the glory of the nutella crepe. If you don't know what that is, you are missing out on bliss. It's basically a flat pancake filled with a sweet hazelnut spread. It tastes amazing! I'll try to make it when I get back to America, but I think the Europeans really have grabbed the essence, and no one can make it like the Parisians. Anyway, I got him hooked on those. After this, we went to the park and broke our hackey-sack record! Woot! No naked people this time though, but we did have a guy ask us if he could take our picture while we played. It's kind of funny because we'll be playing and every once in a while a group of people will stop to watch us, and sometimes people even video-record us! We feel like movie stars, and we actually play better when people are watching us. The next day, we decided to go to the palace that was there, and try some Belgian beer. Dave, Andrew tried the beer you said, and it was delicious. People, if Dave Smith ever gives you advice about anything food-related, definitely take him up on it. He knows what people like!

So the next morning, we had to get to the airport to catch a flight to Dublin at 10:10. Andrew wanted to get there by 8:15, but I didn't think we needed to be there until 9:00 because my flight from Edinburgh to Paris was so smooth. We were wrong. We decided to get up at 7:30 so we could be out the door by 8 and at the train station to the airport by 8:30. From there, we figured it would take about a half hour to get the ticket to the airport and take the train there. This was the plan. What actually happened is we got up at 7:30. I figured out that I had lost the paper with the reservation on it, and for those of you who are newer to our adventures, my computer had broken down the first day I got to London. So we couldn't find our reservation anywhere. I tried to look on the hostelworld web site to see the bookings I had made, but the password for my account was really weird. I had it sent to my email, but the computers at the hostel couldn't access my email for some reason, so we decided to get to the airport and check it there on Andrew's laptop. So we got out of the hostel by 8:15 and to the train station by about 8:35. We had just missed the train to the airport at 8:33, so we waited for the one that left at 8:45. We figured we would still be ok. Well the train never came. Apparently it was really delayed or something, so they just cancelled it and we had to take the 8:59 train. We got the airport by 9:15 and we had to walk for a little ways to get to the airport from the airport train station. By the time we had checked in and everything, it was already 9:25. Boarding began at 9:45 and the flight took off at 10:10. We figured we were still good because all we had to do was get through security. Actually, no. Apparently in Brussels, you have to go through customs to get out of Belgium. We got to this room with an insane amount of people where we saw that we had to wait in this huge line to get through. So we wait in line, praying that we'll get to our flight on time. This whole time, Andrew's been saying, "We'll never make it," in a joking matter, but I started saying it too when I saw how long the line was. We got to within 10 people by 9:45, but then, people started taking a really long time. We ended up getting our passports stamped by 10:00. We had 10 minutes. We run towards the security line, and all I saw was a huge amount of people, and I thought we were finished. I looked at Andrew and just sighed. Then, I saw this little tiny security line off to the side and said, "We're going there!" We get over there, and apparently we were allowed to go through that way. There were only two people in front of us, but the lady in front of us waited until the last minute to start getting ready to go through the line. She took things out of her pockets, took the liquids out of her bag, took off her shoes, took off her watch, blah blah blah, and all the while, Andrew and I are like, "Just go lady!" under our breaths. She finally gets through, and Andrew and I empty our pockets and go through. Andrew had a bunch of change in his pockets apparently, and he felt the need to get every last coin one by one back into his pocket. I grabbed his bags and my bag and ran to where there were less people. Andrew meets me there, and we look at our tickets to see which gate we have to go through: B32. I saw a sign that said B1-B98. I said to myself, "Surely, fate would not be this cruel to us..." but yes, it was. We had to run 32 gates through a Belgian airport dodging people and trying not to run over babies. At one point, I actually ran through a restaurant to avoid a group of people. I got to the gate at exactly 10:10 and said, "Please, my brother is coming in 1 minute!" The guy said that it was fine, and Andrew comes sprinting up out of breath. Apparently, the plane was delayed by 20 minutes. Thank goodness. That was probably the most stressful time of my life. Anyway, we got to Dublin ok, but we still had to figure out the hostel reservation.

In Dublin, I get my bag and we go through customs and through the immigration office. I show the officer my passport and my papers to let me stay for three months. He points out that the letter from Tyndall calls me a "she" in several different occasions, and he suspected that it was a fraudulent letter! I got a little worried, but he gave me the benefit of the doubt probably because I was an American. We got through that alright, and we used the airports wifi to find the hostel reservation. I get my password to hostelworld, and go to the website. I see all the hostels I was at... except the one we had to get to. Apparently, the reservation had not gone on my record and therefore, we had no way of finding where we were supposed to stay that night. I didn't know what to do. We decided to go to the tourist station at the airport to see if we could make a reservation at a different hostel. The woman there said that there were a lot of events happening in Dublin that night, so most of the hostels would be full. She tried two of them, the first one was full and the second had a double available for 44 euros per person per night. We asked her to keep looking. I glanced at her paper and saw the name of the first hostel was Abbey Court Hostel. I thought that sounded somewhat familiar, so I asked if she could call there and just see if my reservation was there. She called and said, "Hello, this is so and so from the airport. I have two guys here who think they might have a reservation at your hostel. The name is Steven Horne. Do you have a reservation by that name?" Seconds that seemed like hours passed by. I was praying that this was the right hostel. Then I heard, "Oh you do?" My heart leaped, and I did a fist pump saying, "YES!" I don't know how it happened, but we found our original reservation and the rest of the day went splendidly. That incident right there makes me believe that miracles do happen.

After that whole fiasco, we checked into our hostel and visited a church and walked along the river. We were relieved to be in an English speaking country again. That night, there were a bunch of girls from Germany in our room, and they talked and had the light on really late. Finally at 1:15, I said to them, "Are you going to bed anytime soon?" (Apparently Andrew can sleep through anything, so he wasn't affected by this at all.) They apologized and the light was off by 1:30. We were up by 9:30 the next morning (this morning) in time to catch breakfast. I had to check out to go to Cork, so I did that. We decided to go to a church service we had seen the day before, and it was awesome. They had Chris Tomlin playing and they sang songs we knew. It was a very welcoming environment, and we both had a great time there. It was really awesome to be able to go to church after a long time of not being able to for a while. After this, we went to get some lunch, and I packed up my stuff to go to Cork. I got on the bus, said goodbye to Andrew, and got to the train station. Then I realized that I had no idea where to go once I got to Cork. I found an internet station at the train station and logged onto my email from there. I found the Tyndall Institute welcome letter and saw that I was supposed to be receiving an email from the housing accomodations soon. Now I know you are all familiar with spam. I receive about 600 emails per day, about 595 of which are spam. I had actually deleted the email from the housing people, so I wasn't sure what to do. The Tyndall email had given me the name of the place, so I had hoped to just show up there and check in when I got there. I checked my inbox, and lo and behold, there was an email from the place already there! It was asking me when I would arrive in Cork because the lady who runs the place is not there all the time. It alluded to the previous email that I had never gotten and gave me her phone number. Luckily there was a phone next to the station I was at, so I phoned her and left a message. By this time, it was about 10 minutes until my train left, so I went to get on that. Apparently I had forgotten to tell her I would be at the train station, so when I got to the place, the lady wasn't there. One of the residents let me in, and he let me use his computer and phone. Finally, when I called, she got to the place and said she had been waiting for me at the train station. I felt kind of bad, but I was just glad to be there. I finally have my own room! I have to share a bathroom, but I'm so glad to finally have a place I can call my own. I start my orientation tomorrow, so I'm going to do some laundry now and hopefully I will be fresh for the morning.