Hey readers –

A Yank in Dublin City is on hiatus indefinitely, and here’s why.

The blog I co-author, Literary Transgressions, is participating in NaBloPoMo this month. This will take up most of my blogging time, and as all of my Ireland stories are pretty much old news anyway, I think it’s time to just drop this blog and concentrate on LT and my thesis.

Again, thank you all for reading! I really appreciated all your comments, and I hope you will go check out LT!

Cheers,

KT

As for what will happen to this blog, I’m not sure yet. I may just let it rust, might let it turn into an ordinary slice-of-life blog, who knows? I’ll let you know when I decide, which should be after the last few posts. Thanks for sticking with me for this long, anyway, and please visit my other blog, Literary Transgressions.

Cheers,

KT

Wet. That was the first word that lept to mind when I peeked out of the Howth DART station and out into what was the furthest I’d been outside Dublin in months. Though it was only drizzling for the moment, the sky seemed about ready to open up at any moment.

Corey and I had left Dublin in very different moods that morning – her excited about this magical place called Howth, with all of its ruins and hills and trees and happiness, and me craving some sort of caffeine. Once the train started moving, I had some coffee and we started seeing the ocean out the windows, however, I cheered up considerably. By the time we got to Howth proper, I was definitely looking forward to traipsing around some castle grounds.

Howth Castle was, in fact, the reason we decided to come to Howth in the first place – due to Dublin’s disappointing lack of any really satisfying ruins, Corey had specially requested we find somewhere with crumbling stones, a structurally compromised old building of some sort, preferably a castle, and maybe some ivy.

St. Mary's...I guess?

The first building we arrived at was a church that, disappointingly, was perfectly structurally sound, but absolutely beautiful, hence why I have about 50 pictures of the door frame on my camera. It’s quite a small church, but impressive nevertheless, and with plenty of ivy and a delightful garden along the side.

Howth Castle in the rain

The castle is a short walk beyond the church. Though wasn’t open to the public (it never is – it’s actually still the residence of the Earl of Howth and the Gaisford St. Lawrence family as well as a cooking school), the grounds are wander-able, and there are enough opportunities to stare at almost-crumbling walls to make any history buff happy. Also, the pirate queen Grainne Ni Mhaille (Grace O’Malley) visited here and reportedly kidnapped the 8th Baron of Howth’s oldest son in revenge for a slight.

We did leave the castle and explore the grounds a little bit, including the golf course nearby. Sadly, about this time, the clouds opened and rain came pouring down. We put up our umbrellas and agreed, teeth chattering, that maybe a trip to the pub by the train station for some soup and tea was in order.

The friendliest cat in the entire world

The pub was called The Bloody Stream, and was only one of the creatively-named pubs we would see that day (the other, on the other side of the peninsula, was called The Cock Tavern). Clearly full of tourists, but then again, we were tourists, so we both sucked it up and ordered what turned out to be some very suspicious-looking seafood chowder. By the time we finished and said goodbye to the world’s friendliest cat on the way out, the rain had stopped and we decided to try and find the Abbey ruins.

Yay for ruins!

St. Mary’s Church, also known as Howth Abbey, was first founded in 1042. Apparently the earliest church on this site was built around the same time as Christ Church and by the same king, but St. Mary’s, the church presently semi-standing on the grounds, was built in the 1300s and modified heavily over the next 200 years.

Like the best abbeys (and by best, I mean best for exploring), it’s surrounded by a graveyard with mismatched stones and monuments all scattered around the very bumpy hillside. Definitely an excellent place to poke around – if you want to go inside the abbey, though, you have to contact the caretaker who lives across the street for the key.

This one's Corey's...

We took a short walk around the beautifully sunny harbour, which is definitely worth doing—unless the wind is as bad as it was for us. We didn’t last long up on the pier walk, but it was beautiful nonetheless and there was much talk about Howth being magic (just like their slogan – visit www.howthismagic.com for proof).

Corey and I also climbed the MASSIVE HILL at the top of which is the Vintage Radio Museum known as Ye Olde Hurdy-Gurdy. Though we didn’t feel like paying the steep admissions fee, it was worth the climb just for the view of the harbour and the abbey from above.

Then, since the sun was out again, we decided to head back to the castle and see if we could get some better pictures of the castle. We did, thankfully, and then went exploring the grounds again.

After staggering around the golf course for far too long and taking pictures of cows (not strictly necessary, but as a city girl I get distinctly excited whenever I see real live farm animals), we finally stumbled on the wild Howth Castle rhododendron gardens.

