Monday, September 10, 2007

 

Long time no write

 

Well folks, I’m back. Sorry for the long period of inactivity, but I have been having major internet problems at home (as in I haven’t had it!), so I have been unable to update things. That’s not to say that I haven’t been busy, because I most certainly have been. However, it has been so long since I’ve written anything down that I might not be able to remember everything! I’ll try my best though.

 

The first thing that I can recall is that my friend Theresa came from Denmark to stay with me on August 16. She brought her friend Marianne, so my flat was a bit crowded for a week (Marianne left on the 23rd of August). I actually didn’t get to see very much of either of them that week, however, as I was working as usual. Also, I went to the Highland Games in Crieff with my friend Charlee from August 18th to 20th. We took the train after work on Saturday to Charlee’s grandmother’s cottage in Perth (where we would stay for the entire weekend). Crieff is Charlee’s old stomping ground, so she knew all the local places to go, and also how to get around town without any trouble. We went to the games on Sunday, and I had a blast. All I can say is kilts, kilts, kilts! Lol. They had all the traditional games like the caber toss, the stone toss, highland dancing, piping competitions and a whole lot more. I was in heaven. We spent a large chunk of the day milling around the park where it was held, and I even drank my first hard cider (mmm, tasty!). Afterwards, we went for a bite to eat in a local pub, where I courageously ordered (for only the second time in my life) haggis, neeps and tatties (a.k.a. haggis, turnips and potatoes). I actually quite like the taste of haggis (as long as I don’t think about what it consists of!). After lunch, we went walking in a really gorgeous park, with a little idyllic stream running through it. Eventually, Charlee’s grandmother picked us up and ferried us back to her cottage in Perth where she made us the most delicious dinner of homemade chicken soup for an appetizer, then a succulent meal of roasted chicken, potatoes and vegetables. When dinner was over, Charlee and I got ready to go out for a few drinks with some of her old friends. I was a little hesitant to go, as I’m usually quite shy around new people…especially when they are all old friends and usually just talk about all their old memories (of which, of course, I know nothing about). However, her friends were all really nice and we got on well. Needless to say there was a lot of drinking involved (we had to return 3 high stacks of glasses several times from our table to the bar). I cannot honestly remember how many drinks I had, only that I woke up the next morning still quite drunk! After the pub we went in search of a pool table. We found one in this really seedy little bar in a back ally. Charlee and one of her friends played a few games while I spent the time trying to get away from this icky old man who kept trying to hit on me…I mean really! This guy was like 60 years old and wouldn’t leave me alone. I tried to escape from him by going to the loo, only to find out that the state of the toilets was even worse than the state of the old man! I was so happy when it was time to leave that place. Charlee and I took a taxi back to her gran’s and I instantly fell asleep. We sluggishly got up the next morning to catch a train back to Aberdeen. I had the best weekend, especially considering that it was a spur of the moment trip that had only been decided upon the night before we left.

For the next two weeks, it was work as usual. However, one day Theresa and I made a pact to drink the 7 Deadly Sins at Slain’s Castle before we left for Dublin. That night ended up being August 23rd. We got all dressed up, as per usual and headed off to the pub. Now, I would just like to take the opportunity to say that I was under the impression that the 7 Deadly Sins were merely shots. I figured that I could throw them all back in quick succession and then reap the benefits for the rest of the night. I was mistaken. After we had ordered and paid for them (I think it came to something like £24 – about $48 - …I can’t remember exactly anymore), I watched as they began to mix them. Yeah, well, it turns out that they were actually full drinks! That’s right, I had just agreed to drink 7 mixed cocktails. I needed a tray just to hold all of mine, and as Theresa had ordered the same, she needed one as well. The bartender thought that we had ordered the 7 Sins for the both of us, and then her eyes bugged out when we corrected her and explained that no, we each wanted all 7 different drinks. So, after about 10 minutes, they had finished making them all, and we walked to our table holding 14 drinks in total…yes indeed, we garnered quite a few stares. In case you’re wondering, the seven sins are: 

 

Now, I’ll be absolutely honest, I didn’t finish all of them, but I think that I earned my free t-shirt nevertheless! I almost got sick drinking the Baileys one, so Theresa took mine and swapped with her Jack Daniels drink. We both got about 90% through the drinks when Theresa disappeared (as she is prone to do at pubs), and then came back with two guys (which she is also prone to do at pubs!). One was Irish and the other was Scottish (she does have good taste though! Lol). We talked for awhile, until Slain’s closed at midnight, and then we headed over to another pub so that they could dance (I’m getting on in years, so I usually don’t partake much in the dancing anymore). The guys bought us drinks, but as I was just about ready to pass out, I declined and accepted water instead. We were there for quite some time when I told Theresa that I was going home with or without her, and as she hadn’t brought her keys with her, even though I told her she should before we left (and I said I wasn’t going to buzz her in if she came home later, because I suspected that I wouldn’t be waking up anytime in the near future), she came home with me. I spent the next day nearly comatose on the sofa. Whew, was that one heck of a night!

