Ireland

Saturday, July 28, 2012 (Ireland day 1)

We got up at 3 this morning to catch a taxi at 4 to the Manchester airport for our flight to Dublin. I didn’t sleep very well last night because I was worried about getting up on time, so I slept for the whole cab ride. I really don’t remember anything except I was slightly worried to fall asleep. The dude could totally have killed us without a second thought or anyone noticing. But I couldn’t stay awake. We got to the airport with like 2 hours until our flight, so we went through security (we got to keep our shoes on!) and everything and wandered around shops. I fell asleep on the plane, too. The plane ride was only like 45 minutes or something. So then we were in Ireland! We landed in Dublin but then we realized...we weren’t REALLY in Dublin. We were outside of the heart of Dublin. So we thought we’d walk into town. After about ten minutes, we realized the sidewalk ended and we couldn’t. So we went back to the airport and a nice Irishman helped us figure out which bus to take. We paid 12 euro for a ticket into Dublin city center with an open return included, which was great because we wouldn’t have to pay for a ticket back and we’d have a for sure ride back to the airport. On the bus, we realized how impossible it would have been to walk to Dublin. A. There was a “no pedestrians” sign and B. it took almost 40 minutes driving, so walking? Yeah, not so much.

We got into Dublin and decided to get some breakfast. By then it was about 10:30 I think. We found a store that was advertising a 4-item breakfast for only 3.95. Sounded great. We went in and it was like a swanky cafeteria, basically. So we went through the line and the cafeteria lady asked what I wanted. All I saw was unidentifiable fried stuff and lots of sausage and bacon. But there were little half Roma tomatoes with seasonings on them and beans, so I got that. She seemed confused that I didn’t want more but I said no. Then I grabbed an apple Danish and there was a fruit salad, so I loaded up a plate. 4 items. I get to the cash register and the girl tells me the fruit salad is 3.50. What? I only had 4 items. Nope. The 4 items applied to the fried stuff only. I paid 8 euro for one tiny tomato half, a scoop of beans, a Danish, and a little plate of fruit salad. This did not please me.

We wandered around O’Connell Street (the main central street) for a while, looking at shops and statues and stuff. We went into a touristy store and spent a long time looking around. We were all super tired from getting up super early and wandering around forever, but we couldn’t check into our hotel until 2. We had bought tickets for this hop on, hop off bus tour, so we rode that around for a while. We checked a map and thought if we got off on one of the stops, we could walk to our hotel from there. The tour was cool. The architecture in Dublin is amazing! A lot of stone buildings and cool colored doors. And obviously there’s a ton of history. But we were so so tired and freezing because it kept raining and the wind was blowing and the bus was a double-decker and we were on the top deck, which was open, so we were soaked. So we got to the stop we thought would take us to our hotel and started to get off. Luckily Catherine asked how to get to our hotel from there, because the bus driver looked at us like we were nuts and told us we were miles away. We had to get back on the bus, get off at a different stop, and take a regular city bus to our hotel. What? Not cool. So we did, but figuring out which bus to take was confusing and we were supposed to have exact change and we didn’t know what was going on. Eventually we found the 66 bus we needed and struggled through finding exact change for the fare. But then we realized we didn’t know which stop we needed to get off at. Our tickets said a street, not a stop number, but then none of the streets or the stops had street names anywhere. Apparently Dublin doesn’t believe in street signs. So we rode for a while and then a sign said we were heading toward Galway, which is a whole different city, so we got sort of freaked out. We went down and asked the bus driver if we needed to get off and he gave us this sort of exasperated look that said we were idiots and told us it was the next stop. Once we got off, he pointed in the general direction of our hotel, but apparently we were trying to go the wrong way or a dangerous way or something, because he stopped the bus again and pointed out the pedestrian path for us. Supes awk.

We finally saw our hotel, but there was a big wall around it so we had to keep walking to find the opening. Walking. Walking. Walking. Where’s the freaking opening?? We had to walk into this shopping center and then walk around to get to the hotel. By this time we were all tired and hungry and frustrated and annoyed. We finally got into the hotel. We got checked in and they handed us three room keys. We took the elevator to the first floor, because apparently Dublin also doesn’t believe in making your room number (343) match up with the floor. Floor one for a room in the three hundreds? Okay. We took a two hour nap and then tried to figure out what to do. Cherisse had booked us tickets to this traditional Irish show thing in Dublin. I really didn’t want to try navigating the bus again and going to some stupid party thing. I was tired and cranky. But she (well, actually, Mom) had already paid for it. So we paid another 2.15 for the bus and the nice bus driver helped us figure out where to go and even let us only pay 2 euro each because we didn’t have the right change. We found the exact pub it was at and had like two hours until it stated, so we found this convenience store thing and bought food. Cherisse and Catherine bought sandwiches, but they all had meat in them, so I bought a pastry and an apple. The pastry was called a flap-jack, but it was nothing like a pancake. It was oaty and full of different fruit and SO GOOD. The apple cost 50 cents. Seriously! For one apple. Is fruit hard to come by in Dublin or something? I don’t know what the deal is with their fruit being so expensive. But we were all much more cheerful with full tummies and it was a nice night and it wasn’t raining (at that exact moment, anyway). We wandered around and then went to the show.