Corey's again! See what I MEAN?

These really were magical, and the pictures are not doing them justice but at all – you really have to be there in real life to get how gorgeous this place is. It’s exactly the type of place I would set A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with flower petals literally carpeting the ground in shady little areas that could easily be some sort of fairy bower. And the garden wasn’t even in full bloom, as it was only April – I can’t imagine how amazing this place would be right around now.

After the gardens, we decided to forage for some fish and chips – a decent idea, considering we were at the seaside. Due to the lack of signage anywhere, we ended up spending a lot of time wandering the streets and crying plaintively, “We need fish in a box!” before finally stumbling on Beshoff Bros, a chain fish place that happily obliged our wishes.

A short train ride and we were home again, still damp from the morning showers but refreshed by the day as a whole. Though we mocked Howth out mercilessly for their silly slogan, I have to admit, there really is something special about Howth.

St Patrick's! All photos courtesy of Corey.

It’s probably odd that after almost a year in a hugely Catholic country, I had not stepped foot in a Dublin church until Corey (who is, ironically, half-Jewish) came to visit. Considering that the Irish are not keen on Protestants in general (especially Protestants attending Mass), and that Dubliners are not that likely to practice their Catholicism anyway, it’s understandable, certainly, that I hadn’t entered a cathedral at all, but it’s still strange.

And it’s a shame, too, because as we found out, Dublin has some pretty amazing churches.

The most famous, of course, is St. Patrick’s Cathedral. After a leisurely brunch at Lemon and a long catch-up, Corey and I made the trek over to Patrick Street with the idea of starting our church tour with the best.

St. Patrick’s is the national cathedral, and is unusual because it’s a cathedral that is not the seat of an archbishop, but instead has a Dean that presides over it. Like everything in Ireland, it’s insanely old, built around 1190 near the site of a holy well where St Patrick is said to have baptized the first Irish Christians.

There are several very cool things about St. Patrick’s:

1)      Jonathan Swift and his muse Stella are buried there. Jonathan Swift is most famous for Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, but he was also Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. He was an amazingly prolific writer, and considered A Description of a City Shower one of the best things he had ever written…incidentally, even though it’s about London, parts of it are a pretty accurate depiction of a Dublin rain as well (except the drowned puppies part).

The heraldic banners.

2)      It used to be the chapel of the Most Illustrious Order of St. Patrick (i.e., the Knights of St Patrick).  Though the last remaining knight died in 1974 and no new ones have been created since 1936, it’s still cool that there are actually knights who are associated with this place. Though they moved the chapel, the heraldic banners of the members of the Order as of 1871 are still hanging over the choir stalls where they used to sit for services.

3)      There are many items of historical interest, including a few ancient Celtic crosses and a giant door that (legend has it) the Earl of Kildare hacked a hole through in 1492 in order to offer the arm of peace to the Earl of Ormond in an attempt at a truce.

Though all of this was amazing and very interesting, we still had Christ Church to get to. After a couple of pictures and a stop at the gift shop for little St. Patrick’s medals (which may or may not protect us from snakes), we pressed on.

Part of the crypt at Christ Church

If you can believe it, Christ Church (or The Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, if you prefer its official name), is even older than St. Patrick’s. It was built in 1038 at the end of Dame Street by a Viking King of Dublin named Sitric Silkenbeard. It’s seen the Anglo-Norman invasion, and is so old that it was actually rebuilt in 1171, and restored and expanded regularly since then. It also holds the tomb of a man named Strongbow, a Norman-Welsh warlord who, by all accounts, was pretty nifty (though quite short, judging from the size of the effigy).

The Victorians attempted to renovate and restore the building, and managed to preserve the church just fine; while it’s gorgeous, though, the problem this has caused for historians is that they are sometimes unsure of which parts of the cathedral are genuinely medieval and which are Victorian. However, there is still plenty of history preserved within the crypt under the nave, which is filled with silver altar settings, old statues, and tombs, and is delightfully creepy. The famous skeletons of the cat and rat that were found trapped and naturally mummifed behind the organ only add to the effect.

The last church on our list was probably the least tourist-inhabited than all of them: the Whitefriar Street Carmelite Church. This is quite possibly the most Catholic church I have ever been to, with at least 20 shrines along the walls, all with candles lit in front of them. Needless to say, I was a bit awkward regarding protocol — should I genuflect out of respect when crossing the altar, even if I would undoubtedly do it wrong? Should I at least cross myself? Is it blasphemy for a Lutheran to cross herself while in a Catholic Church? Is it blasphemy for a Lutheran to even enter a Catholic church of this ilk? Was I about to be struck down by a lightening bolt of righteous anger, courtesy of the intercession of the saint who I didn’t light a candle in front of?

