Rollercoaster

SOOOOO I had a day to recharge my batteries and pack once again before I trained it into Pearse Station to meet my cousin Mary and my sister Kris at the Holiday Inn on Friday afternoon. We chatted for a long time and caught up while they got ready, and then we went to Temple Bar to eat at Gallagher's Boxy House. I had some lovely potato soup, and the girls both had boxties. We shopped in Temple Bar a bit and strolled on over to Grafton Street to grab some tea and dessert at Bewley's (Mary's favorite place of the whole trip!) We made it an early bedtime, as Kris and Mary were REALLY tired and jet lagged.



Saturday morning we awoke to find that there actually was NOT continental breakfast as we had thought there was. So, we grabbed some chocolate muffins at Centra (which were actually the most amazing muffins I've probably ever had), shopped and walked around Dublin (Grafton Street and Temple Bar again and St. Stephen's Green), and had lunch at Little Ceasar's Pizza (which is different than the Little Ceasar's in America). I had eaten there with Katie and Abby when they came to visit, and it was just as yummy and charming as the last time! We walked over to Dublin Castle and took the tour (what's this? my 5th time? 6th? I've lost track), and then walked all the way over to catch one of the last tours at the Jameson Distillery. (Jameson is actually distilled in Cork now, but Bow Street in Dublin is the site of the original distillery. They've recreated four tourists a distillery the way it used to look when Jameson was first distilled in 1780). This was my first time on the Jameson tour, so I was excited to do something new. The tour was quite interesting, and we had a really cute and funny girl for our tour guide. At the end of the tour we each got a complimentary whiskey; we could choose either straight whiskey, whiskey with ginger ale, with coke, or with cranberry juice. We all tried a different concoction, and they were all good... but Jameson and cranberry is probably one of my new favorite drinks!



That night we had dinner at the Quay in Temple Bar. Kris and Mary tried their first Bulmer's and like it, but said it was too sweet for them to finish a whole pint... Dinner was good, even though Kris had second thoughts about her salmon pasta and wanted to change her order but couldn't so she was mad at me for the rest of the night for telling her not to get fish and chips because she could get it in London. Wow, that was one long run-on sentence. But the hamburger and chips Mary and I shared was delish.



So, it had been a good day. But when we got out of dinner, I noticed that my phone was still on silent from the Jameson tour, and I had 3 missed calls from home. I was worried, so I called home to see what was up. My sister Katie answered, and she told me that her friend Chad from optometry school had been killed in a car accident. (He had visited Ireland with Katie back in January and had "a crush" on me). I couldn't believe it. It seemed like time just stopped... like all the people in Temple Bar froze around me and all I could see was Chad's goofy face and all I could hear was Katie crying. It was awful. I was standing right in front of one of the pubs that we'd gone out to with Chad. He was such an amazing guy and had so much going for him. I wasn't that close to Chad, but we'd spent a week flirting, and we'd kept in touch through aim and facebook... he'd actually just written on my facebook wall HOURS before the accident, and I considered him a friend. It's so sad and shocking when something like that happens. I was really sad about it for the next few days, and I still think about him a lot. But most of all, it broke my heart that I couldn't be there for my sister. Nobody at home really knew Chad, and I knew nobody at home could really understand...



So there I was, just steps away from the pub where I last saw Chad... speechless... with no words to say to make Katie feel better. I hung up with tears in my eyes, and Kris and Mary said we could go back-- but I thought about Chad, and I knew that what he'd really want me to do was go have a drink for him at an Irish pub. So we stopped at Doyle's on Pearse Street and had a drink for Chad.



I'm sad whenever I think about Chad, but I know that he'd want me to go on having a great time here in Ireland-- the place where we met, and the place that will always make me think of him and what a great guy he was. Chad had diabetes, and it was his diabetes that caused his accident. I used to joke around with him about his diabetes-- I never thought of diabetes as a fatal disease. I always thought it was just something a lot of people had to live with. But Chad's accident showed me how harmful diabetes really can be. I've done a bit of research, and I found a really great 5K fundraising walk for diabetes in Philadelphia (in Chad's home state and the city where he went to optometry school). I'm definitely going to take part in that every year that I can in memory of Chad.