 

Things were much quieter during the next week, and then suddenly September 1st was upon us. That was the day we flew to Ireland. I was so excited. We chose Ryanair, because the fare was only 2 pence roundtrip (okay, with taxes added on it came to 30 quid…still pretty freakin’ good for an airplane ticket!) It was a bit strange though, as Ryanair doesn’t have assigned seating, so we had to rush onto the plane in order to get the best seats. I only brought one carry-on bag with me because Ryanair charges £10 per checked bag, and I was too cheap to pay that. The flight only took about 50 minutes, and then we landed in Dublin. We took a bus from the airport into the city centre, and then tried to find out hostel. I was a bit worried about staying in a hostel, as this was my first time going to one, but my fears were quickly dispelled when we got to Jacob’s Inn and I saw how nice it was. We chose to stay in a 12 bed mixed dorm room (simply because it was only 8 quid a night), so there were a lot of other people in our room, but it didn’t really bother me; I had my iPod to drown out the noise. We stored our luggage under the bed and then left to go exploring. The first place we went to was the Guinness factory. You can’t go to Ireland without touring the Guinness brewery! It was really informative, and we even got a free pint of Guinness in the sky bar on the top floor. We also go to try a new recipe of Guinness that wasn’t available anywhere else in the world! Now, I’m not actually a big fan of Guinness, but I still had a good time, and for some reason it didn’t taste as bad as I remembered. After the tour, we spent a lot of time in the gift shop. It’s amazing how many Guinness-related things you can buy there!

 

After leaving there, we just went back to the hostel, as it had been a long day already. The next day promised to be very busy as well. We woke up early and then decided to go to Trinity College and look at the Book of Kells. For those of you who aren’t familiar, the Book of Kells is one of the most famous illuminated manuscripts in the world, written in 800AD. It contains transcriptions of the four Gospels. It is the most elaborate manuscript to survive from the early Middle Ages. Cameras aren’t allowed in the exhibit, so I don’t have any photos to show you…although even if I did, they wouldn’t do the book any justice. It is absolutely beautiful, and quite an amazing feat of workmanship when you think about how long ago it was written. The Book of Kells is yet another example of my history course coming to life. You learn about these things in uni, but viewing the actual work brings a feeling that is difficult to describe (similar to the time when I actually touched the papal bull that created the University of Aberdeen in 1495).

After exploring the Book of Kells and Trinity College’s Long Library (which is this amazing old library filled from floor to ceiling with old manuscripts), we decided to talk a walk in a nearby park. All along the walk there were these photographs of nature displayed. We took a picture of about half a dozen as we walked along. There was supposed to be a free performance of The Taming of the Shrew there, but just as it was about to begin, the sky opened up and it started to rain heavily. Ah well. We decided that it was time to leave and headed for Dublin Castle (pictured at right). Luckily for us, admission was free that day (I have no idea why), so we took the free tour. It’s amazing to think that the castle held such importance and use until just recently. I also found it extremely interesting to find that an old moat (made by diverting a local river around the castle base) still flowed underneath the ground. We got to go down into an old ruined are of the castle and see it.

 

After all the castle exploring we went for a nice dinner in a little Italian restaurant, and then went to see the movie Knocked Up. What a snooze fest that was! Theresa liked it, but I found myself falling asleep half way through. I would not recommend that movie to my worst enemy! We went to sleep early, as we knew we had to get up at around 8am or so the next day to pick up our rental car.

 

Monday brought with it clear skies and an overwhelming sense of dread in the pit of my stomach. Why, you might ask? Well, because we were on our way to pick up the rental car. As I am 27, and Theresa is only 21, she cannot rent a car herself, so it was up to me. I got an automatic of course (which is difficult to find! Europeans really have something against them…it’s all manual, manual, manual over here!). It felt strange at first sitting behind the wheel, which was located on the right-hand side of the car, but I actually got used to it fairly quickly. We ended up getting a 2007 Nissan Micra. Theresa thought that it would be really tiny, because they usually are, but it turned out to be a nice 4-door model. We nicknamed it ‘Pink Lady’ (even though it was bronze color), because we were eating apples, and I stuck the label on the dashboard. Our next task was to try and navigate through the streets of cramped Dublin in order to find the motorway that would take us west. Of course, we got lost. Lol, luckily, however, it was only a 10 minute detour before we found the correct route out. Just outside of Dublin, I came up to my first roundabout ever, and I was feeling a bit nervous, but once I had gone through I realized that they are nothing to worry about! Within a half hour of getting behind the wheel, I was totally comfortable driving on the left and navigating the roundabouts and small roads. I do have to say though, it is a good thing that I’ve been studying for my British license, because I knew what all the strange signs and road rules were.