With all of this overwhelming Catholicism, it would be understandable to wonder why we went at all. Actually, though the church is out of the way and not well-known (we got so lost trying to find it), it also houses one of the coolest relics I’ve seen: the remains of St. Valentine.

I think you can guess what this is!

Apparently there were three St. Valentines, and I cannot find anywhere that specifies which one is resting in Dublin. I do know, though, that the remains were given as a gift to the church from the Holy See in the 19th century, and that there’s a beautiful shrine to St. Valentine to the right of the nave, where his remains rest in a little box under what might be an altar and what is definitely a kind of creepy statue of the saint himself. There’s also a book where you can place a written request for St. Valentine’s intercession on your behalf.

A quick visit to the life-sized Our Lady of Dublin ended our tour of Dublin’s churches — after all, we only had four days, and three churches in that time was plenty! Though if you’re going to be in Dublin longer and you feel the need, there are a few more churches you could visit: St. Anne’s on Dawson, St. Andrew’s on Westland Row (I pass this every day on my way to Centra and have not yet been inside) and the chapel at Trinity College (only open sometimes, sadly).

Next: Our trip to Howth, with starts with a depression-inducing caffeine withdrawl and ends with fish in a box. Whoo!

Wednesday:

• Corey arrives! Bright and early at 10 a.m.
• Brunch at Lemon
• Christ Church Cathedral
• St Patrick’s Cathedral
• Quick walk through Trinity
• Dinner, more planning, and much viewing of The Road to El Dorado

Thursday:

• Trudge through rain to Avoca for breakfast
• National Museum of Archaeology
• Our Lady of Mount Carmel
• Powerscourt Centre and possibly other shopping
• Chapters
• Ginger Man!

Friday:

• Corey heads to Dublin Castle in the rain while I try to track down my essays
• Trinity College Secondhand Book Sale!

Saturday:

• HOWTH! Which featured castles, churches, flowers, and fish in a box. Awesome.
• St. Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square

Corey, let me know if I am forgetting anything!

In other news, I must share this picture with you all in the interest of updating you on my life and solving an earlier riddle:

Remember the sea salt and painkillers?

That’s not even worth its own post, really. Suffice to say that yes, that is my ear, that’s a real bar in it,the place was clean and professional, I wasn’t drunk,  etc. It only took ten minutes, it’s a week old today, and there was no crunching or popping like some people say they have when they get this piercing. It DID hurt like a…well, you know…but it feels much better now and I’m really happy with it! Shout out to Body Shock in Temple Bar

Grafton Street on St Patrick's Day

I can’t tell you how many times I heard this in Buffalo: “Everyone’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day.” This was the excuse countless people of Polish, German, and undetermined descent used to justify wasting a day downtown at the parade (where it would always rain), dumping Bailey’s in travel mugs full of coffee, and drinking beer that was roughly the color of the faces of the people who had started drinking much too early.

That saying does have some truth to it, though, even in Dublin — so long as you define “Irish” as “person wearing a funny green hat and drinking.” The city was positively overrun with tourists all week, all of whom could be convinced to wear stupid hats shaped like pints of Guinness and cough up the eight euro ($11) to see the Book of Kells.

All of the tourists got me thinking: if wearing a Guinness hat doesn’t make you Irish, then what does? What makes the ‘Irish’ of Boston different from the Ireland Irish? The answer is not terribly simple, but here are some guidelines to help you distinguish the Irish from the Iwish:

1) Wrapping themselves in the flag (literally). Section 8d of the American Flag Code states that “the flag should never be used as wearing apparel.” While images of the flag on shirts abound in the States, most Americans (especially in the midwest) would never wear the American flag as a cape, as the Irish have a tendency to do on occasions such as St Patrick’s Day or the homecoming of the Irish Rugby Team (WHOO GRAND SLAM CHAMPS!).

2) Speaking Irish in bars. Sometimes, when you’re out at a bar, you wish you spoke another language so you could communicate to your friend that you need saving from the 50-year-old part-time poet/plumber who is breathing down your neck. In America, and most other countries, this is a pipe dream unless you somehow have retained your high school French. But most of the Irish, especially in the West, have been learning Irish (also known as Irish Gaelic, to distinguish it from Scots Gaelic) since first grade or so. While this doesn’t mean they are fluent, it does mean that they are adept at hurling Irish insults at unsuspecting passersby, communicating how hot that guy over there is without alerting the whole bar, and letting each other know they need rescued with very little fuss.

