Working Hard in Galway

G’day all,

Well it’s been a hectic past few months since my last update with much working, partying, socializing, footy kicking and site seeing. “Race Week” ended up being as crazy as it was hyped up to be with the whole town wall to wall with tourists for the whole week. Each day everyone went to the races and each night the whole main street “shop street” was blocked off and turned into one huge outdoor pub. All the bars gave their patrons plastic beer cups so they can take their drinks out onto the road. It was one absolute huge week long party. Our house has also started falling apart since updating you guys last with my Cousin Dan’s roof collapsing, water from the shower dripping through the kitchen roof, rats running across our living room floor and across my hand while I slept, and parts of the walls falling off. It has also been getting very cold lately and as it’s so expensive to get heating over here we all sit around the lounge room in our thermal underwear, beanies, gloves, and scarves each night laughing about how nice our house is. One thing that’s been helping us get through the bad weather is our huge games of footy we’ve been having at least once a week. Sometimes we have up to 10 or 15 people all tackling each other in the mud and rain and we play until it is dark. We’ve been inviting anyone we can to join us in our games but as the weather has been getting colder and darker our games are starting to fizzle up now. Another update to our crazy household here is our new French/Spanish/Irish hippy mate Des who came to crash on our couch for a week and is still here 4 months later. He is the funkiest guy you can meet with dreadlocks shooting out of his visor and his matching primary coloured clothes. Every time he plans to move on we talk him into staying longer and now he works here full time and loves kicking the footy more than any of us. Our Kiwi mates and Dan have now moved on and are travelling around Europe at the moment and our other mate from Adelaide Shane lives in Dan’s room now. Before the crew went travelling we had a really great day out at the Aran Islands where we rode bikes around all day through beautiful scenery and admired the views of these incredible cliffs. There islands are almost unchanged for hundreds of years and everyone still speaks the Irish language over there and ride around with horse and cart. I also now have been working 3 jobs with my day job and 2 night jobs doing promotions, one for one of the big nightclubs here called GPO and also promoting the Aussie beer “Carlton Cold” in bars on my nights off. I really love doing the promo jobs and it’s the easiest money as all I have to do is talk to good looking girls all night and put stamps on their hands and get paid for it. Through doing my promo jobs I also met these great Adelaide girls Amy and Alex who have become good mates of ours for about 2 months now and we hang out most days and all party together each weekend. It was Halloween a few weeks ago and boy was it a massive week. Even about 10 days before Halloween night there were people dressing up all over the place and the event went for a week long. None of us could believe the extent of trouble people went into making their costumes and Halloween night was huge with not a single person to be seen without being dressed up. Sean, Tate, and I all dressed up in “Nuclear Radiation Suits” for Halloween and spent about 5 hours making them. Our night was so huge that by the time we got home again at the end of the night our suits were just a few pieces of shredded cloth left on us. I’m planning on heading off to go travelling again in February at this stage with the rate I’m saving money at. So far my plans are to first head to Dubai and Qatar in the Middle East then spend a while in Egypt before heading off to travel Eastern and Southern Europe, North America, Mexico, the Bahamas, Peru, and New Zealand for 7 months before heading home again in September next year.
Anyway that’s about all for now,

Ooroooo

Woodsy

Galway, Paul's Way....…All Settled In!!

