5 posts tagged “ireland”

So continuing on with our tour through Connemara and the Burren--

You see these walls a lot in the countryside, and sometimes they're to keep sheep out of your neighbor's land or something, but there are a lot of them that go nowhere and serve no purpose.  The government tried to help out during the famine by hiring day laborers, paying them like one bowl of soup a day to build walls and roads that went nowhere.  Here's one of them:

 

Hundreds of people died while building them, so I guess in a lot of the more rural areas people keep them up as a kind of monument. 

The Burren is really this whole huge area where there's just tons and tons of limestone, sometimes just below the surface and sometimes on the surface like this:

 

 

Here's a whole bunch of pictures of the cliffs of Moher:

 

The fourth picture of the crazy people laying on the edge -- that's where I'm standing in the picture of my feet.  Rachel wouldn't stand that close to the edge, she'd only lay down.  Chicken.

Here's a thatcher that we saw, actually thatching a roof:

 

We also went to Kylemore Abbey in Connemara, which is a huuuge manor house that you can tour, and also an Abbey kind of attached to it that's a functioning girls' boarding school.  There were rumors that Madonna's daughter was attending there at the time.  The grounds were gorgeous, I didn't get many pictures of them though. 

 

After our tour and hanging out in Galway, we headed back to Dublin for one night before flying back to Malaga.  Our flight was at like 6am, so we had to be at the airport around 4, which means we'd have to start heading from downtown at about 3:30, so we decided to try to not waste money on a hostel and just stay out all night.  Rachel ended up having more work to do, so she found an internet cafe that was open all night and camped out with our bags and some awesome-looking gamer types.  That was actually really nice, because I didn't have to carry my stuff around.

So I went to this pub that I had liked the last time I had been in Dublin, just to get some food and meet people, maybe.  I was wearing this red shirt with a black bull on it that I'd gotten in Spain, and these two Ukrainian guys came up and asked me about it, and then sat down and we had some drinks together.  They were both wearing these orange scarf things on their necks, and it turns out it was right in the middle of that whole election scandal over there, and Ukrainians all over Dublin were out protesting and shouting in their orange gear (orange being decidedly NOT a favorite color in Dublin).  But so they told me all about the situation and bought a few rounds, then walked me back to the internet cafe at around 2:30. 

Rachel and I were totally beat (that was the night I learned that Guinness is the WORST enemy of staying awake), and we weren't sure exactly how we were going to get to the airport, so we decided to go ahead and set out in case it took longer than we thought, and we could wait there without having to pay hourly like we were in the internet cafe.  So this Irish guy Micheal kind of had overheard us and had been talking to Rachel, and he offered to walk us to where there were cabs available, so we took off in that direction.

Turns out, that time of night on a Saturday night in Dublin, there's a huuuge line for cabs in the middle of Dame street that you have to wait in for about an hour, with all the young gorgeous people going home from a night out.  So Micheal said he could get us to somewhere else, where we might be able to catch cabs coming back toward the pickup point thing, so we took off down all these random back streets and way out of the main city center, following this total stranger, getting kiiiinda skeeved out, until we turned onto this street and saw like 4 empty cabs and took one.

The airport was completely desolate and empty, the gates didn't even open until like 5:30, so we threw our stuff on the ground, set a phone alarm, and decided to try to sleep for a couple of hours on the ground.  Around 5:15 I heard my NAME being called out, and it was this girl Robin who was in Film Society with me at A&M, taking a similar budget-6-am-tweenage-pilot Ryanair flight from Dublin to where she was studying that semester in Italy.  The flight back was probably equally terrifying, but I was pretty much unconscious the whole time.  Rachel actually had to come over and sit by me, we had each had our own rows, because she got scared, but I was kind of oblivious.  Anyway, that was my second trip to Ireland. 

So sorry it's been a while, but I was moved today to write about my second trip to Ireland. 

