Ireland Instruction manual

Many people have asked how our trip to Ireland was. I feel that it would be best presented in a the format of an instruction manual. I think you will get the gist of the trip in this manner.

RENTAL CAR
When traveling to Ireland, you will likely need to rent a car. This is a country where you will drive on the left side of the road, and have your steering wheel on the right side of the car so this is something that you will need to adjust to. If you are frugal, you will also be checking out the cheapest rental car there is, which means it has no air conditioning and it is a manual, or stick shift car. It is also called a Ford Fiesta, which will make you wonder what kind of fiesta you might have in it. An intimate one, to be sure, as it is a tiny car. You will also need a GPS or SAT/NAV system because you will be lost and could potentially not be found. This is worth the extra expense. The phones you have from the United States will work in Ireland but you will be "roaming" so it is best to just get the GPS. You will name her "mappy." Your car insurance does not transfer overseas so you will need to have some kind of insurance on the car. You will also try to "frugal" your way to paying for the least expensive insurance. The rental car agent will try to convince you to get the full insurance. You will insist on getting the lesser insurance but when he tries to put a $1600 deposit on your credit card and it gets rejected, you realize that you will need to cut your losses and just take the full insurance even if it doubles the price of the car rental.

You will finally arrive at said Ford Fiesta and be grateful you only have one suitcase. You will try to get into the car but realize that you are on the wrong side. You will walk to the opposite side of the car. You will do this "dance" every time you go to get in the car. EVERY TIME.
Once inside, you will start to wonder about the last time your husband drove a stick shift with his left hand. You will be certain that it wasn't this decade.
You realize that the GPS cannot find the place that you need to go. You don't want to use your US phone because it will cost extra money each day to use it. You decide to do the best you can with the information you have and start your trip.
You begin the three hour drive to your friend's house. You aren't on the road long before you realize that you will likely die in the Ford Fiesta. You realize that this road trip will cause more gray hairs to escape your tense brain. You comprehend that this road trip will be the culprit of much contention and fighting as you and your spouse equally hate each other's driving habits, compounded with new roads, new types of traffic, and a new cockpit in the car. Driving on the left hand side of the road is not that hard to adjust to, it is the things that you naturally do when you come to a stop light that make it confusing.  You will want to make a right handed turn but suddenly it isn't protected. You will have to sit at the stop light and really think through what is about to happen. "I am making a right hand turn; I am in the left lane; I will have to watch for cars on both sides of the street because I have to cross all lanes to get to the left lane; I will also have to remember to change the clutch back to first gear so that I don't kill the car." You will feel those gray hairs start to poke through your skull because you are stuck in the passenger seat and can't control every step in the process. You will try to suppress the words that you are thinking but you just aren't that good of a wife. You will both exhaust each other with tension by the end of the day in this tiny party car.
You will also be grateful for the full insurance that you forked out. You will consider calling the Irish Hertz car rental guy to tell him thank you for insisting that you get it, but then you remember that you can't understand him very well and that you can't use your phone anyway.

ARRIVAL
You will make it to your friend's house 5 hours later with a few miracles tacked on to the trip. You start to realize that Ireland is beautiful and green and pastoral, but it is not America. You will want to stop for lunch but you only find one McDonald's on the side of the road next to a horse that is tied to the guardrail. It will be made known to you later that you cannot just stop anywhere and grab a bite to eat. There are many areas of the country that have no services and you will want to ensure that you have enough gas and food in case you end up in one of these areas for a bit of time. In fact, if you don't realize that you are almost out of gas and it is after 10:00 pm, you could be in a pickle, as many gas stations shut down at 10:00 pm. There may have been one night where you were certain that you were going to have to sleep in your Ford Fiesta until the gas station opened at 7:00 am the next morning. This is where your prayers become more fervent and answered in the eleventh hour - literally.

THINGS TO DO
You will see many things in Ireland... sheep, green fields, more sheep. You also will see some castles, kiss the Blarney Stone (maybe), and take your kids to a pub. There will be few places to park so most of your pictures are from your car as you whiz by.

 Irish Pub. My kids were not a fan of the food.

You might notice that the road signs list the location that is farthest away from you at the top.
You will go eat dinner in a castle and visit with a "cheeky" Irish woman named Helen. She and your husband will be very chatty while you sit across the table trying to understand the English that she is speaking. This is confusing to you because you don't usually have a problem understanding accents and yet you can't comprehend when she uses words like "cutlery" instead of "silverware" in her heavy dialect. Also, everyone will want to ask you about Trump. But then they will stop you before you can say anything and give an excuse for why you don't need to answer them.

 Bunratty Castle

                                                              Dinner in the Bunratty castle.

 Jeremy's cheeky friend Helen, with her friend.