G’day all,

It’s been a while since my last blog update but I’ve been in Ireland for almost 2 months now and I’m finally all settled in with a full time job and it’s all going to plan so far. It’s been an extremely busy past couple of months with lots of job searching, footy kicking, partying and visitors coming in and out of our bachelor pad house we call “club 43”. My cousin Dan moved into our place about a month ago and since then our house has been the centre of partying and our social life in Galway with a weekly and sometimes nightly gathering of pre-drinks and laughs before nights out on the town. I first got a job here doing bar work for one of the big hotels. It was pretty nerve raking because I know sweet bugger all about working behind the bar and was thrown into the deep end because I’m Aussie and they assume every Aussie lives in a pub. The hard part was I couldn’t understand half of what the Irish people were ordering nor how to make it so I had to wing it the best I could. I had to walk 45 minutes each way to work in the rain and it was getting really tough but was so glad that just before my 4^th shift I got another job working only 5 minutes away from my house. For the past 6 weeks I’ve been working as a salesman in a fancy home store selling all sorts of cooking gear and loving it. I don’t know much about cooking at all or selling stuff but I find that I can get away with anything with my accent and my customers just love asking me about Australia. Everyday I get the same thing over and over and over and over again: Where are you from Australia or New Zealand? What brings you here to this weather? How long are you here for? What do you think of Galway? Why Galway? When did you get here? All my work mates just laugh every time I get asked because I just switch to auto pilot and say the same old lines back each time. I was given a real fancy pancy suit for work too and had to get my hair cut to look the part so now I’m clean cut Paul instead of backpacker Paul. Everyone I work with is super nice and we are always having a good laugh or “good craic” as the Irish say. If Galway had good weather it would be the best place on earth but I’ve never seen such depressing weather in my whole life. It is supposed to be summer here but it seems to rain and drizzle every single day and night. We did have one good week where the weather was around 25 and sunny for about 7 days straight but now it’s back to winter weather again. The town itself though is amazing and it is a buzz every day and the night life is unreal. You can literally go out any night of the week here and find a packed bar or go on a pub crawl. A few weeks back we went and saw the famous Australian stand up comedian Carl Barron do a gig at the local pub and had a great night and all got to meet him and get photos with him. At the moment I’m a bit partied out though if that’s possible as for the past few weeks I had two of my best mates in the world Rob and Dan come over from Toronto in Canada to visit for two weeks. They left last Friday but WOW was it a big few weeks while they were here. We pretty much went out every single night of the week for two weeks while I worked full time during the day each day. We had such a great time and we did a couple of trips with them. Tate got his work car one day and we all drove down to the “Cliffs of Moher” which were awesome and the weather was great that day. In the second week I had two days off and we all got a rental car and drove down to Cork where we stayed the night and partied. The following day we went to the Blarney Castle and then drove to Cove to see where the Titanic left the wharf for the last time before sinking. It was so good to see the boys again and we had quite a few kicks of the footy while they were here too. At the moment it’s just me and Sean alone in Club 43 as the Canadians have gone, Dan and Shane have gone to Egypt for the week, Kate has gone to New York and Tate has a new sales job roaming around the country side. We also still have our Kiwi mates here and these two legend Melbourne guys I met in India Scotty and Pud to party with. Towards the end of July Galway is going to be going crazy as the arts festival is on and then the much talked about Race Week. Race Week is supposed to be absolutely mental as a million people come to this town of 70,000 for a big horse racing festival. All the locals tell me I won’t believe how crazy it is until I see it so I’m looking forward to that. We had an interesting bit of publicity in our street over the past month. About a month ago a dead mans body was found chopped up in pieces in a freezer in our street only about 10 doors away from our place. Apparently he was killed about 4 years ago and he was a drug dealer.

Thanks about all for now,

Woodsy…..having a ball in Galway

The Ireland leg begins…..

G’day all,
Well it has been a while since my last update mainly due to either not much happening or too much partying. My best mate Tate came and joined Sean and I at the “Kings Arms” on the Saturday before we headed off to Ireland. It was a huge celebration for the 3 of us to be finally re-united after not being together for 14 months and we really showed the English how to party that night. There were champagne corks flying left right and centre and we all ended up singing songs and wrestling until the early hours of the morning in front of a pub full of amazed English onlookers. On the Tuesday we got our 1 pound (+ about 30 pounds of extra charges) flight from London to Dublin on Ryan Air. We expected the worse as we heard the flights were really dodgy and disorganized however surprisingly it all went smooth as a jar of vegemite. I was so glad to finally be making progress again in the trip as doing nothing and being too cheap to do anything in England was doing my head in as I felt so helpless. Once we arrived in Dublin we found a cheap hostel, looked around for a bit, then sniffed out the cheapest we can eat and drink. We spent 2 nights in Dublin and all we really did was party and sleep in. I did get to meet up with a good friend of mine Elise who I met in Thailand last year so that was really cool. Dublin was a cool city but it was still way too expensive and big for us boys so we got a bus out to Galway on the Thursday. My cousin Dan met us at the bus-stop when we arrived and he let us crash on his floor for the first few nights until we settled in. I was also really excited to find out that our Welsh friend Kate who travelled with us through Thailand and Cambodia was staying with Dan. We instantly fell in love with Galway as the city has such a good feel to it. It’s so pretty and happening, and it has a great buzz about the place. After planning to have a quiet one Thursday night it ended up being another blinder as we also partied with Dan’s kiwi housemates Dom and Victoria and his other Adelaide housemate Shane. On Friday it was my 25^th birthday so we made it 4 nights out in a row. After spending 2 nights on Dans lounge room floor we were pretty keen to find our own place. On Saturday we hit the jackpot as we got a place right in the town for only 55 euros each a week and moved in instantly so we were thrilled to bits. We were so happy with our place we ended up throwing a house party and had everyone over for drinks before heading out on our 5^th night out in a row. The night life in Galway is fantastic. There are pubs and clubs everywhere you look and they all seemed to be packed out. In Ireland it’s illegal to smoke in pubs and bars now so it’s really weird seeing all these people standing outside the pub in the cold for a smoke. The past two weeks have been really fun however so costly and the alarm bells for my cash flow situation are ringing very loudly. Since Monday I’ve been on a job seeking rampage walking the streets of Galway with a pile of resumes under one arm handing them out everywhere. Today I got so desperate I noticed a tanning salon and an adult book shop advertising for full time positions so I had to blush and suck it up and hand over my resume to them. We’ve been in Galway for 5 days now and apart from the weather…We all love the place!!!!

That’s all for now,

Woodsy