 

We made our way southwest towards Cork. I have to just interject here for a second and say that Theresa is the absolute worst passenger a driver can have! She kept shrieking like a banshee at every car that pulled out in front of us, and then she made the cardinal sin of passengers: she invaded my driving space. Apparently, when somebody lets you pass over here, you are supposed to flash your hazard lights as a thank you to them. Theresa didn’t inform me what she was doing, and then all of a sudden I saw lights flashing on my dashboard and got worried. Like I didn’t already have enough to deal with already (what with new road rules, driving on the left, having to figure out how fast we were going…everything is in kilometers per hour, etc), I didn’t need somebody messing with my lights and whatnot as well! So, anyhoo, we eventually made it to Blarney Castle (after Theresa gave me bad directions and got us lost on a tiny one-lane road…my one stipulation for driving was that I did not want to drive on a one-lane road, as the thought of two cars veering head-on towards each other at over 50mph scares the bejeezes out of me!). So needless to say I was a bit snippy at her until we got to the castle. Blarney Castle is beautiful! The whole point of going there is getting the opportunity to kiss the Blarney Stone, which is said to give the person the gift of eloquence. Winston Churchill even made the trip and kissed the stone! I was terrified, however, because in order to kiss the stone you have to lay on your back, hold on to two railings and then practically lean all the way backwards, being supported by a castle worker…and all of this several hundreds of feet in the air! My phobia of heights was not my friend that day, I’ll tell you. But I did it, and the proof is in the picture to the right. After being at the very top of the castle, we had to take these itsy bitsy winding stone stairs all the way down to the bottom. One girl coming down was in hysterics and crying…I felt her pain!

 

Theresa and I spent quite a lot of time exploring the grounds of the castle, and were taking pictures of everything. Below is us taking a second to relax in a tree. After all the walking, we definitely needed the break.

    

When we were all done for the day there, we got back in the car. However, as I was sick of Theresa freaking out over my driving (which, honestly, was not the bad!), I told her to put her money where her mouth was and drive the next leg of the trip. She went all pale at the thought! Ha ha, now she knew what it felt. She relented, however, and we continued to drive westward towards the Atlantic coast. When it began to get dark, we looked for a nice B&B to stay at. We found one in the town of Glengarriff. It cost us about 35 euros each, if I’m not mistaken. The breakfast the next morning was fairly nice and consisted of cereal, orange juice, eggs, bacon, sausages, white pudding, toast, fruit and tea. We headed out early though, because we knew we had a long drive ahead of us. Theresa drove at first, but as we were nearing the beginning of the scenic drive on the Beara Peninsula, we realized that we would have to switch. I’m not much of a photo-taker, and Theresa is one of those people who take a picture of absolutely everything, so in order to get the most out of our drive, I had to get behind the wheel again. All was well for a while, but then as we were rounding the peninsula and heading inland again, the road became a one-lane gray road of death! Okay, maybe it’s not that bad, but it was one lane, the speed limit was 80 km/hour, and the lane was ridiculously twisty and turvey. It really did feel like a roller coaster, only I was the one driving. I had to somehow pull over at least 4-5 times to let cars going the other way pass by. Let me reiterate: I HATE ONE-LANE ROADS! So, after about an hour of that, we finally came to some normal roads, and Theresa once again took over driving as we headed towards the town of Killarney.

 

The purpose of our visit there was my spontaneous need to see Ross Castle (pictured left).  I’m a castle fanatic (in case you were not already aware), and I’ll use any excuse I can to visit one. This particular castle was a tower house, meaning it was simply a very tall block of a building, where a prominent family of the area once lived. The views were absolutely spectacular, however. Once we took the tour, we decided to go on a horse drawn carriage ride around the surrounding lake. Wow. The pictures don’t completely show just how gorgeous the scenery actually was. The ride took about 40 minutes, and the driver was this old Irish man named Seamus (pronounced ‘shame-us’). He was quite the dirty old man. He kept making sexual remarks and whatnot. I started feeling really uncomfortable, but Theresa was just laughing. When we had finished, we went to pay him his 40 euro fee, but Theresa didn’t have enough, so he agreed to drop the amount to 30 euro if she gave him a kiss. See? Dirty old man.

