#NewMayDays Days 6-9: Dublin

So an avalanche of work impeded my #NewMayDay resolutions in the middle of the week, but I have tried to make up for it over the past two days. In no particular order, here are four new things that I did over Thursday and Friday:

• voluntarily scheduled a tutorial before 9am
• took an international holiday during term time
• ate a dish whose primary ingredient was beer
• saw some of my favourite YouTubers perform live

Several less savoury new experiences were also enjoyed, such as drinking over 10 pints in one evening and sampling the delicacy of sausages and chips in a buttered white bread sandwich, gifted to us by someone so Irish as to be entirely unintelligible. It was a journey of discovery.

So to explain a ridiculous 36-hour journey abroad in the middle of term, my three favourite YouTube comediennes Hannah Hart, Grace Helbig, and Mamrie Hart have been touring in a comedy extravaganza called the #NoFilterShow. It's essentially one long in-joke with their subscribers, and when I missed out on tickets to their London shows I of course did what any normal person would do and booked flights to another country so as not to miss out. Thank god for budget airlines. Luckily the show itself was phenomenally excellent so I do not regret it one bit; we met a lot of really great people, got to see our idols onstage, and even enjoyed a few hours of Dublin in glorious sun. On Thursday afternoon we visited the famous Temple Bar, watched several ceilidh bands, and ingested Guinness in both pint and soup form, and although we had of course planned a Friday full of culture and new experiences a night in the most pub-heavy quarter of the most pub-heavy city of the most pub-heavy country obviously wrote the day off.

So yes, I really enjoyed my first experience of the "mini-break" and it was a welcome pause from the palpable tension of the Rad Cam in finals term. We even sat next to a nun on the flight home.