Cinnamon patrol

Mostly the latter, with dreams of the former.

While our apartment is fairly quiet most of the time, there are some noisy ones. On Friday evenings, the bell-ringers at Christchurch Cathedral go a bit mad for a few hours. On Saturday nights, the bar up the road is pretty loud, what with the noisy (drunk) punters and the booming bass.

But on Saturday it wasn't the bar that woke us up. It was the punters (please feel free to substitute a more apt description of your own choice - my mother reads this, so I can't be too crass - hi Mum!) in our apartment building. Doors slamming, screeching and shouting, and general noise. Both David and I woke up, and finally after over an hour of it, I lost the plot.

I went outside and discovered that people upstairs were conducting a party in the hallway. The large, cavernous hallway common to all 40-odd apartments, which is all hard surfaces, and consequently an excellent conductor of sound.

Scantily clad, I stood in the hallway and bellowed until someone looked over. I told them that at 4.15AM they'd better end the party, as they'd had all night. (Okay, so I'm paraphrasing here, but I didn't even swear at them, I was so restrained.) They looked embarrassed, and in the ensuing 15 minutes, spent a lot of time shushing one really noisy punter. Finally they shut up, and while I heard a few people leaving later, it was quiet enough for David to go back to sleep.

If they do it again, I'm not going to wait an hour to scream at them.


We figured that Sunday night (last night) would be fine, though - everyone has stuff to do on Monday, right?

Wrong.

At 11PM, we noticed people queueing noisily at the bar. They were dressed up to the nines, clutching tickets, and I hoped fervently that it was a private gig - perhaps some jazz. I mean, it was after 11 on a Sunday, right?

Well, we were woken sometime after 1AM by the... feckers. (Sorry Mum, but it's commonly used here, even by mothers, so I figure it's not quite swearing.) Around 150 people had spilled into the street. The boys were smashed, and noisily attempting to dance and sing. It was not a pretty sight - nor were the incidences of public nudity, vomiting, and urination.

Honestly, the women with them must have had no standards.

The Gardai turned up finally. I was all keyed up, ready for some (well-deserved) police brutality, hoping the whole shindig would be shut down in a matter of minutes. Instead, they kind of observed with bemused looks on their faces. They did manage to arrest around 4 people, and their presence did help to disperse the crowd, but very slooooowly. By the time the last of the Gardai left at 2.45AM, there were still quite a few people left, but they were quieter.

How did it eventually end? Well, one guy jumped up on another to give him a hug, and the jumpee fell and hit his head. An ambulance came, checked him out, and left - as did the last people, finally.


Now, my guesses on both of these events are that they're graduation-related. It's May, the end of the studying year, and students are leaving. I've been a student, and seen what students can do. But I've never witnessed such thoughtlessness (in the case of the people partying in the hallway), or crass ickiness (the super-drunk ones).

On both occasions, I thought fondly of New Zealand. Of our former building manager who'd shut a party down in the apartment building; and of noise control, who actually controlled noise, and police who actually dispersed large drunken mobs rather than watching them and giggling.

So really, it was just mayhem - there were no murders. Not that I wasn't tempted.

Labels: Dublin, Grumbles, Laura