So about 2/3 of the way through the semester, Rachel and I decided to go to Ireland over one of our long "weekends" (that consisted of about 6 days).  So we had a longish weekend, over which I went to Morocco, then I came back, went to classes on a Tuesday, and left that night (I think) for Ireland. 

We took a bus to Malaga, and a craaaappy red-eye RyanAir flight to Dublin.  I think our plane tickets cost us about $25 each.  It was, um, worth it.  I guess.  I'm pretty sure our pilot was about 17 years old, and inebriated.  Anyway.

So we got there, and walked to our hostel, the Four Courts, on Merchant's Quay, and got settled in.  Over the next couple of days, we poked around Dublin, hung out some in St. Stephen's Green, I don't really remember what all we did, actually.  For the first part we were there.  I think I have some pictures though.

 

 

Yeah, so there's us at St. Stephen's Green, and some picture of somewhere on the Liffey.  But THEN, we had decided that we wanted to go visit some of Rachel's family, who lived in western Ireland.  So after a couple days, we got on a bus and went out to Loughrea, this itty bitty town, where the Wards were from.  We were to meet her like great-aunt, or something like that, named Sarah Ward.

So we took the bus out there, and got off at the bus stop in front of this pub (which, like most of the other ones not in the really big cities, had no women in it.)  Everybody in the town was kind of staring, like it was not at all normal to have visitors there, but it was a cute little strip of shops and stuff that looked plenty tourist-friendly.  So we got to a phone and called Rachel's great aunt, who was near impossible to understand on the phone, and she told us to go to the B&B down the street and check in, we'd meet her there.

So we went down to the most GORGEOUS B&B I've ever seen, all like red wood and old fancy embroidered furniture and rugs and stuff, and told the front desk that we were there as guests of Sarah Ward.  The lady looked really interested, and told Rachel to play her cards right, because Baby Ward, as they called her, was extremely wealthy and had no children, and her brothers had died also before ever having children.  She also informed us that Baby had set us up for the night and paid for a traditional Irish breakfast for us in the morning.  We went up and checked in to our room, and then came down and met Baby and another relative, Maureen. 

The first question they asked when Rachel introduced me was "And what is your surname?" When I told them, they kind of stopped and thought for a while, and then "And have you any Irish blood?"  When I told them I thought it was mostly Welsh and Scottish, they seemed really disappointed, and then Baby got up and went to find a phone book, to show me all the Thomases in the Galway phone book, convinced that there was no way I had no Irish blood. 

They then took us out to Baby's house, in the middle of absolute nowhere.  We stopped first at Ward's pub, which used to be owned by the family, but had been sold, but kept the name.  Rachel took some pictures and a bunch of angryish and drunk-looking men came out wondering who the strangers were, and were totally amazed to find two American girls out there. 

 

 

We got back in the car and went to their church, where Baby put the holy water on our foreheads or whatever and showed us the huge stained glass windows she had commissioned for each of her brothers.  We found out later that we weren't really supposed to go in there since neither of us were Catholic.  Oops. 

 

 

Then we went out to Baby's house for dinner and birthday cake, to celebrate each of our 21st birthdays.  I guess it's such a big deal there that we each got a birthday cake, for me it was 6 months after my birthday, for Rachel I think it was like 9 or 10, but we had missed our party evidently so we got one. 

Then Maureen and Baby fired up the record player and taught us how to do some Irish dances:

 

 

That's Maureen, Baby, and me.  Which, incidentally, they pronounced Maureen like "Murren", like they do on Braveheart.  And I guess you can tell from that picture why they referred to me probably a dozen times as a "really big girl" and kept trying to give me like 3x as much food as everybody else got.  Welcome to Europe, Amazonian Texas woman. 

