Hitting the ground running

I hadn't been in the UK long before I was lucky enough to see a few familiar faces. The first of these was my completely awesome friend and ex-flattie Lara, who not only picked me up from Heathrow, but put me up for more than a week at her place in Guildford (courtesy also of her flatmates Mark and Siobhan, who are legendary). I imagine she'll feature pretty heavily here for the next little while, as her powers of generosity are matched only by her skills in filling my weekends with interesting and exciting outings, the first of which I will mention in a moment.

Once my bags had been dropped, it was into London to meet up with a few friends from old Melbourne town - Ben, Ange, Tris, Dog and Alex; a veritable reunion. Arranging to catch up with them over a few beers and grabbing some dinner was an almost surreal experience given the lack of contact with your normal life travelling holds. Safe to say it was something else to see them all there on the other side of the world - meeting people from home in far-off places has to be one of my favourite things. This we managed to couple with another of my favourite things - garlic! Everything on the menu at our chosen venue was garlic-themed. The jury is still out on the garlic beer...

The next call of business was to head to Dublin for a weekend music festival, which Lara and I flew to the next day. It was a blast. I won't go through the line up, but there were some brilliant acts. The weather was terrible the first day, but somehow this only managed to add to the fun that 80,002 people (70,000 of whom were our next-door neighbours for 2 nights in the campsite) can have at a showground with 7 stages going simultaneously. And the amount of rubbish they can produce - see above.

Dublin itself was lovely, and we were probably not there long enough to do it justice. We were there long enough to visit the Long Room, in Trinity College, where they house an amazing collection of old books. This includes the Book of Kells and several other gospel books which were on display in a fascinating exchibition. One thing I won't forget is the musty-old-book smell, bottles of which I wouldn't be surprised to hear they export from this room to be released in second-hand bookshops around the world just to add authenticity.