Brain Drippings (Blog)

July 14, 2026

I just ate my first-ever full English breakfast... although technically it was not English, as I'm in Ireland, or breakfast, as it's 4:30pm. But I wanted to find a wifi cafe, I'm exhausted, and hadn't had a real meal in two days other than the $9 airport pizza I got for (actual) breakfast, so I figured what better time to have a giant, greasy, meat-centric meal?

Ireland, you're too meaty for me. Out of the three flesh-based items on my plate, I was able to finish one of them. The bacon was quite good — different from American bacon, less crispy and more like thin cut strips of pan-fried ham. But I found the flavor quite pleasant, and the texture calmingly lean, the interspersed rinds of fat relatively unobstructive and easy enough to remove.

The sausage, unfortunately, though I was able to enjoy its richness for a few bites, quickly went from gluttonous to nauseating to my sensitive, west-coast liberal palette. The strong meat flavor was the kind which, though I know by all evolutionary and biological logic I should find mouth-watering, does in fact make my mouth water but in the wrong way. The sheer intensity of its rendered-fat flavor makes saliva involuntarily well up in my mouth and some muscle in my throat leap as if to reject it. Not, as you can imagine, an enjoyable ingestion experience, though nevertheless giving me a clue as to the pleasure it must induce in others.

The "pudding" is an ambiguous puck of some generically meat-looking substance. I'm fairly certain it's one of those things that you know you'll enjoy more if you don't look up what it is, which very knowledge however already fills me with unease and trepidation. Its flavor was really quite inoffensive (I would compare it to a slightly more mushy and less-seasoned sausage), but the meatiness and richness was reminiscent enough of the sausage that, combined with the fact that I already had two slices of preferable bacon to make my way through, I left it two-thirds uneaten.

I do feel bad about leaving that and slightly over half the sausages, but there's no point subjecting myself to a meal I won't enjoy just to say it's been consumed. And it was a novel experience and now I can say I've tried both (not to mention written this thrilling blog post).

This was supposed to be a review of everything I've done in the last two days with my current cafe status as a hook, but it got a bit derailed. I checked into my hostel in Dublin around 3pm, after a day of travel that started at 5:30am. I booked an airport shuttle bus leaving from Reykjavik at 6:30am, without realizing that the city busses don't run that early, so I had to hike with my giant backpack for an hour through Reykjavik to get to the station. In the rain. After waking up at 4:30, after only having been able to sleep maybe two hours. It felt like my head was going to explode. But I did it! I got to the bus right as it was boarding, at maybe 6:23am.

I got exactly no sleep on my trans-oceanic flight (of course the one time I managed to drift off my inner row-mate chose that particular moment of an 8-hour flight to need to get up to use the bathroom, after which crushing defeat there was no recapturing the magic) so I've tallied about 4 total hours of sleep in the last 48 hours. And yes, I'm still going to try the hostel pub crawl tonight, because carpe diem or something. I've bought these hangover prevention pills at the pharmacy (it's so touristy here around the city center that the pharmacy had a traveler necessities display front and center, of which this is apparently one.) in the hopes that they might help negate the everything else. Only 7 euros for like 15 different vitamins, including 6000% of the daily value of B12. Figured I might as well give it a shot.

I'll make another post later with photos from Reykjavik, as I don't have my camera on me right now and haven't downloaded them yet.