I was grumpy about going to the show, but it was awesome! Super cool music and the guys were funny and talented and it was tons of fun. One of the guys were really cute, too. He played the illin pipe, which sort of looks like a tiny bagpipe but is pretty different. It’s the really distinctive sound in Irish music. You don’t breathe into it; you pump it with your elbow. And you play this pipe thing with your fingers but you have to use the palm of your hand to play chords on these other keys, all at the same time. It seemed crazy hard. We bought the CD of the band because they were so cool. And the Irish songs were pretty funny. Then we successfully caught our bus back to the hotel and were pretty proud of ourselves. We were sitting in the lobby using the wifi (our hotel didn’t have wifi in the rooms) and trying to figure out what to do for Sunday, whether we were going to church or what, and we were getting grouchy again. There was no way to figure out how to get to church because we didn’t know street names or anything. Cherisse wanted to go see the Cliffs of Moher, but it’s like 4 hours away and would’ve cost like 60 euro just for the way there. Mark said his group was going to Blarney Castle, so we were thinking of meeting up with them, but we weren’t sure how we’d do that.

While we were sitting there trying to decide what to do, this guy who was sitting by us also using the wifi asked if we wanted tickets for the red hop on, hop off tour. We'd gotten tickets for the green one and the red one was definitely better. It went to more places and a bus came right to our hotel at 10 every morning (or so he told us). He said it was for two days but he and his family were heading to London and couldn't use the tickets for the next day and asked if we wanted theirs. We said that would be great and he asked what our room number was so he could leave them at the front desk for us in the morning. That sort of sketched us out a little, because we didn't want to tell him our room number, so Cherisse just told him our reservation was under Gore and we hoped he wouldn't find us and kill us. So we decided to stay in Dublin and go along on the tour. We set alarms so we could be up early enough to check out and catch the red bus at 10 from the hotel and figured if he didn't actually leave the tickets we could just take the city bus and keep doing our green one. I kept tossing and turning because I was worried that guy was going to break into our room or something.

Sunday, July 29, 2012 (Ireland day 2)

Catherine woke us up and said, “It's 9:00.” None of us had woken up early like we'd planned. I hurried and took a shower and we rushed to get dressed and out the door. We made it to the lobby by 9:40 and checked out and went outside to find the bus. No bus. We stood around for a little while and then went back into the lobby and asked one of the desk clerks. The bus actually left at 9:40, not 10. The guy was wrong. That sucked, so we still had to pay our 2 euro for the city bus, but it was super nice of him to give us the tickets and the red tour was a lot better. I am 90% sure that the recorded narration on our tour was Allen Leech. I've done a lot of listening to his voice and he's from Dublin so I'm pretty sure it was him. I wish it would've been a live guided tour and he was the guide. We decided to just ride it all the way through before getting off anywhere, because we hadn't been all the way through yet. We saw more cool architecture and places of interest. Phoenix Park looked really cool. It's huge—twice the size of Central Park, according to Allen Leech. And we passed the American embassy and the home of the Irish president (also a white house...I think they even call it the White House). They don't plant any of the trees or flowers; they just let them grow naturally, except in one place. And the entrance has no gates. Apparently, legend has it that in the 30s there was a big Eucharistic conference going on at the park and the people in charge took the gates off to accommodate all the crowds, but then they did such a good job storing them they never found the gates again. And the first Irish president, who established the park, did it because he was a politician and a park ranger. Pretty cool. It got to the end of the tour and we stayed on for it to go back around so we could visit some of the stops we wanted to go to.

We went to Trinity College-Dublin, which is a big, old college. The grounds were super pretty and there were lots of statues and stones and everything that seems to be typical Dublin architecture. And (as Allen Leech told me on the bus), one of the provosts of the college (whatever a provost is), some guy named Lecky, had prophetic words: he said over his dead body would women be admitted to degree, and he died in 1903—the same year women were admitted to Trinity College. It sounds way cooler in an Irish accent. Allen Leech went to Trinity College, so I was excited about that. And he studied theater, which is in the same building as social sciences. We would have been in the same building if we had gone to school together! Cool. We bought some snacks from a vending machine. For some reason all the chips were cheese and onion flavored. We tried it—not my favorite. I bought a Mars Bar, but it's different than the Mars Bars we used to have in the States. It's basically just a Milky Way.

