The land of the unemployed

There are many things I've discovered since I became unofficially unemployed. One of them is that I can go out any night of the week here in Galway, and still find that I won't sleep past 9:30. OF course, that might have more to do with the fact that I'm staying in a dorm room in a hostel than anything else, but it's a point worth considering.

I have also discovered that drunken Irishmen lose the ability to speak. Or at least that I lose the ability to understand them when they get drunk. I struggle with some of the Irish accents at the best of times, although I am improving. Add alcohol to an already confusing accent, and the result is incomprehensible, but very very loud and quite amusing.

It hasn't taken until now to realise that people do stupid things while on holiday, but it has taken hours spent sitting around a hostel common room doing work of some form or other to discover just how stupid people can be. Take, for example, the american traveller who was sitting at reception yesterday being filled in by his friends on all the things that he'd gotten up to the night before. He had no memory of any of it. He couldn't recall the point where the bar was closing but he didn't want to leave; then there was the point where he was being wrestled to the ground by security, leaving a very large hole in the leg of his jeans, somehow. He struggled to remember taking off one of his shoes to hit security around the head with it in when seems to have been a fairly comical turn of events for everyone except the security guard involved. In fact, the only thing he did remember was waking up in the lock up where police had all but carried him so he could sleep off his alcohol induced coma.

In the land of the backpacker - ie, the unemployed or student - alcohol still reigns as king, it seems.

There is a side effect to this though, a slightly sinister bent to the party atmosphere of the town. Galway is beautiful, set on the banks of the fast-flowing river Corrib, with the wide sweep of Galway bay just a short walk away, and Lough Corrib a little further out. There are water and bogs ringing the town, one way or another. There are also constantly appearing missing posters on the lamp posts of the town. The first I saw was for a young woman, and the flyers disappeared before I really took anything in. Then there was a 20 year old man who vanished from somewhere in Galway city on Wednesday night. Then last week more posters appeared for another young man. You can't help but wonder, with a person a week going missing, what is happening in this town? It is a party town, with high alcohol consumption and every night of the week there are people who get paralytic and wander the streets. It seems that at least one of them will walk clean out of existence every week as well. But in the land of the unemployed and of students, it sometimes takes 3 days for people to compare notes and realise that they've gone. Like something out of a horror movie, nobody knows for sure what happens to these people. Apart from memories and grainy footage of them from CCTV, the only marks of their passing are the forlorn appeals for information left to weather on the lamp posts of Galway city.