TWAs, cheeky Irish bloke, and ‘the walk of shame’

'Walk of Shame' should have brought shades

Thirsty Thursdays were made for me I tell you! Nearing the end of a week of hard classes (okay, maybe they weren’t so hard) but definitely taxing on the brain; there’s nothing I like more than to kick back with a few beers and some good times on the day that the weekend should officially start!

Ciaran (the guy I had met on my first day here) asked me if I wanted to ‘hit the town’ and since I thought he was quite cute, funny and had a different kind of Irish accent than the Dublin one I had heard, I agreed. (He has a Louth accent and I’ve been told by my Irish classmates that their accent is not the same as other accents around Ireland due to inbreeding- God I hope that’s a joke!).

I let Catelyn persuade me into wearing my red knit dress and arranged to meet Ciaran at the Molly Malone statue (oh how I loved rubbing that in Grace’s face – “Hey Grace, I’m meeting him at the ‘Tart with the Cart’, get that!”) I was full of nerves when I spotted him and he gave me a mischievous grin, planted a kiss on my cheek and then looked me up and down.

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Not wanting to disappoint him and to reassure him that I was going to be a really fun date, I exclaimed that I was ready to paint the town red! Laughing out loud, he responded with a cheeky line of ‘You certainly will in that dress, sunshine!’ I could have killed Catelyn!

First stop was to the smallest pub in Dublin, The Dawson Lounge, which feels like you’re walking downstairs to somebody’s basement, and it was packed! It’s about the size of my living room in America, but it’s cozy and quaint, and you just can’t help but talk to lots of people because you’re all pretty much sitting on each other’s laps.

The conversation was entertaining, on his part, as he made fun of me a lot or ‘took the piss’ out of my American sayings and phrases. He kept commenting on my TWA’s (not what you think guys) such as LOL, OMG, WTF (or WTH if you’re a prude), BFF, FYI, TMI, OTT and so on. He reckoned that Americans are just too lazy to write or even sound out the full words so we use lots of ‘three word acronyms’. Yeah, I probably should have been mad at him, but at this point, the beer was flowing and we were laughing so hard trying to make more of them up with the other Americans in the bar.

Next thing I knew, the lights were on in the pub and bar staff were crying out to everyone ‘Come on now folks, have you no homes to go to?’ meaning GTFO! Ciaran offered me his hand and with an unmistakable twinkle in those Irish eyes, I knew it was his home he was planning on taking me to next.

Let’s just say that I did my first ‘walk of shame’ back to the apartment in the early hours of Friday morning. Thankfully I don’t know anybody in this city, because I looked such a mess that young mothers were steering their small children over to the other side of the street when they saw me coming towards them. To be crystal clear here people, I wasn’t looking such a fright from a night of unbridled passion with a handsome stranger; I was looking that way because it was more like a drunken fumble with a guy who was groping his sister in the sequel to ‘Deliverance’.

About an hour later just as I was walking in to my first class with my body deprived of much needed sleep, my phone started beeping with a text from Ciaran, asking if I was enjoying the ‘FKG’ on my face. Not knowing what that particular Irish TWA was, I had to ask one of the guys in my class to help me out on its meaning. While giving me a dirty smirk, he said all he could give me was a hint and see if I could figure it out for myself. Apparently the first word is ‘freshly’ and the last word is ‘grin’…. I’ll let you fill in the blanks, but as the penny finally dropped with me, and I got the meaning of Ciaran’s message, my face was as red as that stupid dress I was wearing the night before and all I could think of responding with was ‘they don’t write that on the brochures of Tourism Ireland’….
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