omg souvenirs

today has been the official day of souvenir shopping! I didn't realize exactly how daunting this task was going to be. dublin has this incredible superstore called carroll's irish gifts and there are about a hundred of them around the city. I've been in them a few times so I had a good idea of what to get everyone. (and chill out, unless you're related to me or you asked for something specific, you're probably not getting anything. it's not that I don't love you . . . it's just that I have a limited amount of space in my luggage, and if I got a gift for all of the people I adore you'd all be getting really cheap lame crap.) anyway I had made a nice detailed, annotated, legended list of the stuff I wanted to get and STILL had a hard time navigating the shelves and finding the stuff I wanted. I made one trip and got a majority of the stuff I wanted, but was still missing a few things so made a pit stop at the hostel to repack my suitcase and fenagle some more space for irishey trinkets. I made my second trip to a different carroll's to get the rest of the stuff, and after an entire day of shopping, rummaging, shuffling and ducking out of the rando flash flood, I can say that I have successfully bought something for everyone on my list! I feel more satisfaction than I do when I finish christmas shopping. seriously.

unfortunately today was not all chimes and whistles. I had spotted a tshirt in a show window ages ago and thought 'I have got to buy that before I head home.' so I went in today to try and get it, and the guy was plumb out. turns out it was a limited edition shirt with only a few copies in all of europe, stocked by some supplier from thailand. I tried every tshirt store in the walking vicinity, but no luck. this is the lamest part, I am always offended and a little bit annoyed by shirts bearing faces of celebrities because I think they're usually tacky and especially lame now that you can get them in teeny-bopper stores owned by the man and they really don't represent an actual passion or opinion of a person wearing said shirt. examples: shirts with che guevara's face, worn by eejits who don't know a) how to pronounce guevara b) who the guy was or c) what he represented. shirts with jim morrison's face worn by thirteen year olds who only know some of the lyrics to 'break on through.' shirts with . . . you get the idea. so anyway the reason I'm being so ridiculous about this is that the shirt I wanted was a plain black tee with the classic photo of kurt cobain wearing his token white frame sunglasses, only cartoonized into a really simple screenprint graphic . . . it was superunique. and I am saddened. but I made up for the loss by getting a bit of chocolate from butler's. on a related note I am a little weirded out by the soon-to-be-released cobain-issue chucks printed with excerpts from his 'journals' book as published by c-love/suicide note/writings on the eve of his murder/whatever they are.