Ireland
Ireland was, in a word, wonderful. The order of this post is going to have to be a little weird, but I won't be able to fit it all in otherwise.
The Irish. First off, Ireland has a weird duality thing going on with it. When you walk down the street, everything feels more aggressive, like everyone's ready to fight all the time. It makes it a little uncomfortable walking down the street, because you're always wary about asking people where things are. Especially as an American, given the general feeling of the world towards us right now. But it's the complete opposite when you actually talk to the people - every single person I met in Ireland was really nice, helpful, and friendly. The Irish don't like what the American government is doing, but everyone I met seemed to be interested in me as an individual rather than as an American, which is a pleasant change from some countries I could name (you hear that, Spain?). Plus, the Irish accent is really fun to listen to. I found it hard to avoid imitating them, even as short a time as I was there. It's infectious.
The History. Another thing that I wasn't expecting is the feeling of age that persists throughout Ireland. I already knew that people have been living there for thousands of years, but it's not something I think about all that often. Irish history is one of those branches that I know very little about. There are apparently over 40,000 stone- and bronze-age forts around Ireland, and countless burial sites and tombs. Not to mention the dry-stone walls that run everywhere - Ireland is made out of limestone and shale, and people just pick up the flat rocks that you find all over the place and make walls out of them without mortar or anything. They're really stable too, and I saw some forts made with the dry-stone technique that are over 4000 years old (see below).
The Weather. The weather ... is schizophrenic. One moment the sun is shining and it's warm and clear, the next it's raining. Then it clears off again for 15 minutes or so, then you look out the window of the coffee shop that you're sitting in to notice that it's hailing and the wind is so strong that the hail is blowing in sideways. That seems to be about par, and rarely do you see someone outside without an umbrella or raincoat ready.
Saint Patrick's Day. So on Saturday the 17th of March, 2007 Anno Domini, I bid my parents and brother goodbye in Stuttgart and took a train to Rastatt, from whence I got a bus to the Karlsruhe-Baden airport to fly to Dublin. It should be noted that this particular Saturday was St. Patrick's Day, and most of the Americans in Freiburg seemed to have the same idea about celebrating it in Ireland. I found myself sitting in the bus and airplane next to a girl I know from the AYF program, which ended up being a very good thing, because she had been to Dublin several times before and knew where to go. I just had to follow her. This was particularly good, given the aforementioned (though unwarranted) intimidating atmosphere produced by the Irish.
A part of the Temple Bar area on St. Paddy's Day.
I did eventually find the people I was meeting in Dublin, but only through the will of God. Dublin is not a small town by itself, and on St. Patrick's Day it gets flooded with thousands more people, most of which headed to the area I needed to go to (Temple Bar, the area with all the major pubs). On top of that, the text messages I was getting from Alexa and Alisyn (TheBabysitter and Mom) were singularly unhelpful. The first one went something like this:
"We're GREAT!! Sarah's address is 39 Park Court off of Park Lane which is off of Park Avenue ... We'll be in some bar ... Good luck!"
This was not an encouraging start to the evening. However, through the coercion of several more text messages, I did manage to find out that they were in a coffee shop (they were unsure of the name) across the street from an Urban Outfitters. Fortunately, Terra (the girl who had been in Dublin before) also needed to meet people in the Temple bar area, and she helped me look for the place. So all ended up well. It turned out the reason that the messages had been so vague is that my friends were not only already drunk (as I expected) but also under the influence of a pill whose effects are similar to speed.
The people I met. Mom and TheBabysitter were among them, as well as a couple others from the AYF program, and two I didn't know at all, but were there because one was Mom's friend's roommate in Dublin. As a result of getting to know her and her friend, I now have a place to stay in London, should I end up heading in that direction.
I was starving and not drunk yet, so I wolfed down a panini and an Irish Coffee (coffee+whiskey), and we then set off to an awesome bar called Messrs. Malone. Actually, we tried a number, but they were all full, and the only reason we got into Messrs. Malone was because a distraction was caused by someone on the roof ("Jump! Jump!"), and we were able to sneak in ahead of the significant line. I don't know if he ever did jump, or if he was just some official or bar employee up there for some reason. The bar was old, four stories high, all wooden and Irishy, and the first music we heard when entering was, guess what, U2. They then proceeded to play some techno and rock remixes of Irish folk music and drinking songs, and moved on to your basic array of power-pop. There was no rap or R&B, which was wonderful.
Guinness. I would like to take this time to talk about the beer. Oh my God, the beer. The Guinness in Dublin does taste similar to that in the US, but the flavor is fuller in Ireland. It also changes as you take your time with the pint, changing from a thick, malty, chocolatey flavor to a full grain taste, and finally settling down to a wonderful, satisfying meal of roasted barley and oats. The biggest difference is the texture, though. Unlike any beer I've had before, you have to let real, honest-to-God Guinness settle before you start drinking it. It looks sort of like silt settling to the bottom of a river as the head and the body separate, and once they do there is a sharp dividing line between the two. The foam is the richest, thickest, creamiest thing I have ever drank, and it stayed there the entire time. It makes rings on the inside of the glass as you work your way through the pint, and I swear that if I had set a quarter on top of it, the quarter would have floated there. Christ, I'm drooling right now. The only drawback to the Guinness in Dublin is that it's ASS-expensive, usually going for €5 a pint. So I limited myself to only 3 pints, which was unfortunate, but whatever. I made up for it by having at least one Guinness with every single meal except breakfasts during the entire time I was in Ireland.
