Take Off

Monday, June 26, 2017
Galway, County Galway, Ireland
It's a long old day of travelling if you can't start in the same city as your airport, so it was a delight to sleep for a regular amount of hours and not only know that my colleagues had were waking up to two more days of school, but that I really didn't have much to do today besides turn up in the right places.
My media was all sorted (movies and tv shows on iPad, music on iPod, books on kindle, offline games on phone - spoiler alert: I used almost none of them for the whole trip.) Laura and I gathered our bags and sauntered down to the airport bus a slow five-minute walk from her house. The bus itself got quite full, but we had seats and our bags had shelves, and it was fun to wonder why some travellers always do things the hardest possible ways (like, leaving their bags unzipped while walking, or carrying their water bottle in their hand. Or wanting the smallest little thing from the very bottom of the biggest suitcase in the world.)
Just due to the way life works, Laura and I were on different planes. Leaving from and going to the same place, just one hour apart. This meant we needed to be in different terminals, but since I was an extra hour early, I went all the way to Terminal 1 and waited until Laura got into a queue before I headed back to Terminal 2.
There weren't any queues in Terminal 2 - just a lot of confused passengers. We had to weigh our bags and label them and print our tickets all by ourselves, and people are generally crazy with luggage. I've embraced the George Clooney "Up In The Air" philosophy (to an extent. I still bring my penknife for stuff like peeling fruit and fixing bag straps, so I usually need a checked in bag). It seems like airports go out of their way to make everybody slow though. I would love to try an airport where the queues for solo travellers were separate, and just see how quick they were in comparison to the milling masses on their way to Ibiza and the Canaries. 
I still managed to sneak around the confused people and get my bag label and ticket printed pretty fast. Then the bag went one way and I went the other and we were great. Until I ended up in the same queue as the terrible traveller from the bus (water bottle, zips, huge suitcase). She still had several things hanging off her, and she had to be told to remove every one of them individually. Then her case(s) went back through the x-ray a few time. It turned out she was carrying a hand weight - like the thing you use at the gym? For why, I don't know. There doesn't seem to be any law against it though, in case that's important to you.
I eventually got through, filled up my reusable water bottle from a well-concealed water fountain (goddammit, this is Dublin and they will do everything to make you pay for your water!) and wandered around for a while, before deciding I would rather get to my gate and read my book for a while. Off I went.
Guess who I met at my gate? LAURA! My gate was back in Terminal 1. And it was right beside Laura's gate. She eventually got on her plane, but they didn't take off for ages, so I kept her up to date via Snapchat with what was being plugged or unplugged, and what her pilots looked like.
My flight was also somewhat delayed but I had a gazillion interesting in-flight videos to entertain me, some of which I jotted to down with the express intention of sharing with you here:
~How to do Child CPR

~How to do Baby CPR

~How to make Chicken and Tomato Pasta Bake

~How to Style a Hair Piece

~How to Understand Bad Dreams

~How to be Confident in the Workplace

~What to wear when going shopping

~How to Complain about a Dentist

~How to Hustle

~How to Fake Cry

~How to Fake Being Sick

~How to Tie a Klemheist knot

~and Who is Ant-Man?
Eventually, I had learned enough, and we were flying over Toronto. There was a lot of bad weather (clouds and rain - the Toronto Islands were closed to the public because they were flooded!) which meant the flights were backed up and doing circles in the sky. Unfortunately my cool map thing wasn't working, so I only got a view of one circle my plane did, but my dad was keeping track and knew not only where I was circling, but where my sister was circling, how long it would take before we could land, and almost how many circles we had completed in our areas. (I know this because I got bored and turned on my phone. OMG, I know.)
We did land eventually. Our dear brother was in a hotel, Laura was in one terminal and I was in another. Somehow or other I found Vincent and we got a little train that took us to Laura. Vincent piled us into another train that took us to central Toronto (Union Station) and the subway up to near his apartment. Apart from getting in and out of trains, we had very little walking to do (which was most decidedly NOT a sign of things to come!)
The Annex is the area his apartment is in (it took me a while to understand that The Annex is like saying "Drumcondra" or "The Claddagh" - sort of - it's just an area of the city. Not a top secret apartment complex with Anne Frank in the attic or anything). It's lovely. There are nice, established apartment complexes, but also loads of lovely Victorian style houses. And lots and lots of greenery. The roads are quiet, the traffic is slow, and the people are pleasant (they seem happy, and happy people are often quite pleasant). He's also very near Bloor St. which ranges from Guccis and Prada's to "affordable" shopping to hipster cafés in run down warehouses. It's very cool.
We headed off for a walk. On the way to Kensington Market, we passed a Krispy Kreme and THEY HAD BIRTHDAY CAKE DONUTS. So I got them all. I actually didn't get any other Krispy Kreme on the whole trip, so I'm glad I overfilled at that one. I had a donut for the road and kept the rest for later, and then had a burger for seconds. It was deeeelightful. Brioche bun and beautiful meat and salad. ALSO POUTINE. YUM YUM.
We wandered in and out of a lot of hipster shops - they sold prickly pears, dragon fruit, Pokemon hats, really old Nintendo consoles, shiny Digimon cards, and pretty much everything you could want. We made a note to get Laura's broken watch strap fixed (which we did, another day, in case I forget) and then. WE PLAYED A GAME.
There's this place that has virtual reality games for playing, and OMG. So much fun. I have Google Daydream VR viewer for my phone, and it's really good, but the equipment in this place was the proper Microsoft €1000 VR gaming consoles, viewer, earpiece, microphone and two hand controls. We were up on an empty little stage, roped into three little squares, and then we were logged in. SO MUCH FUN. We killed a lot of bad guys in outer space. Laura and Vincent went back there in July and tried some other games that they said were even better, so they must have been telling the truth because I LOVED it.
We walked around the city for another while and eventually came back to Vincent's apartment. He was donating his bed to us, and housemate Joe was donating his comically thin mattress to Vincent on the living room floor (because Joe had picked up a thicker mattress on the literal side-of-the-road somewhere. Their whole house is composed of a mix of cheap Ikea and side-of-the-road finds).
And even though I hadn't done too much, it was brilliant to just lie down and sleep.
I love holidays.

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