3) Step dancing. This follows right on the heels of number two, but it must also be noted that I’ve only ever seen this done in Galway. Generally, in an American club, the dance floor looks like a high school semi-formal: girls bopping along in the center, in a circle around their shoes and their purses, and the guys are either nodding their heads along with the beat on the outskirts or flailing wildly and trying to separate a girl from the herd, depending on degree of drunkenness. These are the only options. But in Ireland, at last in Galway, apparently step dancing is also an option for the particularly rhythm-inspired young men. Generally this breaks out around roughly midnight, and if you’re in the bar that I tended to frequent, the dancer will be hoisted to the rafters and left to swing shortly thereafter, leaving the girls shrieking and running out of the way. Bonus points if the step dancing/rafter-swinging is done to a Saw Doctors song.

4) Eating weird sandwiches. I used to think that sandwich choices were standard the world-round. Not so. While egg salad is offered pretty much everywhere, and the tuna is pretty normal despite the sweet corn in it, there are a few weird choices that threw me for a loop the first time I saw them. In addition to the chicken and stuffing, in general sandwich places offer prawn mayonnaise, which is sort of like shrimp salad, something with smoked salmon, and the ubiquitous cheese plowman, which involves cheddar, lettuce, tomato and plowman’s pickle, which is sort of like pickle relish only with apples and turnips instead of cucumber, and it’s brown, not green. Much like Vegemite is a litmus test for Aussies, the plowman’s pickle (also known as Branston pickle) can separate the Irish from the wannabes.

5) Ditto on the chip flavors. Chip, or crisp, flavors include prawn cocktail, turkey and stuffing, and steak and ale pie (I kid you not). Actually, Walker’s (the Irish/UK Lay’s) is running a contest right now for their new chip flavor, the contenders being Builder’s Breakfast (eggs, toast, ketchup), Crispy Duck and Hoisin, Cajun Squirrel, Fish and Chips, Chili and Chocolate, and Onion Bhaji. If you see someone eating prawn cocktail chips without finding it strange, there is no way they are American.

6) Taking rain in stride. It rains here. Big whoop. Often, if it’s just drizzling, no one will bother putting up an umbrella. After all, it’s just rain. You’re not going to melt. However, this is easy for the Irish to say, as they have mastered the art of the ‘duck and cover.’ When we were living in Galway, my housemate Rachel and I could not figure out for anything how the Irish students could show up at class completely dry after a torrential downpour that had left us looking like we had fallen in the bay. The answer, it turns out, is that they all dash for the nearest shelter and wait out the worst of it — after all, rain that hard can’t last all that long.

7) Knowing that Northern Ireland is part of the U.K. Admittedly, it’s all the same island, but Northern Ireland uses the pound, they have a whole other dialect called ‘Ulster Scots’ and the Queen is their monarch. IT’S A DIFFERENT COUNTRY. BELFAST IS NOT IN THE REPUBLIC. The Irish would never, ever make this mistake, as the history behind this split is fairly recent and still very sensitive.

8 ) Making fun of other provinces’ accents. If you can tell the difference between a Caaark accent and a Dooblin accent, then more power to you. The Irish love to make fun of other accents, especially poor Cork, while most Americans can’t even tell the difference. Admittedly, I can’t tell where someone is from from their accent — I can only tell that the Galway accent is different (and much nicer, by the way) than the Dublin one, but even still it takes me a while to even tell that, and that’s after almost a cumulative year of study. Ruth’s Letrim accent still sounds very much like Tina’s Dublin one to me, but Ruth could pick out another person from Letrim instantly.

9) Hating London. Admittedly, Amy (who is Scottish) hates London too, but every Irish person I have asked has said not to go. They insist that Londoners are arrogant, that the place is filthy, and that the city has no redeeming factors. Though London is kind of dirty and the English do have a reputation for a teensy bit of hubris, this attitude may have something to do with the British/Irish history. Still, it doesn’t stop many from going over to find jobs.

10) Eating black pudding. There’s blood in it. Enough said. Extra Irish points if this is part of a full Irish breakfast, including a broiled tomato and white pudding (which looks even worse than the black).

BONUS! Knowing how to pronounce ‘Dun Laoghaire.’

Not actually my Centra...but close enough.

