Fast Friends - Part II

August 8 - Dublin, Ireland
A couple days later I was alone in Dublin. The night before I met Noah in the TV room and went to Temple Bar and emptied some Guinnesses with him and the Irish girls we met who sadly still live with their parents. When I woke up he’d already gotten on his rented bike and started peddling west. That evening I went back to the Temple Bar area to shoot some video of Irish drinkers (or at least tourists drinking in Ireland).

“Do you have a minute,” a couple young Irish guys asked. They wanted to know if they should visit Las Vegas or New York when they go to the States. A minute later a couple girls walked by and the Irish guys roped them in. They were from Brooklyn and had just got in for a week’s vacation. We all had a Guinness and then I followed Colleen and Christy to meet their Irish friend who just got back from a round-the-world trip.

I interviewed Robert on the cobblestone street outside the row of bars. He’d done 10.5 months and knew how it felt to be in month eight. Month eight—for most of us it seems—is when it all gets a little tiresome.

“Constantly packing and unpacking your bag, riding on buses, finding hostels, saying goodbye to people, it just stops being fun.”

That’s how I’ve felt the last week or so as the cycle of the five-hour friend has become a bit old. It’s not that it’s an unpleasant thing that you can only tolerate for so long, it is in fact a very pleasant thing that can lose its charm after a while. You get numb to the things you’re seeing and tired of making a new friend every damn day. It’s not loneliness because someone always turns up, but it’s tiredness with having to do it over and over again.

Colleen somehow bought all this as some great burden. “Traveling around the world must be so hard,” she consoled. “It’s probably been forever since you were able to just curl up next to someone in a comfortable bed.”

Oh yes, month eight can be torturous, so it’s good to find someone you can see in the morning—at least for five minutes—before you get on your bus and she gets on hers.