They took us back into town, and back to our room, where I spent a lot of the night on the roof journaling.  Then in the morning, I got up and went down for breakfast, where I had most of the dining room to myself, except for this incredibly posh English couple that were just in from the fox hunt, in those like wide-hipped pants and hats and everything.  The food, the place, and the people -- it was like I was in the middle of a movie in like the 1890s.  Irish breakfast, fyi, consists of exTREMEly strong black tea, about 7 kinds of sausage, including this blackish blood sausage, several eggs, and rock hard, dark brown toast. 

I then went and walked around Loughrea, the CUTEST little town.  Here's the cathedral:

 

Which was surrounded by Whomping Willows:

 

Then we got on the bus again and went to Galway. 

In Galway, Rachel's grad school application deadlines were sneaking up on her, and she had to spend a lot of time working on stuff for school.  I just kind of poked around by myself.  We were in this hostel that I had stayed in the first time I was there, the one with a girl's room with about 20 beds.  There was only one other girl in our room that week though, a girl named Roso from Cataluna, in Spain.  (Pronounced Ro-jo, with the J sound). 

 

 

We got there I think on Thanksgiving, and I've told this story before.  But anyway, she went out to dinner with us, and took us to this internet cafe where she met up with a bunch of other people from Spain, and we ended up all going out that night for drinks.  Me, 2 Madrilenos, several Catalunians, several Basques, and one Italian.  I spent the night learning a bit (via spirited but good-natured arguments) about the Catalunian and Basque separatist movements, which is when I got the idea for my senior thesis comparing the Basque separatist organization ETA to the IRA.  It was a super fun night for an international studies major.

 

 

The next day I did a bit of shopping and walked around, then Rachel and I went on a bus tour of the western coast.  We met this other American guy, Russell, who was pretty cool.  We went to the Burren, which if I remember right (I can't believe how much I've forgotten) is where there are the most, like, Gaelic Irish left in the country.  There are whole towns and counties there where Gaelic is the official language, and they don't even have street signs or anything in English.  Here's an ancient grave in the Burren:

 

 

I've got a lot of pictures coming up so I'm going to start another post.

Now on to Donegal. 

Cliffs just behind Micheal's house:

 

A view from his front door:

 

More cliffs, with part of the falling-down watchtower:

 

Frank, Rebecca and me in my hostel in Galway (in the middle of the night):

 

That's it for now, but I did go back to Ireland two other times that semester.  More on that later.

Here are my pictures:

 

My room in Four Courts hostel:

 

Cathedral right behind my hostel:

 

Christchurch Cathedral, just up the street:

 

St. Stephen's Green:

 

Trinity College, where I totally wandered around and like sat on benches outside of lecture halls seeing if I could pass for a student.  Not sure why wouldn't have, but oh well.  It was a thrill.

 

A cool looking building, I don't actually remember where it was:

 

Dublin Castle:

 

This is this awesome old building that Bono and the Edge own, it's a hotel.  It's GORGEOUS inside.  Just up the Liffey from where I stayed:

 

The Liffey, goes right through the middle of Dublin:

 

More in the next post....

So, backing up a bit. 

When I first left for my semester in Europe, I went to Ireland for a couple of weeks before heading to Spain.  I flew from DFW straight to London, then to Dublin.  I got off the plane, went and waited at the baggage claim for just about forever, and still no bag.  So I went up to the little desk, registered my lost suitcase, and got the complimentary overnight bag (tiny toiletries, standard fare, and then an absolutely ENORMOUS, practically see-thru, white t-shirt and some equally enormous white unisex underwear.)

I walked out the doors of the airport, my first time outside a building on the continent of Europe (this time around anyway), and was greeted by enormous thick clouds of cigarette smoke.  I remember thinking "yes.  I have arrived.  I'm really in Ireland."  BUT, I then found out that they had recently passed this ordinance that made smoking in ANY enclosed space illegal unless it was your own home.  Like, including restaurants, bars, even clubs.  It was kind of crazy, and kind of nice, but you also realize that the smoke was kind of a nice buffer to the sweat and b.o. smell in most clubs, and I just might prefer it in that case.  But anyway.