I have an inordinate attachment to the convenience store down the street, Centra. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t shop at a convenience store, due to high prices and the fact that food from convenience stores is, well, usually like food from the dollar store…you just don’t trust it.

But when the nearest grocery store is a 15-minute walk and you’re out of milk and toilet paper, it makes sense to take the 10 total minutes, round-trip, and go to Centra. This is Dublin — food is expensive everywhere, so convenience store prices aren’t even terrible compared to Dunnes or Tesco.

Pretty soon, I began to rely on Centra’s convenience, and quickly began shopping there every day for something. And somewhere around the second spate of essays, I realized that the guys at Centra probably know way too much about my life, based on the things I buy.

Toilet paper and dish soap? It’s my turn to buy shared flat items. Four bottles of American-style pancake mix and a jar of Nutella? We’re hosting Pancake Tuesday. Pizza, shoved into a laptop bag? It’s essay time, and I am too stressed to cook. Wispa bar and a Coke on a Friday night? I don’t have a date, and am depressed about it. Friday night, but a bottle of water and a half pan of bread? Hangover prevention supplies — I’m headed out.

It’s nice, in a way, kind of like Cheers, only instead of my name, they know my favorite chocolate bar and Jillian’s brand of cigarettes. Like the baristas at the italian place know my coffee order, or the people at Lemon could probably bet on which crepe Jillian’s going to order. I’m pretty sure the cashiers at Marks and Spencer know Amy as ‘the water girl.’ It goes a long way toward making a strange city feel familiar, that’s for sure.

What did I buy at Centra today? Painkillers, sea salt, cotton swabs and antibacterial soap. I’ll let you speculate why in the comments

EDIT: Check that list of things I bought today again…

There’s no real news, except that there have been a few developments in my everyday experience here that I feel should be grouped together into one post. This is the stuff I have not been blogging about, because it was really too small to mention, but since it’s been over two weeks, I feel like I should write something:

1) My roommate is back. Ya know, the one who sings, talks to herself, drinks out of glass jars, and asks me why I say I’m sorry when I nearly knock her over in an attempt to get to the fridge. She’s a special person, this roommate, almost an archetype of that weirdo roommate I’m sure everyone has had from time to time…you know, the one with no grasp of social norms? Yeah. After a blissful two weeks of just having the three normal people together in one apartment, two weeks of a semi-clean kitchen, and two weeks without hearing her horrible door BANG every time she shut it, she’s back from the States, banging and singing away.

Also, she has a cold. I know this because she has hacked and wheezed constantly over the past two days without bothering to cover her mouth. This, along with her refusal to clean, is possibly her most annoying habit to date.

2) Essays are basically complete. This is a big deal, since I’ve been deep in the essay process since late February, and it’s hard to believe there might actually be a light at the end of this tunnel. Essay completion also marks the completion of my transformation into not just ‘that girl,’ but ‘That Girl Who Wrote Essays on a Comic Book and Fantasy Fiction,’ which cannot be altogether good. But the end of the essays means that maybe as of Friday, my life will no longer revolve around finding the last available power outlet in the library. Probably not, though, as my thesis comes next…

3) Thanks to number 2, I now know all there is to know about Watchmen or The Lord of the Rings (or at least know what secondary source to look in). Come on, ask me anything. I dare you.

4) I have solved the Wispa vs Aero debate. For those of you not familiar, Wispa is a type of ‘aerated chocolate bar’, which basically means it is chocolate with little air bubbles in it, and Aero is roughly the same. Why, you ask, would people put air into chocolate? I don’t know, really, but all I can tell you is that it is amazing. Well, the Wispa is. The Aero, not so much, as the holes are too big and you get the feeling they were just trying to cost-cut–though maybe the mint one is better. Regardless, the Wispa is my new favorite chocolate in the whole wide world — but then, it’s Cadbury as opposed to Aero’s Nestle, so there’s no surprise there. (Also, according to the Wikipedia page, Wispa’s latest ad tagline was, ‘Wispas are back. Apparently.’ How much more British can you get?)

5) I got my tickets for Trinity Ball yesterday — rather, I reserved them yesterday, and can pick them up the day of the dance, but regardless, I am definitely going to the largest private party in Europe on May 8th! The dress is picked out — this in the blue color — and though shoes are pending, I’m looking at these and these. Look forward to an exciting (though possibly more bacchanalian then normal) post around May 10th!

6) I will have a springtime post up for you soon, as well as maybe an Irish pride one. We’ll see. My friend and Literary Transgressions co-blogger Corey is coming up in April and we have big plans to hit many, many tourist spots and museums, so that will be excellent blog fodder as well!