Enraptured after taking my first sip of real Irish Guinness.
The night pretty much flew by in a blur of dancing, music, and beer. On Sunday I did nothing in particular other than recovering with the others, who, in addition to the drugs, had had much more to drink than me. I never got past a buzz, unfortunately. I wanted to head into town to check out Dublin a little, but Sarah lived farther away from the city center than is walkable, and I didn't feel like figuring out the public transport system. So we all just stayed "home" and watched TV (which, during the daytime, is just as bad in Ireland as it is in the States) and bought beer and food to make dinner that evening (for which I managed to not pay, which no one noticed).
The West Coast Early the next morning I took a cab with Mom and TheBabysitter into town so that I could get to the Heuston train station. They were trying to get to the airport so that they could fly to Slovenia (???) to do some camping. As far as I know, they are still alive and unmolested by Gypsies. Anyway, I took a pleasant walk in the early-morning dim along the River Liffey to the train station, and the nice old Irish man behind the counter figured out a way to make me pay as little as possible to get to Galway and back. I slept most of the way on the train, periodically being awakened by the shuffling by of a sweaty, obese, and possibly retarded woman to get snacks for her sweaty, obese, and possibly retarded family at the back of the train. Whatever. The central portion of Ireland seemed to be full of puddles and slush, but it was warmer and more pleasant on the coast.
Right when I got off I didn't have time to check into my hostel, so I just boarded a tour bus that would take me to an area southwest of Galway called The Burren. The Burren is a rocky, hilly area which is chock-full of ruins, caves, and sheep. The weather was another day of the on-again-off-again rain and sun, but our tour guide seemed to be able to control things such that it was clear each time we got off of the bus. Here are a few pictures from the tour.
The inside of Ailwee (pronounced alley-wee) Cave, a cavern which stretches for several miles into the Burren. One can only go so far due to danger and the presence of a few underground lakes and rivers which block the way (which the ground underlying the Burren is apparently chock-full of). This entire cave was natural, though, which was really cool. There were bones of some extinct form of bear inside.
Flowstone and a developing stalactite.
A roughly 6300-year-old "gate" tomb put there by stone-age Celts.
From the Burrens we proceeded to the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, on top of the towering Cliffs of Moher. The Cliffs of Moher are over 400 feet high at the highest point, and drop straight off into the ocean below. The Cliffs of Insanity from The Princess Bride were actually the Cliffs of Moher. Unfortunately, enough people have died falling off the cliffs (not only are they fairly unstable, but the wind blows like all get-out up there) that the Irish government has decided to put in a safety wall and only allows one to walk along certain areas. That, in addition to the huge number of tourists that were there, took some of the splendor away, but they were cool nonetheless. Afterwards I went to a pub with some people I met on the tour, where I had a pint of Guinness (not quite as good as in Dublin, but almost) and a fantastic Irish stew.
The Cliffs of Insanity! ... uh, Moher.
Back in Galway, I checked myself into my hostel to find my room to be mainly populated with a group of Croatians that were there for some reason. They were pleasant, though they didn't speak a lot of English, and one of the guys had a big cut along his face, like he'd recently been in a fight. I left to check out the city, and decided I wanted some fish and chips. I got into the restaurant (which apparently is a local legend - "good old-fashioned heart attack stuff," as the desk clerk described it to me), and who is standing in line in front of me but JOE FUCKING MCANDREW and his family. I never had much to do with Joe in high school; I had the impression that he was kind of a dick, but he was friendly enough. He said that he was working on a bunch of papers so unfortunately he couldn't really hang out, but that was fine. His parents and very hot sister (?) were suitably amused at the coincidence. It was by far the weirdest small-world experience I've ever had. I spent the rest of the evening in a bar, drinking pints of Guinness (which is much cheaper in Galway) and chatting with some awesome Irish dudes that I met, as well as a guy from Alaska who was on vacation, and some Spanish girls who were just there for the hell of it. Very cool people, all of them. One of the Irish guys told me that he had lived in Boston for 10 years, and that American Catholics are really just wannabe Protestants rather than real Catholics.
A sign in my hostel's bathroom that made me feel pretty good about staying there.
I took an early bus/boat ride to one of the three islands in Galway Bay (the Aran Islands - I went to Inis Mór, the largest one), rented a bike, and spent the day exploring the island. Had some fantastic seafood chowder and another pint of Guinness, which I bought from a girl whose native tongue was Gaelic and who spoke almost no English. The seafood in Galway, by the way, is fantastic, which makes sense, since the ocean is right there. It was one of the few times in my life when I had access to fresh seafood, and I took advantage of that fact. Inis Mór is beautiful - the whole island is just an outcropping of limestone in the middle of the bay, and the only reason that it has any dirt at all is because the first settlers mixed sand and seaweed to make some soil that they could farm on. I wasn't always able to bike because of the scree, steep hills, and rocky terrain. The island has its own array of impressive cliffs, which have no safety walls, as well as several very large and very old buildings. Two of these are 4000 year old forts, both perched on the edge of the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic. They're both dry-stone, which means that they have no mortar - only flat stones stacked on top of one another. I loved the Aran Islands. They're a rugged, windswept part of the world with few people and fewer tourists, and dry-stone pasture walls crisscross everywhere. It was nice to be there by myself, too. It gave me time to just enjoy it and do what I wanted at my own pace.