 

After our trip to Killarney, we continued on along the Dingle Peninsula for another scenic drive. The first place we stopped was the tiny town of Inch, which is said to have one of the most beautiful beaches in Ireland. Boy, they sure weren’t kidding! This was actually the first time that I got to set foot in the Atlantic Ocean. I’ve been to Florida a few times, but we always stayed on the Gulf of Mexico side, so I never got to go in the Atlantic (regardless of how many times I’ve actually flown over the darn thing!). The water wasn’t as cold as I thought it would be, and we frolicked there for a short time. After that, our next stop was the very miniscule town of Dingle. The only reason that I was adamant about going there was just because I wanted to see where one of my gorgeous Irish professors was born! Lol, yes, I know, it’s a bit stalker-ish, but we were there anyway, so it’s not like I made us go completely out of the way or anything. We were only there long enough to get some food for our long trip back to Dublin that night.

I was dreading that drive. Everybody that we told said we were crazy for trying to drive from Dingle to Dublin in one night. If you think about it, it was kind of ridiculous…we were going from the far west coast of Ireland to the east coast in one drive. However, I still contend that coming from the U.S., this drive was nothing…driving from southern to northern Minnesota would have been a longer trip, and nobody thinks twice about doing that! These Europeans are just babies! Lol. So, Theresa drove from the Dingle Peninsula to just outside of Limerick, where I took over. She adamantly refused to drive into Dublin. I’m a crap driver at night, as I find it really hard to see anything or judge distances, so I was really relived when I finally got the chance to get on a proper motorway and start cruising. We finally arrived in the city at about 10pm, which meant that we had been driving for over 12 hours that day! It’s quite exhausting, especially when you don’t know where you’re going and are not used to the roads. We parked the car just outside the rental place, so that we wouldn’t have to drive through the city the next morning during rush hour to return the car (clever thinking, eh?). We went to bed that night completely shattered, but it had been a beautiful and fun journey.

The next morning at 8am, Theresa learned that her plane left at 11am that morning (she hadn’t checked her flight time before then!), so we had to book it to car place to hand over the keys and then quickly walk back too the hostel so that she could get packed and leave. Now here’s the tricky part. She was leaving that day, but my flight wasn’t leaving until the next day, so I had to get all of my things packed and go to the reception area to check out of that reservation and get checked back into a new one for one more night. The ironic thing is that I ended up being allocated the exact same room and bed that I had previously been staying in, so I hadn’t needed to bring my luggage down. I lugged it back upstairs, with everyone staring at me because they thought I had left, and then went back downstairs to walk Theresa to her bus. I was worried about how I was going to entertain myself for a whole day and a half, but it turned out not to be that bad. I walked around, doing some more sightseeing in the city, and then decided to go to a bookstore to buy some books to keep me busy. I found a bench in a nice little secluded park and read for a couple of hours. After that I decided to go see the Simpson Movie for the second time (it is so funny…I just can’t get enough!). After that I grabbed some dinner and then went back to the hostel to read some more on the super comfy leather sofas in the front room. By then it was night so I went off to bed. The next day, I checked out of my room at 11am and then sat on the sofa again and read some more until I left for my airport bus at 2pm. I checked in for my flight and waited. And waited some more. And waited even longer. We were all queued up for our plane, but they didn’t let us start boarding. The funny thing is the sign for our flight flashed up ‘boarding’, and then a half hour later, when our plane was supposed to have departed, it flashed up ‘departed’. We all laughed at the stupidity of the situation. A few minutes later, the screen changed to show the next flight, which went to Nice. We all laughed again and joked that ‘oh, I guess we’re all going to Nice instead’. FINALLY, they let us board, and the trip back was uneventful. I was so happy to land in Scotland…it always feels good go come home, no matter how good a trip you had. There’s just something about sleeping in your own bed that is very comforting.

Breathtaking view from Ross Castle

So there you have it, a short run-down of my adventure in Ireland. I haven’t fallen in love with a place so quickly since coming over to Scotland. My new ranking of countries that I’ve been to that I’d love to live in is as follows: Scotland, Ireland, the U.S., Denmark, and Mexico. Wow, looking at that list I realize that I haven’t been to very many places yet…I must rectify that situation as soon as possible!

The next thing that I’m looking forward to is uni starting soon. My brain definitely needs the stimulation after a summer off. Plus, I’m entering my Junior Honour year, which means that every single grade I get counts towards my final degree, so the pressure is definitely on. Can I rise to the challenge? Well, we’ll just have to see in two weeks when classes begin again!

 

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