And with that, I am off to enjoy this beautiful weather and the fact that my essays are printed in anticipation of their being handed in tomorrow!

When I left the States, loan checks in hand, the exchange rate was about $1.50 to 1 euro, meaning that a 17,000 euro education meant taking out $26,000 in loans, not including living expenses. The interest rates were high, and it was not a terribly good situation.

However, the exchange rate is now hovering a little under $1.29 to the euro. In essence, I have saved $4,000 just on tuition, my later loan checks are worth more, and once I get home, I can refinance and save some money with the current low interest rates.

Sometimes, a shitty economy can actually be a good thing Now, if I could only find a job, I’d be doing pretty well…

And that's about as clean as it's going to get.

Well.

I have just spent the last four hours in what can only be described as a domestic whirlwind. There was laundry, there was hospital corner-making, there was floor scrubbing, stove cleaning, counter wiping, and more. I even scrubbed the wine stains off the odd shelf near our table. Such is the extent of my dedication to a clean kitchen.

Why would I do all of this? Because I live in mortal fear of the housing inspection ladies.

Like in any dorm, living at Trinity means putting up with rules and regulations that simply don’t exist in a normal apartment. At my previous institution in Buffalo, this meant being kicked out of your room the night after classes ended before every break, including long weekends. It also meant ‘community builders’ with people in your building whom you never wanted to see, especially not while being forced to make a picture frame out of dried macaroni and construction paper.

At Trinity, it means putting up with the Housing Nazis.

These ladies come bursting through the apartments twice a term, using their keys to get in the flat and then banging on bedroom doors in such a manner that suggests they are about to bust you for some sort of illegal activity. When they knocked last week, I was fresh from the shower, still enrobed, with clothes and towels strewn all over my room, leisurely combing my hair when –

My door. It's very resonant when it comes to knocks.

BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM.

It’s hard to describe how much the sound of banging on a hollow metal door echoes in a very small bedroom, especially when you’re standing right next to it.

BAM BAM BAM BAM BAM.

I may or may not have screamed “HOLY CRAP, WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS GOING ON?” Down the hall, I could hear the same thing happening to Jillian, who yelled something even more obscene as the housing ladies worked their way down the hall. I dressed faster than I ever had in my life and flung my door open to see a very short, yet very stern, older lady in front of me, poised to pound on my door again.

“Sorry, I’m sorry, I uh –um–” I stammered as I backed up to let her in.

She grunted, then peered around me to look at the room — which, admittedly, was in a poor state for 11 in the morning. She gave a sniff, a brisk nod, and then left my room to inspect the kitchen, taking ten years of my life with her.

Actually, it kind of DOES look like the kind of kitchen where one would find illegal substances.

Too shell-shocked to follow, I listened from my doorway as the Housing Nazis opened and shut our fridge, thoroughly inspected our oven as if looking for illegal substances (as if we’d keep them them there when they clearly don’t check under the mattresses), and murmured to one another in ‘tsk, tsk’ tones.

Finally, with a final “SHAME ON YOU” sigh, the Housing Nazis swept out of the apartment, slamming the front door behind them. Jillian and I emerged, shaken, almost afraid to read the report that we were certain the ladies had left.

They had indeed written us up for 1) an unclean stove, 2) an unclean floor, and 3) not defrosting our fridge. Considering the fact that our other roommate had just done a thorough sweep a few days past when her parents came to visit, I felt this was a little unfair. Shock turned to rage as we realized that defrosting the fridge meant that our teeny little fridge, stocked full of things like milk and yogurt and other items you don’t want to leave outside a cold environment for too long, would be out of commission for several hours, if not several days (there was quite the layer of ice).

Still, we played along. We defrosted the fridge, carting all the perishables to the apartment across the hall and commandeering theirs. We chipped away at two inches of ice, pouring hot water over it for several hours, and stabbing it with a metal knife, despite the warning label that distinctly told us not to.

This is after 15 minutes with a scrubber, a gallon of cleanser, and some serious elbow grease.

Then I went on my whirlwind, Jillian took out our piles of trash and plastic bottles, we cleared the wine bottles off the side shelf, and basically made everything gorgeous. I swear to god, our kitchen has never, EVER been so clean. Granted, the tiles are still falling off the walls and the stovetop has the grime of a decade burnt into parts of it, but the whole place is about as clean as it can get.

If after all that, the Housing Nazis write us up again, I will not be a happy camper.