Cheers!

This weekend was an extended one for me....as I left for Belfast on Saturday morning and just got home (Monday night). 

Thursday some of my roommates, their visiting friends, and I went to a restaurant in Montmartre called Les Refuge des Fondues...its TINY....pretty touristy...and is a fondue restaurant that serves you wine in big baby bottles. It was a lot of fun.....and very loud....crammed.....and hot. The man that owns the place pretends to be mean....but is actually very sweet. We ate about 100lbs of food. Good times. 

Saturday I went to Belfast to visit Lauren Dumm (fellow Chi O...but alumna) and her fiance Eamonn who is from Belfast. Northern Ireland (I guess Ireland in general) has such a sad, sad history....and knowing very little--I got about 800 years of history crammed into 3 days. It was pretty interesting. I'll spare this blog the details...but basically after my visit I am pretty familiar with the issues concerning "The Troubles" and the Catholic/Protestant(Loyalist) dispute. It's really intense...and still very much a part of the culture today. I met some really interesting people this weekend....and just totally experienced something I knew nothing about. It was a little overwhelming, but I'm glad I went.

Sunday we drove up the Antrim coast to "Giants Causeway". This is....a must see. So, basically its a really impressive landscape of crazy volcanic rocks in weird shapes and a big wall of rocks that the sea runs into....and its been there for I believe thousands of years. The cool part is that the Irish have a legend that goes with it. There was a giant named Finn McCool....and he battled this bigger giant, but when he realized how big the other guy was...he pretended to be a baby. The other giant was so scared to see a baby that large (as in...how BIG must the father be) that he ran away....on the path of stones that Finn McCool had built for their battle (aka Giants Causway). It's really breathtaking......and although I am afraid of heights, I climbed a "wee" bit. 

Monday morning Lauren and I went around with an ex political prisoner and got the catholic perspective of the troubles....we saw a lot of murals, graveyards, monuments, etc. Very interesting and really depressing. 

Happy to be back in Paris! My 21st birthday is this weekend.....so hopefully I will have good things to tell in the future!