So I went and found my hostel on Merchant's Quay on the Liffey, went into my room (which had six beds), and met this girl Emily from Australia who was the only other occupant in the room that night.  It was mid-morning and I decided I needed to adjust my clock and everything, so I was going to go look around and make myself stay up until a normal bedtime.  I found a little independent theater tucked away in this little artsy part of downtown, and they were showing the Donnie Darko Director's cut that night (which had just been released), so Emily and I went that night, and I can't remember ever being so completely and utterly tired as I was by the time it was over.

So the next day I woke up, still no suitcase.  With the time change and the trans-Atlantic flight and all, it was Wednesday morning and had been Sunday night the last time I showered.  So.  That was lovely.  I tucked that white shirt all the way down to my knees and put a little jacket on over it, and headed out.  I got a day pass on this tour bus thing that was a hop-on-hop-off, and took you to all of the good places, so I kind of just used it as a bus pass around the city.  I can't remember what exactly I did on what days, but I saw a good bit of Dublin. 

I LOVED St. Stephen's Green and went there a bunch just to read and sit around.  I also would go to this coffee shop/bookstore/crepe shop thing across the Ha'Penny Bridge from my hostel, it was tiny but 3 stories high with this rickety winding staircase and this amazing cafe at the top.  I also discovered the magical combination of Club Orange and salt and vinegar crisps.  Mmmm.  And how an entire half of Dublin smells like a giant bakery thanks to the Guinness brewery.  Which is, fyi, only the second largest brewery in the world.  The only one that tops it is the Guinness brewery in Lagos. 

The last night before I left, I went out with a bunch of Australian kids from my hostel (I guess most Aussies and Kiwis take about a year or so to travel between college and the real world.  Something about being thousands of miles from anything else but ocean, that'd be my guess.)  We went to the Boar's Head (I think, it's been a while), the oldest pub in Dublin.  It's been there since I think the year 1190.  If memory serves.  That pub is 300 years older than America. 

About a week in, I went to Donegal to see my friend Micheal.  I definitely took the wrong bus line and ended up on the COMPLETE opposite edge of his county from where I was supposed to be.  Luckily, Ireland is about the size of Grapevine Mills Mall and I was only about 45 minutes away.  So anyway I waited in this little pizza place for him and his buddy to come and pick me up, then drove to their town, Teelin. 

Micheal lived on the coast, like a few minute's walk from the cliffs and the Atlantic.  One of the days I was there we walked up and saw this old World War II signal tower thing where people would camp out and light a fire if they saw the enemy, then the next guy down would light a fire, etc.  It was kind of crumbling, but we sat in it for a while and it was gorgeous. 

Oh, and there was actually another girl living in the house at the time, Rebecca.  Rebecca was American and had met one of Micheal's brothers in Dublin a couple of years back, and just really hit it off.  She had gone back to the States, tied up a few things, finished school, and moved to Ireland full-time.  She was living at their house (even though the brother was in Scotland at the time), until she found a job nannying nearby.  She was suuuuper cool and it was this nice surprise to have an American, almost-my-age buddy up there in the middle of nowhere Ireland.  I pretty much totally wanted to be her. 

Ha, so I was staying in Cormac's room which was all old and comfy, and in this cold house with HOWLING wind all around you but these huge thick comfy old blankets and stuff, I don't think I've ever slept better in my entire life.  The first morning, I wake up to Micheal standing there with a cup of tea, and he's like "breakfast is ready.  I caught it this morning."  So I go in and there's these fish fillets and granola and boiled eggs on those tiny little stands, which I proceded to peel, (all the while wondering how on earth I was supposed to eat it on a little stand), which drew extremely quizzical but polite glances from mine hosts, who were finally like "um, what are you doing?" and whacked off the top of theirs with their spoons.  Bizarre people.  Oh, but so I was like "did you seriously go catch this this morning?" and Micheal's all "hahaha, no.  Silly.  I caught it yesterday." 

