My apologies, loyal readers

For such a long absence.

I didn't even end up writing about my Amsterdam trip, and now it's the end of September. How did that happen?

And this will have to be a short one, as I've fritted away my morning booking ferry tickets from Belfast to Stranraer, Scotland, for my mini-holiday next month.

Okay, where to start? Amsterdam was good. Seeing Jen and Stu and Liam was fantastic. Went and saw Rembrandts and Anne Frank's house (the most touching thing for me was to see her room, with magazine cut-outs of movie stars on the faded wallpaper, and you can't help but think, 'I put movie stars on my walls as a teenager!'). Parts of Amsterdam are beautiful and magical, other parts are the tackiest places you'll ever see, and it was in that area that I was staying!

On my last full day I visited Liam in his city of Leiden, and saw his beautiful attic apartment above this ancient tea shop, and with a gorgeous view of the cathedral, and when I found out on top of it all he paid less rent than I did, I wanted to murder him. I checked my emails and found out that I 'failed' the UofT French test a third time, and felt like I was going to faint. We went out and had warm soup for lunch, and Liam is such an old friend that I did not care if I cried in front of him. He was very supportive and we discussed my options (either pay for another whole tuition in order to take the test a fourth time, or abandon the Masters degree I worker very hard on... neither of which is very pleasant) and also what I was going to do with my future. A lot of us are reaching a quarter life crisis, and as Liam said, this moment in our lives is made harder by the fact that it was immediately preceded by the best time in our lives (undergrad). Speaking of which, I keep having dreams about Guelph people, and living in res again and all those good times.

Anyways, I wander around Amsterdam in a blur that last day and really just wanted to be home, but 'home' now meant Dublin. I had Chinese food for dinner (very bland, as I mentioned before, am spoiled forever) and went to the fabulous art deco movie theatre and saw 'Away We Go'. I read a big chunk of Edith Wharton's 'Age of Innocence' on the plane home, and was deliriously happy to get back to my own room, away from high hostelers who turn on the lights at 3am and Italians who (honest to freakin' God) listen to their radios in the middle of the night! All I wanted was a whole pizza from Luigi's, the late night pizza place beside my house, and was overjoyed to find them still open when I got home from the airport. The eastern-european woman who works there barely gave me a smile though.

The next day I found out that I had an extra two days before I had to go back to work, so I wandered around the city feeling contented and comfortable. Two tourists stopped me and asked directions to a certain street.

I smiled and answered, "Umm, I'm sorry. I don't know where that is. I'm not from here."