At St Brendan's Ave

Happy Birthday Helen!! 

I have two wonderful Irish housemates, Helen and Niamh, along with my amazing American roommate Andi. Last week Helen turned 21 so there was quite the party at our house. Despite the fact that 21 is a random birthday which doesn't provide any new privileges, it's still a significantly big deal here.

In addition good-old-and-super-yummy-and-wonderfully-chocolaty- birthday-cake, Helen received twenty-one kisses from the guests, cause that's what an Irish birthday earns you.  And then in addition to that, Helen's cousins decided she needed to be tossed  twenty-one time as well. Hilarious, although not easy to photograph.  

The birthday shenanigans went on well into the night and I think the earliest any of us went to bed was about the same time as I would arrive at work to open at Starbucks. Also known as roughly 5:30. Or rather half-five as they would say with their wonderful Irish accents. And sleep is overrated right? No really it's not at all, I love sleep. But epic birthday parties are completely worth it. 

The Irish president is secretly a little leprechaun in not-much-of-a-disguise, you can see right through it can't you?

There were plenty of balloons and decorations for birthday and we also have our normal decorations of candles in wine bottles and a  stolen poster of the Irish president Higgins.                                                                                                                                 The first thing Niamh's mums's said when she came in the other day was "Oh I see you Michael D is here." Because President Higgins is  known to everyone as Michael D.                                                                                                                               Now we have successfully (or at least mostly) recovered from the crazy birthday shindig followed in short order by St Paddy's Day. We got a letter from our landlord saying the house needs to be clean and tidy for an inspection tomorrow. Which equals a lot of cleaning and tidying today. So now our cute little house on St Brendan's Avenue is all shiny.   I haven't posted any pictures of my house really so I've included a couple. Figured I should post one of my room while it is brilliantly clean and tidy.                                                                                                         My comforter (aka duvet) was left by the sweet Aussie girl who studied aboard in Galway last semester and lived here. And that stack of books were all one or two euro finds from the best-est-book-store-ever-Charlie-Bran's. Although typically it would be strongly advised against, using the internet to move in with complete strangers in a foreign city, turned out incredibly well for me and I'm quite quite glad.