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Don’t talk to strangers, people say, but, then, we really had to, and we didn’t tell anyone about it either. It was the recipe for disaster. And, at times, it did look like that’s what we were cooking up. Turns out, we didn’t. Ireland is a place I remember with a smile; perhaps, the one place where you can’t do anything wrong, where you should talk to strangers, where that sketchy boat shed is nothing but a boat shed. Having solely a hand-luggage bag on my back, I only had one pair of jeans which I didn’t take off for even a day. By the end of the first week, my mom fit jeans had turned into what could best be described as a textile garbage bag. The one pair of shoes I’d brought (other than, of course, my flip-flops) had lost almost all colours after the hourly cloudbursts (in retrospect, an exaggeration, but that is how it felt at the time) and the never-ending hitchhiking. Joe, our host in The Glen, is the person whose porridge made Lora rethink her previously firmly negative stance on porridge. Joe lived on what seemed like the most appropriate of places; to the right you could find the relatively short road to the Skellig Ring, to the left were the tiny strand of beach where the swimsuit-wearing locals showed us just how unacclimated we were to the Irish weather and the Skellig chocolate factory whose free chocolate samples saved our budget. But one thing I will never forget is the Portmagee public toilet which had won Ireland’s Top Toilet Award, and the fact that me and Lora purposefully did not pee before hitchhiking to Portmagee so that we could experience the true merit of said toilet (it was a good pee in a clean place, I must admit). After that, we visited the only supermarket in Portmagee only to purchase the most expensive pack of cigarettes any of us had ever bought. Richard gave us a couch to surf on for our two unusually rainy and lazy days in Killarney when we couldn’t be bothered to walk for more than 15 minutes. His house bore an eerie resemblance to how I imagine the Witch’s Cottage from Hansel and Gretel. Richard was the type of guy who tangled his fingers with yours even though you had every intention to high-five him, but, other than that, he was the host happiest to see us at his front door. Killarney was, perhaps, where the most people apologized to us on behalf of the weather (a very common practice among the Irish apparently). We didn’t mind the rain, but our pants did. I can’t count the amount of times when I stood up from a bench/ the grass only to find out that that my ass was wet. Even though Ireland’s wild nature is, perhaps, one of the most awe-inspiring things I have ever seen, there was nothing more awe-inspiring than the fact that this one lady (who picked us up around Lahinch and drove us all the way to Limerick) was so petrified by the fact that something might happen to us on our adventure that she offered us to stay at her home in Cork for a few days until we had to leave for Dublin (and catch our flight), even offering to cook for us. While her name escapes me, I won’t forget how hard it was for us to convince her to leave us in Limerick rather than take us back home to Cork and take care of us. Right after she left us off at Limerick, me and Lora went to the Limerick Museum where we could shake off the unavoidable doubt about our safety this kind lady had instilled, only to be walked to the bus stop we needed to get to by the museum guard who, too, felt uneasy to let us leave the museum unaccompanied. My leap into Ireland left me with the thirst for more and even bigger leaps.