Weekend Update

Some highlights from the past week:

Weds: I participated in a tournament poker game run by one of the student organizations.  I bought in for 5 Euro and played for about six hours.  We had about 40 people with about 68 buy-ins.  Once the field whittled down to the final table of eight, we left campus and went to a small casino at the top of Grafton Street.  The place was empty (to be fair, it was 11:00pm on a Weds night), but the casino generously provided us with a casino table and a dealer.  Overall finished 5th and won 25 Euro.  The club runs a tournament every Weds night, so I will be back.  I also tried a new gelato flavor: stracciatella.  This is basically the Italian version of chocolate chip vanilla, but it's done with thin strips of chocolate rather than chunks.  Result: heaven!  I also sampled the caramel which seems very promising.

Thurs:  Set out around 8pm to go to the Oktoberfest celebration in the Docklands with my friend Andrew.  Upon arriving, we discovered the line to reach the tent area in the center was over an hour long.  Instead, we sampled the food and beverages from the booths circling the central area (conveniently with no wait).  

 We then enjoyed a quick pint in the Pav, the campus pub.  The crowd was fairly young and not recognizing anyone else we knew, we headed off.  We made our way towards Temple Bar and ended up at a place called Fitzsimmons.  As the weather was nice (it's been 50-60 here since arrival), we headed for the rooftop terrace where we noticed the playoffs were on.  We decided to join three older British men in an attempt to talk sports with them.  They didn't know the first thing about baseball (they also held a firm belief that Americans ate nothing but popcorn and hotdogs), but were spectacular company for the next few hours (even buying Andrew and me a round).

After a short stint on the dance floor, we called it an evening.

Fri: I went to my second week of dance classes where we did about an hour of the waltz and an hour of jive. The waltz was a breeze as I have some experience with it, but the jive is a killer with it's quick pace.

Tame weekend but I'll be going to my first hip-hops class in months tomorrow.  Should be interesting to say the least.