It barely rained in Ireland.

Go on, gasp.

Based on what every single person alive told us about Éire, we were prepared for rain. And then, it didn’t rain. In fact, the trench coat I had on was doing nothing to block the cold and wind and I spent an entire afternoon in Dublin in search of a winter coat. I justified the heavy price tag in the name of my sanity (and in the name of research, obviously, since I am a fashion blogger, you know) and my husband’s, since he was a weeee bit tired of hearing me complain about how cold I was.

But not wet.

Even the locals were shocked. One morning we visited an adorable coffee shop in Kinsale and this mother-and-daughter-team eating cookies and drinking tea told us that they had spent the entire weekend at the beach. “It was so glorious—we just had to. And there was no rain!”

Luck ‘o the Irish, indeed.

Oh come on…it was begging to be said. 

I wanted to do exactly one super touristy thing in Ireland—kiss the Blarney Stone. (I mean, other than drinking Guinness in pubs whilst listening to locals sing Irish music, of course.) And as luck would have it, the day I was planning to climb a hundred thousand circular steps and brave the potential vertigo to climb a giant castle WITH NO ROOF in order to kiss a large stone, it rained. A lot.

It’s funny that I wanted so desperately to kiss a giant stone that would give me the gift of the gab, since, you know, I have been gabbing here  several-times-weekly for almost nine years. Shutting up doesn’t really seem to be a problem that I suffer from, but, well, it’s just one of those things. How could I come home and tell people that I went all the way across the pond and not only did I not partake in any tripe or black and white pudding, I didn’t kiss the Blarney Stone either?!

Blasphemy.

It stopped raining as we got out of the car.

Luck ‘o the Irish, indeed.

(I *did* warn you…)

Too bad kissing the famous stone doesn’t give me the gift of the Botox, because, dude. Note to self: cut bangs asap.

But, hey, want to know what else I didn’t get from kissing The Blarney Stone?

HERPES SIMPLEX.

Mostly because I don’t think that this is how science works.

People warned me to take lysol wipes with me. People warned me that locals pee on the stone regularly. People warned me that a person they know got herpes from kissing it.

Even though I tend to fall on the germ-o-phobe side of things, I skipped the wipes. I did, however, put on a layer of lip gloss (you know, to be both fresh and pretty for make-out date and to create an extra layer between my precious lips and stone).

I didn’t worry about the pee, because I thought that if locals went to all the trouble to figure out how to sneak into Blarney Castle (not an easy feat, I can assure you) and climb the hundred thousand windy and tiny steps to get up there AND figure out how to angle their wieners in such a way that their pee would actually make contact with the stone? Well, then more power to them, and their pee. Also it had just rained. Pee be gone!

And, well, since there was no actual making out or tongue-kissing of any kind with a giant rock, I kind of figured that the chances of getting a sexually transmitted disease in this way were highly unlikely.

I was worried about other things. Like, um, how bendy and Cirque du Soleil-like my body is.

Impressive, isn’t it?

I certainly got the gift of something up there.