6 posts tagged “world travels”

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....

The next day we went to Tangiers, drove by the strip where all of the movie stars used to live, like Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson and whoever.  Tangiers is GORGEOUS. 

 

It's so weird, we went to this beach and looking at the sunset, it looked like the sky in the Lion King.  So bizarre, because we were like not that many miles away from Spain, but somehow the sky just looked so African. 

 

Another view, these are obviously outside the city on the coast.  Um, duh.  But the city is really big.  I think I have a picture of it somewhere... 

 

Well, that's Tangiers but it doesn't really show what it's like. 

 

Need!  Photographer!

Anyway, the reason we drove out to the beach near Tangiers was to see where the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea "hug" each other, as Jamal said.  You can't really see it in the picture, but there was actually a little ridge in the water where they kind of hit up against each other, and the water was a little bit different colors. 

 

The African sunset.

 

We went to this really cool restaurant in Tangiers, where I got the "vegetarian" option, which naturally was chicken.  Evidently, to people in at least Morocco, Spain, Italy, and France, it has to be red and bleeding to be considered meat.  Who knew.

 

It was amazing, couscous and vegetables and an entire chicken, but it made me SO sick that night. 

 

These are some of the only pictures I have of Cynthia from the whole semester.  How sad is that?

 

Chefchouan will be later.  Running out of time.

Part 2 of my world travels. 

I went to Morocco either one day after I got back from Ireland, or I was back for one day before I went to Ireland.  I think I went to Morocco first. 

Anyway, my roommate Cynthia and I found the trip on the message board at our school.  We were picked up by this random professor guy in Granada, and the three of us drove to Malaga in his tiny little car.  When we got to Malaga, we met up with the rest of the tour group, which consisted of about seventeen Swedish and Dutch girls, all blonde except one, one more American girl, and one Dutch boy.  So, all in all, twenty girls, one boy.  They were all studying in Malaga.  Naturally, with 18 Swedish and Dutch, 3 Americans, all studying in Spain, and visiting Africa, the entire bus spoke English the whole trip. 

We got on the Gibraltar ferry, which was huge and amazingly fancy.  It had like tons of snack bars and it was all solid shiny wood, with tons of seating (it wasn't very full), and lots of decks. 

 

That's a view from the boat.  I am a genius, and did not take a single picture of the boat.  I always do that.  It was cool though.  I think what we're seeing there is Malaga (my excellent deductive skills tell me this, since it is a view of the wake of the boat.)

Our first day there we got a tour of Tetouan.  It seems like most of the larger cities in Morocco, at least the ones we went to, are divided into quarters, or maybe 3 or 5 sections.  Tetouan had a Jewish quarter, a Christian quarter, a Muslim quarter, and I think like a French quarter or something.  I don't remember, I can't believe how little I remember from some parts of this trip. 

Anyway we walked through some of the markets and stuff, and had to hold mint leaves under our noses so that we wouldn't be completely sickened by the smell.  It was right after the end of Ramadan, so Cynthia and I had brought long-sleeved, muted colored, plain, loose-fitting shirts and jeans, and just to be safe we had brought no jewelry and as few gadgets as we could get away with.  Pretty much every one of the Swedish and Dutch girls were about 6 feet tall, had platinum blonde hair, huge jewelry, tight-fitting, glittery tank tops, and like a million flashy phones and cameras.  They were comPLETEly bombarded in all the markets by vendors, everybody either would stop and stare when they walked by or come up and try (very persistently) to sell them something.  Cynthia and I and our little brown hair and boring clothes were practically left completely alone. 

 

An unbelievably crappy picture of the end of a road in a marketplace, I'm pretty sure this was in Tetouan.  I'm hiring a photographer to come on my next trip.

 

A paint store/stand.  You mix it yourself.

 

Hannah from Sweden getting dressed like a local by some local ladies.

 

Hannah and Jamal, our tour guide.  He was AWESOME.

 

This guy stopped and looked at us like we were the weirdest thing he'd ever seen until we were out of his sight.

We stayed in a really nice hotel that night, and all I really remember was that there was some football game on (no, not that football, the other one) that all the Europeans were FREAKING out over.  We definitely didn't watch it.  Oh, and we tended to get a cup of Yerba every single place we went. 

While we were in Tetouan, I think, our tourguide took us to this Berber carpet factory place.  I think he was getting some kind of kickback for it.  It was kind of shady.  We all went into this maze of a building with carpets everywhere, and they started doing this little presentation for us, showing us all of the carpets they had.  When we walked in, there were like 2 guys in there.  Then another guy came out with a rug, and another, and another, like just to lay them down to display, but there ended up being about 10 guys in there. 

 

Then, once the presentation was done, (our tourguide was nowhere to be seen), they scattered, and each one of the little Berber carpetmaker guys came and took us in ones or twos to some other random corner or secluded room in the big giant house, and started pushing the whole sales pitch.  I pulled my purse in and said "I don't have any money.  No tengo dinero." before they even said anything.  They were willing to take Visa, dirham, dollars, euros, probably even pesos.  Cynthia and I swore up and down that we had no money at all until they let us go. 

When we got back to the bus, all of these other girls had these rugs that they had bought for like 200 euros or something, just scared of the guys.  Sketchy!

Tangiers in another post -- this one's getting too big.