Fire!, Fire!...

So there I was on Friday evening, sitting in Dublin airport, slowly dozing away while I awaited my flight to open for boarding when suddenly I was awoken by two men in what looked like security uniforms running really fast past me towards the boarding gate entrance. I then noticed that half of the people who were waiting for the same flight as myself were up on their feet and had their faces pressed against the window looking out at our plane. Out of morbid curiosity at what people were staring at, I too preceded to look out the window, (as everyone does whenever they see a large crowd of people gathering around a window). What I saw was 6 or 7 fire trucks all parked outside our plane with the lights flashing away and what looked like all the hoses at the ready.

At this stage, I thought to myself : "Oh! maybe the plane had to make a really bad emergency landing". Then I thought to myself : "Ah feckit! My plane has caught fire. I'm going to be stuck in Dublin airport for hours now". It was just then, another really official looking guy appeared. He promptly started walking around to the awaiting (and at this stage, somewhat bemused) people telling them in a hushed sort of voice that the special Olympics Irish team were on that plane that had just landed and it would be really nice if we could give them a big cheer when they disembarked!!! Then a piper appeared out of nowhere and started bellowing "music" out of his bagpipes, the special Olympics Irish team, one by one, started to appear out from the boarding gate and people proceeded to cheer and clap (myself included) until the last of them were off the plane. After the last person disembarked, all the fire trucks drove off, the official looking guys disappeared, as did the bag piper and all was well again.

Now, what was the purpose of that little anecdote? I hear you ask. Well, first of all; I find it highly amusing and somewhat perplexing as to why it was necessary to have all those fire trucks at the ready? Did they expect the special Olympians to spontaneous combust out of sheer excitement at being back on Irish soil again? Has this type of phenomena happened in the past? Our "non-special" Olympians would probably have gotten proper garda security vehicles as landing escorts but our special Olympians get fire trucks instead!?! Perhaps the powers that be just figured "ah sure, they're special Olympians. We'll just throw some vehicles with flashy lights at them. They'll never know the difference".

Secondly; why was it necessary to have some official looking guy run around to everyone telling them in a really hushed voice that it would be really nice if they gave a little clap and cheer for the special Olympians when they disembarked. If they were the Irish team for the "normal" Olympics that was disembarking I can assure you that people would be cheering for them without being told. Why must we be told to cheer (and be told in what I thought was a very condescending manner towards the athletes) in this case? OK, I understand that the special Olympics are in no way near as grand a scale as the "normal" Olympic games but should we not be taking equal pride in our athletes be they "special" or not? The ironic thing about all this is that the Irish team for the special Olympics actually win a crap load more medals than the Irish "non-special" Olympics team ever could. Of course, you had the obligatory smart arse making the remark that all the medals the Olympians had around their necks looked liked giant chocolate gold coins.

OK, little rant over. Onto the Lindy Hop festival that I attended over the weekend... In short, it was OK. Truth be told, I was a little disappointed but I think I ruined it for myself by having really high expectations of it before hand. The classes for the most part were quite good. We unfortunately only had a short (but excellent) class with the one teacher I specifically went over to the festival for which was a real let down. To top it off, my thighs were killing me all weekend which was really weird since I wasn't doing anything strenuous (in fact I wasn't even using them that much). Of course, since I've landed back in Dublin they are all well and good again...typical! The black and tan masquerade ball that was held on Saturday evening turned out to be a black, white, red, blue, green, purple, orange and whatever other colour you can think of and tan ball. People obviously have very different concepts of the colours "black and tan". The highlight of the whole festival for me personally was getting to watch the Harlem Hotshots perform. Those guys are scarily good.

Also got to walk around London for the day to do a bit of site seeing. Hadn't done that in years. It was really enjoyable. More so than I remembered it being all those other times. Of course, it's around about this time in conversation about major cities that I've just visited that I would start complaining about how our public transportation system here sucks donkey balls compared to said city in conversation but I'm not going to. That's more or less a given at this stage. However, why is it that that always seems to be the first thing I notice whenever I'm abroad in any major city? Roll on the first phase of the kick ass Dublin metro in 2010! *Note, I'm being highly sarcastic here*