its a small world after all

so anna and i are staying in a hostel called "jacob's inn" in city center dublin and this is my opportunity to officially recommend it. i slept incredibly well last night (the guiness may have helped) and we made friends with the other girls in our bunk room incredibly fast. this is what i love about hostel culture--everyone is there with the intent of getting to know the person sleeping in the bunks next to them, and everyone is eager to make friends and have adventures. i was sort of worried before, having never done the hostel thing, but now i am totally all about it, which is good, cause its all i'll have for several weeks on the camino.

so these are our new friends: karen and susan, cousins originally from hawai'i who now live in oregon and new york respectively; and a pair of talkative, funny, "non-mormons" from utah named cynthia and misty ("i am not a porn star, despite my name"). we went out with them to a bar called temple bar last night. temple bar is such a big deal in dublin that they named an entire district of the city after it--and its actually that cool, a mix of tourist and locals, live music and heavy drinking, lots of weird rooms connecting to each other decorated in a thousand different ways, all in a old section of the city with cobblestone streets. the italians were being celebratory (their team just advanced in the european championship), but to ward of their unwanted advances, we made friends with a another american who had just arrived, a 20-yr old named andy who played ultimate at the university of wisconsin. his team just won the national championship, and you can bet that anna and i "talked shop" with him about ultimate for a while. i explained that i was from amherst, and he lit up.

A: "my roommate in the fall is a kid from amherst!"
E: "no way! who?"
A: "jeremiah berlin. do you know him?"

to be clear, i do not "know" jeremiah berlin. it is likely that we have met, and i certainly know who he is. we have probably even had conversations before. this is especially likely because we went to elementary school together as well as high school and while he is two years younger, in a school of less than 200, you know everyone. his sister is an ultimate player in my brother's class. i have watched him play. I wouldn't say we are buddy buddy, but yes, i know him, and at a school of 50,000 students, he is living this fall with the boy i just met by fluke in a bar full of 200 people.

bars in foreign cities are the ideal place to discover that it is, after all, a very small world.