Canadia: Tues, Dec 26th

Ok, trying to sum up what I got up to over the last 10 days is gonna be a tough one. Hands down the craziest week and a bit of my life. Really should have done a blog posting for each day as so much happened. It was mental oriental. I took about 100 photo's too so will have to try pick a few to sum it all up.

First up was Christmas eve, which I wasn't expecting much from as it's one of the better nights back home, with all my friends, so I didn't think that it could compare over here. We planned to just go out to the small Irish bar that Angela works in for a few drinks and see what happens. It was complete madness as soon as we got there. There were plenty of Irish lads in there all day. There was this one crazy bastard from west Cork who was without doubt the craziest lunatic i've ever met. He kept everyone entertained for the night with his ramblings. We ended up having a lock in the pub till around midnight. Angela even brought me behind the bar to teach me how to pull pints, so I was the barman for quite a while. Funny. Around midnight then we all headed back to a house of a couple of Tipperary lads for a party. Again, absolute madness here. Singing, dancing and lots of drinking. No idea what time we left here it's a Christmas eve i'm not going to forget anytime soon.

You can probably guess that we weren't in the best of conditions on Christmas morning. Not eve sure what time we got up. Think it was around 9, so we were all pretty fuzzy headed. We all had lots of calls to make home so hence the early rising. We did our secret santa first though. Lots of funny presents all round. I got a slinky and instructions for lots of drinking games from Glen (like I need more of a reason to drink more). It was definitely good to have something to open on xmas morning. The others had some gifts from home too, mostly clothes. We all headed to the hostel then to make our calls home. I was on the phone for hours. I had to catch everyone early before they headed out for the day. When we got back from making our calls Angela cooked a big ol Irish breakfast for us, which was just what we all needed. (Note: it's impossible to top a proper Irish breakfast, everything over here tastes different, especially bacon which just plain sucks). We probably all ate too much as we had our xmas dinner booked in a hotel for 6 but none of us were really hungry by then. Turns out it all worked out fine though as the dinner was extremely poor. The servings were shockingly small. When the bill came we still tipped quite well seeing as it was Christmas but I did write on the reset that it was the worst xmas dinner EVER.

After dinner we had an invite to go to a house party for another Irish guy, (Stevie) who actually lives quite close to Glen back home in Tyrone, and who were we to refuse an invite to a party. We had bought our drink well in advance so we picked it up from our house on the way to Stevie's. All the public transport was still running on xmas day so we had no problem getting around. In fact, seeing as we live in Chinatown you wouldn't have guessed it was xmas day at all as all the shops were still open. Was definitely strange. We got to Stevie's around 7ish and the party was well on the way already with a good mix of people from all over. Needless to say we partied till all hours and all crawled home at some ungodly hour.

The day after xmas is called boxing day over here as well and they go mad for their sales. I wanted to try and get a cheap webcam for myself so went round some of the shops. Picked one up for $9 which is crazy cheap, so I was happy with that. We weren't sure what to expect from that night as we weren't sure if it was like home and everyone goes out. Turns out it was nothing like home. Most places were closed. We started drinking at home first to keep the costs down and then headed to lovely sounding pub called Philty McNasties. There was a gang of Irish there again so we had another great night.

Ok this is getting out of hand, i'm gonna stop here and will fill ye in on the rest shortly.