Travelogue

During my travels, I usually collect three or four personal accounts which I then recount in emails to friends. And since they find them very entertaining, I reckoned you might too. A travelogue is born.

From: Ilse

To: Harold F.

Date: 21 October 2007

Subject:"Off with her Head!"

What happened last night was so hilarious, I just have to share. So before I leave for Rosslare, here it comes. I told you earlier I never spotted any leprechauns, but I did encounter a giantess tonight, who kept falling and picking the wrong door. Come to think of it, it was like a scene of Alice in Wonderland.

To appreciate the story, you need to know the setting. I arrived back at the Neptunes hostel in Killarney yesterday late in the afternoon. It had been on a long drive down from Lisdoonvarna and I was met with yet another school group at the hostel. This one was well behaved, nothing like the dutch earlier. The boys looked a bit odd with their retro Beatle-esque haircuts, the girls had an interesting choice of dress. They all had the eeriest pallor. I checked into a six bed dorm, at that point occupied by girls of four different nationalities. They would be chattering mainly about girly things from the moment I first entered the room until the moment I fell asleep.

I walked down to the kitchen to prepare, enjoy my dinner and watch the kitchen be set on fire, as some novice queen of the kitchen mistook the knob on the gas pipe for the stove knob. Luckily a clever young lad quickly grabbed the fire extinguisher and thus saved our day. As night fell, the hostel quieted down. Our international dorm audience was fast asleep, when serenity was violently disturbed by someone barging into the room. It took me a couple of half-dazed minutes to figure out what was happening. This was our heavyweight american roommate, who earlier that evening had proclaimed she was a practiced consumer of intoxicants.

Once in the room, she stood still for a long time. As later turned out in a sloshed attempt to send a text message. When that didn’t work out, she started to undress. This involved much hopping around on one foot, bumping into bunk beds and crashing to the floor. Minutes passed until finally she climbed into her top bunk bed. It swayed under her weight.

Time passed and peace settled in once again. Until a couple of hours later our giantess felt a need and climbed, no fell, out of her bed to answer to it. While half asleep I was astonished a trained drinker, of her size, after hours, could still be so three sheets to the wind. In the dark I watched her get off the floor, stagger to the door and go in. What she didn’t realize, was that in fact she had gone out the dorm. Without a key card, it was impossible to get back in. She started desperately pounding at the door. I considered leaving her outside for a while to sober up, but finally my tenderheartedness won.

After that, there was a last episode of by now the whole dorm being awake and worrying that our giantess had lapsed into an intoxicated coma on the bathroom floor. The hostility with which she answered our probing questions (her body jammed the door) reassured us in leaving the giantess be. Mental note for future reference: when in Ireland, don’t waste your time searching for leprechauns, where drunken giants are in liberal supply.

Ilse