One of the days I was there we drove up to Derry just to look around.  Derry's on the border of Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and had probably the 2nd most violence during the Troubles, next to Belfast.  It's also where Micheal grew up, for part of his life anyway, and where his dad Mic used to teach history.  They had vendors on the street, and literally like on one side of the street they'd take Euros only, and on the other side, pounds sterling.  Half of them called it Londonderry, half Derry.  We walked along the Derry wall, saw a march of the Orangemen, and even heard a controlled detonation of a car bomb that the police (Garda) had found.  It also had these amazing political murals on the ends of the buildings, and I think they weren't even supposed to be there, some guy did them all in the middle of the night but they were phenomenal. 

The whole town of Teelin is like a butcher shop, a pub, and a post office.  I saw some signs up at one point for a town fair, (I think that's what they called it) and I was like "oh, we should go!" Micheal looked at me like I was just about crazy, and I was like "what, are they not fun?" and he goes "um, people bring sheep to sell, or they go to buy sheep.  There's just sheep." 

We also went one day to visit Kitty, kind of the town matriarch.  She had a bunch of sons that I guess had turned into like the town butcher, the priest, the barkeeper and the whatever, so that pretty much everything in the town came back to her.  She was hilarious, and about 95 years old.  And smoked like a chimney. 

So my second-to-last night there, one of the girls in town was having a birthday party.  So we went to the pub, and pretty much the ENTIRE town was there.  Every age, from little kids to Kitty, all just knockin' em back and having a blast.  After a few (read: probably at least 10) Guinnesses, Micheal's inner songwriter came out (by popular demand), and he treated us to some of his songs, which were toooootally hilarious.  One was about his friend Eamonn who had bought a ram at a fair one year for like 250E, and woke up the next morning and it was dead.  It was called "Eamonn's Ram".  Another was called "Suicidal Sheep."  Theme, yes.  He had this guitar that he had to be holding to perform, and occasionally at random intervals he would strum, but he had no clue how to play any actual chords. 

Later, Eamonn, who was already about 6'5", had this gorgeous smile and thiiiick curly hair, decided to go out and get his plasterer's stilts from his car and wear them into the pub.  Stilts, on an already extremely tall, extremely drunken, Irishman.  So we ran out and got them and (team effort) strapped them on, and then I was lucky enough to be his escort back into the pub.  We all danced for hours or just sat around. 

And with Rebecca and me being the only American girls most of them had seen in a veeeeery long time, let's just say I was more than taken care of and never paid for a single drink.  Oh, that, and for some reason rural Ireland is like 85% male.  They were all consummate gentlemen, of course. 

Around 2 or 3 in the morning, it started to kind of die down, and they started singing.  One of Kitty's sons, Paddy, got out a guitar, and they sang some songs in Gaelic and some in English, some of them funny poem-y songs, some really sad and sweet, some that only the really old people knew.  It was incredible. 

Then we drove (yikes!) home.  Not that anybody was really in danger except for sheep and possibly Micheal's bumper.  There aren't really "neighbors" in the sense you come to understand in American suburbia, and I doubt we saw the better side of 15 mph. 

From there I went to Galway for a couple of days, mostly just walked around and shopped and read by the river.  There I stayed in a hostel with 20 girls in my room.  Rebecca had started dating this Teelin guy Frank, and they had both headed to Galway about when I did.  I think he was going back to school.  Anyway, we hung out a little bit, went out to eat, got shown around by Frank.  The last night I was there, I was in bed asleep when the front desk guy from the hostel came and woke me up and said I had visitors.  Frank and Rebecca decided they couldn't just let me leave without really going out, so we went to this club (me in my glasses and a sweatshirt over my pjs), and had a ton of fun. 

The next day I left for Spain. 

Running out of time, I'll add in pictures later.