"Football" is "Soccer" in American.

It’s getting a little Irish around here. A guy in the kitchen at work just said to a lady, “How old are you then?” She said 34. “Ah. You’ve had a tough life, haven’t you?”

MAN! I would have cried. Who says that?! So I headed back to my desk and checked on the weather for the rest of the week. Surprise, surprise.

Yay.

Well, what are you gonna do?

Last night I went to a “football” (tee hee!) match with Fiona. Her boyfriend’s club, Malahide, was playing UCD, the Univ. College of Dublin, which is just up the road from us. The Irish add a certain je ne sais quoi to soccer. It’s a little bloodier, a little more vulgar, a little more bone-crunching. In the first half, a man had his back twisted so hard that when he fell, his legs twitched as he lay otherwise motionless, an obvious sign of nerve damage. Last year, a player almost lost his leg in a game—it came nearly off, and it’s currently held together with titanium pins and rods.

My favourite part of the match were the nicknames. All the players shouted at each other in what seemed to be a unified chorus. They all seemed to know who to shout to as one voice. The names were hilarious—Smitty, Boppo, Greek-o, Greener, Fiver…The best was when the goalkeep would catch the ball, just before he’d send it back out, the other team would try and distract him by shouting “dodgy keeper!”. LOL. Oh man, that would really throw me off my game…

Anyway, it was fun, and then we headed back and got stuck in a carwash with Fiona yelling at me “TAKE OFF THE ARIAL!” and me yelling back “WHAT THE HELL IS AN ARIAL?!”, and the Garda honking behind us because we…I dunno, weren’t traversing the car wash fast enough? Maybe they were cautioning us against an arial left standing. We got home and I went to Tesco’s and got garlic baguettes, which are the coolest thing. They’re a 12” French baguette with slices cut in it and garlic butter spread in the slices, and you bake the whole loaf then tear apart the pieces and eat them. It’s kind of like our freezer garlic bread. It hit the spot, and I ate it along with After Eight chocolate and a bottle of wine with Fiona while we watched Big Brother and I read HELLO! Magazine, which espoused the sluttiness of Victoria Beckham in a full 6-page spread.

So it was a GOOD NIGHT! Now please, I have to get back to the monsoon that is Ireland.