After Trinity College, we went to Dublin Castle. We thought it was free (Allen Leech said we could wander around the grounds for free!), and we were pretty excited about that because we didn't want to blow any more money. But then when we got in there, we found out that you can't go inside unless you pay for a guided tour. Lame. We didn't want to pay, so we just looked around at the cool architecture. We also got to go into a church on the grounds that super ornate and gorgeous. You couldn’t go into the actual church part, but you could look into the entryway. Really, really pretty. We walked up the street to Christ’s Church Cathedral, but it’s another one that cost money so we just looked around. As pretty as it was, I won’t lie, it wasn’t that different from everything else.

About that time, it started raining. Now, here's something we learned about Dublin: it rains on a schedule. It's like every half hour it will rain for ten minutes. Usually it's just sort of a drizzle, and all the buildings have little overhangs you can stand over until it stops. But this was not the light drizzle we'd gotten used to. It started pouring. We stood under some trees for a little while, because we weren't close to any buildings to stand under, but it wasn't super effective. St. Patrick's Cathedral was up ahead, and we wanted to go there anyway, so we booked it over. But there was a guy outside saying it was closed for about two hours because they were having services. Uuugh. Some guy in front of us went in, and it occurred to me we could probably go see the service, so I asked and he said yes, as long as we stayed for the whole thing. Done. So we went in and immediately saw one of the most impressive medieval-y looking churches I've ever seen. It was crazy—all stone bricks and stained glass and candles. It looked like a movie. It wasn't mass; it was something called evensong, where they just sing songs and read passages from the Bible. I was kinda bummed, because I've never seen Catholic mass and I really want to, but the evensong was cool. They handed us programs that told us when to sit and when to stand and when we should kneel. The pews had little cushioned bench things in front for when you kneel. I was surprised that the priest guy didn't actually preach...the program called it “lesson one” and “lesson two”, but all he did was read a few verses from the Bible and then the choir got back to singing.

After the service, we wandered around the cathedral. It was pretty awesome. They had a lot of history in there. There were memorials for people who had died and a bunch of memorials to different groups of soldiers. There was also this huge wooden door with a big hole in the middle and a plaque explaining that two families had been fighting (like the Hatfields and McCoys, I guess) and one of the families went to fight the other family, who was hiding behind their giant door. A guy in the first family realized that the bloodshed was pointless and wanted to declare a truce, but obviously the other family didn't trust him and wouldn't open the door, so he hacked a hole in the door and put his arm through as a show of good faith. It said that explains the expression “to chance your arm”, meaning to take a risk. I've never heard that expression, so it must be Irish or something. They also had the place where you could light candles, like I've always seen on movies (Rudy was the first one to come to mind), so I lit a candle. There was a sign saying something about the welfare of the homeless, so I lit a candle for the homeless. I'm a fan of social services and such.

We kind of spent too long in the cathedral and the gift shop, so then we had to hustle back to where we were going to catch our shuttle to the airport. It was raining again, of course, but this time it wasn't stopping. We got kind of lost wandering around, trying to find O'Connell Street. I don't know what Europe's problem is, but they're not huge fans of street signs. So we were wandering wandering wandering, getting irritated because we were hungry and tired and lost and trying to hurry so we wouldn't miss the shuttle because we (obviously) needed to get to the airport. We never actually made our way to O'Connell Street, but we found a different stop for the airport shuttle, and there was a sandwich place right next to it, so we got food and waited at the stop. Eating definitely eased the grumpiness and we got on the shuttle and everything was fine. I fell asleep on the shuttle (of course...I fell asleep on any ride that was longer than twenty minutes if I didn't have to worry about getting off at the right stop) and when we got to the airport, I made quite the commotion getting off. I sort of fell out of my seat, and then I didn't notice the step to get into the aisle, so I tripped going down that, and then I accidentally hit someone with my bag, and then I tripped again going down the stairs to get off the bus. I left Dublin with a bang, that's for sure. There's really nothing to report about the plane ride or the taxi ride back to Catherine's, because I was asleep for both.

We got back to Catherine's at like 11, unpacked our stuff, and repacked for Germany in the morning, then went to sleep. Traveling is tiring. I've been exhausted this whole trip. Part of it stems from not sleeping well, because I haven't been running. Not running has just thrown everything off for me. My emotions are a lot harder for me to control because I don't have running to mellow me out. I get grumpier way easier and I can't control my temper as well. This has caused a lot of friction between Cherisse and I when we're traveling, because security and planes and bus rides are already sort of stressful, so me being impatient and grumpy doesn't help. I honestly almost killed her in Frankfurt.