Getting There

I'm more outgoing now than I normally am: I incessantly bothered the unfortunates on both sides of me for the entire eight hours of the flight. However, I did succeed in gleaning some funformation from them. On the left, we had an expert in 16th-century English poetry who guest lectured in Trinity but lives in New York. On the right, we had a trainee occupational therapist from Cork who's off to a massive yoke of a house in Alaska with 20-odd others to do voluntary work.

I got pulled for a random security check by a pair of rather tense security dudes in JFK. Maybe I'm just projecting. In any case, there was deffo some rather tension floating about.

The subway was pretty generic. But it did lead to one of those classic gawky-tourist moments when I emerged for the first time from the depths. People look so cool here. It's not like anywhere I've been before. There's the studied hipsterness that's visible around George's Street in Dublin and there's the if-you-throw-enough-money-at-it-some-of-it-will-stick approach of UCD's more moneyed denizens, and then there's this. My new neighbours are not rich. They aren't even comfortable. Nonetheless, they look shit hot. They're wearing saggy denim, XL t-shirts and sideways caps. They're cruising around in shiny cars with their particular tunes banging on non-standard sound systems. It's all flamboyant and fresh and new.