You will want to try yule log. You will like yule log and eat more of it than you need because you are on vacation in a foreign country. 

You will want to try Christmas pudding, black pudding, and white pudding. None of these are particularly good nor are they an actual pudding.

You will get to the Blarney Castle in hopes of kissing the Blarney Stone, which up until this point you thought was something like a green emerald or some type of gem. Instead you will learn that it is a piece of rock that looks like every other piece of rock used to build this castle. You will make it to the top of the castle and kiss the Blarney Stone hoping for more eloquence in your speaking but then think about the ridiculousness of this superstitious act, especially when you have to risk your life to do it. You notice that since you have done this act, your ability to speak has actually diminished and you hope and pray that it is the jet lag from too much traveling.

In order to kiss the stone, you have to bend backwards over the wall, hold on to the metal braces and reach as far as you can upside down to kiss a rock. There are actually 2 guys who sit up there all day to assist people coming to kiss the rock. In America, this would probably be a government job.

 Blarney Castle

 Blarney Castle

Downtown Cork, Ireland has cool architecture.

Intermission from this lengthy instruction manual. I have never been into a unisex bathroom before, as far as I can recall. I have been in a unisex bathroom where there is only one stall and you lock the door, but never one where you walk into the same bathroom followed by your husband, or any other man needing to use it. This was a weird experience. We don't even follow each other into the bathroom at home. When I came out of the stall and saw my husband, I thought, "What are you doing in here?"... Oh, right.

 These are the Cliffs of Insanity, from the Princess Bride. They are locally known as the Cliffs Of Moher. (Pronounced like the American word 'more')

 See, I was there.

While in Ireland you will attend a child's Christmas Program. This will be the first of its kind for you because although the kids are dressed in their Christmas sweaters, they are preforming a gymnastics routine to 80's music. There is nothing that says "Christmas" more than songs by Queen or Michael Jackson's "Beat it." 

(They did sing some Christmas songs at the end.)

 You will want to go to the Guinness factory so that you can refuse any alcohol that they offer you and everyone wonders why you are there, but it is closed for the day.

 There are many Irish Crosses around. We went on a walk around the back country roads sporting our "mandatory" neon safety vests. (That is a joke. My friend insisted that we wear them in order to go on the walk. One neighbor commented on how we couldn't be missed.)

 You should look for Fairy Doors while on walks. They are hidden in the trees. You can also order them online. http://www.theirishfairydoorcompany.com/

They are super cute.

You will also get to see glass blown at the Waterford Crystal Factory. It will be the last tour of the year. Your husband will break a piece of glass there. Luckily, it was one that was already broken.

And lastly, you will return your party car, thank it for the memories, and head to the airport. You will get a double screening at the airport when you leave a Snack Pack of butterscotch pudding in your backpack and the over-tired security agent will be thrilled that you have ventured out today. 

You will board your plane where you will have individual TV time where you can watch movies or play games for the entire 8 hours on the flight. And you will, because you paid for this. Besides, if you sleep then you might miss the food they bring you every 2 hours, which you have also paid for. This might be the only time you wish for delay in traveling. When you arrive back in America, your brain will hurt but you can head to a fast food restaurant where you can drown yourself in a large soda and hamburger the size of your face. Unfortunately, they don't take the Euro's that you forgot to spend so now you are stuck with money you can't use - at least not until you head to Rome in March.

Ireland was peaceful, beautifully green, and surprisingly warm, but I love America. 

Happy Christmas!

Emoji's

I feel like emoji's have a lot of power. They can take a statement from being rude to being passive aggressive just by adding a smilie face at the end. ie. "You have done so well for someone with your education level. :)" The person reading isn't sure whether to smile or cry. Or maybe you can use them because you just don't have words to say, like using a thumbs up. This could be because you want to be done with the conversation but are still in a friendly mood. There is power in an emoji. However, I feel like there aren't enough emojis. Here are some experiences I have had this week that need emojis that just don't seem to be available.

First off, my weight has slowly been creeping up on me. I blame my tomb (the hotel room that I live in) but it also could be our new lifestyle. Either way, I am just keeping an eye on it and getting more and more annoyed so I considered taking up smoking. Really, chain smokers are like the skinniest people; but then I thought about how antisocial that "sport" is so I decided to approach my friend who is a nutritionist. Her assignment to me (among other things)  was to pay attention to my body and ignore natural meal times. She said, "Try eating when you feel hungry."
Now I have a new "sport" which involves constantly asking myself if I am hungry yet. I think the emoji that would fit this is like a person looking at their belly in kind of a shrug pose. "You hungry yet?" I need a red and green light. Maybe even a yellow to indicate if I am really hungry. It feels like a Seinfeld episode, "You hungry yet?" "I don't know. Do you know, Elaine?"

