Summer Recap

As you'll remember from my first (slightly over excited) post, this summer was meant to be one to remember. As my official last summer as a student I was determined to use every single day to the max so here's a quick recap of what I did!

June: 4 weeks of work placement, a sneaky weekend away to London to visit friends. I did loads of shopping, met Jude Law twice, not to mention Jerry Springer, got to go to the West End, partied, overall great time! Also managed to fit in Dublin Pride with the ever straight Tomato. He thoroughly enjoyed being followed around by a 5'2 Brazilian guy called Santos for the entire evening. Hilarious.

July: Flew off to Zambia in the most long, convoluted, environmentally disastrous fashion with C to meet 40 other classmates. Travelled to Botswana (safari...OMG), Tanzania (Zanzibar was only amazing!) and ended up in Kenya as well by the end. It was here that my flights were delayed by a psychotic woman who insisted a baby had stolen her seat and had to be removed by security. The entire plane clapped as she waved us goodbye whilst being carried away.

August: Helped out in arranging a meeting with MarriagEquality in Cork, also decided to set up a gay civil rights network with some friends! Wooo!! It's all incredibly exciting! Had 3 days in Budapest with N and met loads of random strangers in a hostel who we decided to go camping with at Sziget! 7 days of glorious music, partying, dancing, socialising....ahhh I long for you again Sziget!

August 24th: I started back in college. How revolting.

OK so all in all, a pretty successful final summer. I didn't manage to fit in Berlin like I had hoped BUT I did make friends with a guy from Berlin at Sziget and I've been invited over in January. That's a pretty good compromise! I can only hope my final year will go half as well as this summer did. And so...... I'm off to study! Here's a picture of me on my last day in Nungwe, Zanzibar witha close friend.

Ciao for now!
Piney

Marley Park

Hey guys and gals,

To tell the truth, I'm still recovering after this weekend. Saturday night was spent handing out flyers (it went great and I met loads of cool new people!) and Sunday was spent in Marley Park, Dublin for a concert. Here's a very brief overview of my thoughts on the four main acts!

Calvin Harris
I really thought he was probably one of the highlights of the day. Unfortunately I didn't get to see him at Oxegen this year (I think the crowd is just too young there for me, plus I was in Zambia anyway!) so I'm delighted I got the chance to see him perform this summer. He really got the crowd going and his music is obviously amazing! It really makes me wonder what stuff him and Roisin Murphy got up to when they were collaborating together/friendly. Guess we'll never know now that they're frenemies a la LC/Speidi :-(

Dizzie Rascal
I thought he was great as well, played all the classics and plenty of music I wasn't familiar with, I wouldn't be his biggest fan after all. I'll definitely be looking to buy some more of his CDs! "Bonkers" went down a HUGE hit, the atmosphere was actually pretty amazing during this song, everyone was so absorbed in the rhythm of the music, great stuff!!

David Guetta
Good fun, played all the usuals, I did however get distracted during a bit of his performance as my friend fell and hit her jaw on my wellies! Twas quite amusing except for the fact that she really was in quite a lot of pain so we took a break on the grass for a while.

Fatboy Slim
Honestly, this guy was the grand finale and to tell the truth, I was a tad disappointed. Strobe lighting will only get you so far Fatboy as playing the SAME disco tunes over and over will not cut it unless you're on E. To be fair, there was a group of guys next to us (who we presumed were high on drugs) and they looked like they were loving it. I was, on the other hand, disappointingly sober at this stage and I have no intention of going near drugs EVER! (I'll have to fill you in about my fear of marijuana and schizophrenia at a later date!)

Overall Vibe
This is a really important aspect to any concert so it's important to know that the crowd going were a little bit...rougher than the usual festival goers. From the outside, it looked tres dodgy as there were so many underagers completely ossified but it wasn't as bad inside. I'm not sure if they fully appreciated our alternative attitudes at times (details will not follow!) but we had a great time nonetheless. A good time was had by all.

Random Highlights
1. Meeting 2 lovely girls randomly whom I will hopefully see again at Electric Picnic in a few weeks!
2. Meetin M & C (friends from school/college) and them painting all over us with luminous pink lipstick. My arm read We can make sandwiches" for the entire evening, who knew lipstick was so hard to get off though, I used multiple baby wipes and they barely did a thing!!
3. Getting caught by a Garda drinking by the car. We immediately threw all of our bottles into the boot but he saw S and demanded she show him her bottle. She told him she wasn't drinking at all and that she had thrown an empty one in from earlier. Either way she began rooting through the boot and SOMEHOW found an empty bottle for him! He wasn't too convinced, gave the boot a quick search (and miraculously missed out on the 10 or so bottles we had in there!) but left us to our own devices with a warning. The Festival Gods were looking over us that day.

PS Tomato thought Joaquim Phoenix's name began with a "W" = "Wackeem." That one really cracked me up!

The fruits of unemployment

Personally I found the hairdryer and umbrella parts pretty ingenious but you can never tell what's real online. Then again, it's a bit like Santa, sometimes ignorance is just bliss!

I also thought WALLABOO123 really hit the nail on the head when he/she said on youtube "I can tell you dont have a job! "



Now that the summer has officially started, I'm getting loads of invites to parties/gatherings/lunch etc and unfortunately I keep on having to delete all my texts (I can only hold 200 at a time!) Whilst I was flicking through some of them there I found this priceless one from a friend the morning of an exam. We were planning a pretty big (and cheap, c'mon we're students!) night out on the town so she decided to predict the mess we'd get ourselves into. It started off with a casual "Some Petrone would set me up nicely for the day" but escalated into her narrating out the entire night!

Text
Scene - Sitting at a bar in the Long Island
Piney: Two empty glasses please?
A: Oh no not empty, some ice please too
Piney: Pass me the hip flask please?
A: No problem, here you go
Piney: Ah drinking in bars is great
A: Yeah I love it too
Both : Yum yum, strong booze
Bar staff and general public: Eh get out now!

I swear it didn't end up that way at all. No one saw a thing.