The next thing that happened was one of "those" days. I needed multiple emojis on that day. My sister was visiting me and I wanted to take her to Hot Yoga. However, hot yoga is 30 minutes away and I had a kid to get to dance, the weather was bad, and it just didn't happen. Instead, we dropped the kid off to the friend who carpools with us and I took my sister to the mall (which is really close to the dance place. I should have just dropped them off.) We got pedis and looked at puppies and I texted my husband to ask him to start dinner because we were starving. (It was taco night. I love taco night.) We got done a earlier than I expected from pedis so we had to go wait to pick up the girls from dance. We go sit inside the dance place for 30 minutes. During that time, my husband asks basically, "where are the tomatoes and lettuce?" In fact, here is the conversation:

The emoji that would go to this conversation would be called, "incredulous." It would look like a tired and flabbergasted wife with her eyes wide open and speechless.

So since we suddenly don't have the lettuce that I was counting on, I text my neighbors to ask if they have lettuce and tomatoes. I got some tomatoes but no lettuce. I text some other neighbors. There is a lettuce famine in my neighborhood.

I resign myself to having to pick up lettuce at the ghetto Kroger on the way home and hope the roads aren't icy.

Ironically, while my sister and I sit in the dance studio wishing we could go home, my carpool mom friend is sitting outside in the parking lot waiting to pick up the same kids I am. When it finally got over, we walked outside and see her. That would be the "what are you doing here?" emoji. It would look like a game of telephone where there was no connection.

I stop at ghetto Kroger, spend $7 and head home. When I arrive, dinner is on the table and you know what else is on the table? That freaking head of lettuce that he said he threw away.

The emoji that would have prevented this situation is the "sarcastic" emoji. I don't know why that one hasn't been invented yet. It would look like a backward smilie face so you couldn't tell anyway because that takes the fun out of being sarcastic. But seriously. I could not even believe that there was that lettuce on the table. The emoji I was feeling was "exasperation". It would look something like, "I want to hit you with this plate of lettuce, you fool.  Do you know what I have been through to get you this dumb lettuce?" That is exactly what it would look like.
Even more irritating was the fact that I actually needed more lettuce for the next day's meal so I had to go to the grocery store again for another $7 worth of lettuce. (And I had been to Meijer that very morning to get milk!) In less than 24 hours, I had been to 3 different grocery stores and spent about $7 at each of them. This emoji would look "wasted" as in someone ripping up dollar bills because of the wasted time, gas, and energy from not planning well. Ugh! I hate days like that.

So let's move on to the Elf on the Shelf problems. I know that my daughter "knows" about Christmas but I am still not sure about my 10 year old son. I don't really have a problem moving the elf on the shelf even if they both "know". What I am not sure about is if I have to jump out of bed in the middle of the night to move her because the 10 year old doesn't "know". The emoji for this is called "check" (like in chess) and involves a stare down between 2 people, neither one can say what they are really thinking without giving too much away. So my sister was going to ask the 10 year old if he was excited for Santa to come but he offered this up instead, "I'm so glad that I have a summer birthday so that I can get summer presents and Santa can bring me winter presents."
Well played, kid. Well played.

But this is not good for us. First of all, we are going to Ireland for Christmas so we told the kids they would be getting no gifts. However, now I have to have Santa gifts. He is already confused because he left this note for our Elf:

It says: "We are going to ireland for christmas will you come? Answer yes or no"

For some reason my husband circled yes but then said, "Santa says I have to stay here."

The 10 year old asks me, "Well, what does that mean?"

Well buddy, it means your dad can't read.

So I guess we might be taking Rosie, our elf, to Ireland. This is the "you shouldn't lie to your children" emoji. It looks like a woman doing something she hates because she started a lie and can't stop now. I feel like it might be time to tell him but I will wait until summer. Everything seems less devastating in the summer.

The other Elf problem involves my feisty 12 year old. One day Rosie the elf did not move from the previous day's location. My daughter is very much related to my mother who is a full blooded Italian woman and has ties to the Mafia. (Seriously, you should see my Uncle Frankie.) This 12 year old corners me in the laundry room and essentially threatens me - "You need to move Rosie." 

I look at her innocently and say, "She must have liked where she was yesterday and wanted to stay there."

She gets a little more upset about it and I am thinking that I should have pulled out the "Move her yourself" emoji. But despite the fact that she "knows", she still respects the fact that she can't touch her. It is so bizarre.

She stood there staring me down and I finally said, "I'm not moving her until tomorrow." So the next day both kids woke up to find Rosie holding the TV remote and sitting on their tablets. Their faces - first laughter and then the realization hits that they can't play with them because no one can touch the elf. Pull out maniacally laughing emoji.

Now I am curious, What emojis do you need in your life?