Me perched at the top of some 200-300 foot cliffs on Inis Mór. Another biker took the picture.
"The Black Fort," the smaller of the two clifftop forts on the island.
Dun Aonghasa, the largest dry-stone fort on Ireland (and possibly in the world). It's about 4000 years old, which puts its construction at before the time of the Egyptian pyramids.
My knees hanging over the edge of the cliff enveloped by Dun Aonghasa, with the sea about 300 feet below me.
I spent the night in Galway again, and I treated myself to some fresh (raw) oysters, prepared according to some traditional Galway recipe. As luck would have it, I ran into Joe McAndrew and his family again. Once again, weird and amusing. The oysters, by the way, were awesome, and the texture of raw shellfish is indescribable. Rubbery and slimy, but in a good way. I went to a bar again that evening, where a band of musicians played Irish folk music. They were really good too - the guitar player and the mandolin player both went faster than I can understand. They even played a couple tunes I knew, so I was even able to sing along.
Irish musicians.
Unfortunately, I had to leave early the next morning to get back to Dublin so that I could catch my plane back to Germany. 4 and a half days are nowhere nearly enough time to spend in Ireland, though, so I'm planning on going back, if not this year, then sometime next year. Anyone who's actually reading this should consider the possibility of taking a trip with me. As a matter of fact, I liked Ireland so much that I'm playing with the idea of putting med school off for a year and getting some research experience in Galway or Cork. We'll see what happens. For your amusement, here are some pictures of Dublin as I was on the bus to the airport, as well as another unrelated picture that I find entertaining.
This guy is pretty pissed, for some reason.
Bear Cavalry!
The Irish. First off, Ireland has a weird duality thing going on with it. When you walk down the street, everything feels more aggressive, like everyone's ready to fight all the time. It makes it a little uncomfortable walking down the street, because you're always wary about asking people where things are. Especially as an American, given the general feeling of the world towards us right now. But it's the complete opposite when you actually talk to the people - every single person I met in Ireland was really nice, helpful, and friendly. The Irish don't like what the American government is doing, but everyone I met seemed to be interested in me as an individual rather than as an American, which is a pleasant change from some countries I could name (you hear that, Spain?). Plus, the Irish accent is really fun to listen to. I found it hard to avoid imitating them, even as short a time as I was there. It's infectious.
The History. Another thing that I wasn't expecting is the feeling of age that persists throughout Ireland. I already knew that people have been living there for thousands of years, but it's not something I think about all that often. Irish history is one of those branches that I know very little about. There are apparently over 40,000 stone- and bronze-age forts around Ireland, and countless burial sites and tombs. Not to mention the dry-stone walls that run everywhere - Ireland is made out of limestone and shale, and people just pick up the flat rocks that you find all over the place and make walls out of them without mortar or anything. They're really stable too, and I saw some forts made with the dry-stone technique that are over 4000 years old (see below).
The Weather. The weather ... is schizophrenic. One moment the sun is shining and it's warm and clear, the next it's raining. Then it clears off again for 15 minutes or so, then you look out the window of the coffee shop that you're sitting in to notice that it's hailing and the wind is so strong that the hail is blowing in sideways. That seems to be about par, and rarely do you see someone outside without an umbrella or raincoat ready.
Saint Patrick's Day. So on Saturday the 17th of March, 2007 Anno Domini, I bid my parents and brother goodbye in Stuttgart and took a train to Rastatt, from whence I got a bus to the Karlsruhe-Baden airport to fly to Dublin. It should be noted that this particular Saturday was St. Patrick's Day, and most of the Americans in Freiburg seemed to have the same idea about celebrating it in Ireland. I found myself sitting in the bus and airplane next to a girl I know from the AYF program, which ended up being a very good thing, because she had been to Dublin several times before and knew where to go. I just had to follow her. This was particularly good, given the aforementioned (though unwarranted) intimidating atmosphere produced by the Irish.
A part of the Temple Bar area on St. Paddy's Day.
I did eventually find the people I was meeting in Dublin, but only through the will of God. Dublin is not a small town by itself, and on St. Patrick's Day it gets flooded with thousands more people, most of which headed to the area I needed to go to (Temple Bar, the area with all the major pubs). On top of that, the text messages I was getting from Alexa and Alisyn (TheBabysitter and Mom) were singularly unhelpful. The first one went something like this:
"We're GREAT!! Sarah's address is 39 Park Court off of Park Lane which is off of Park Avenue ... We'll be in some bar ... Good luck!"
This was not an encouraging start to the evening. However, through the coercion of several more text messages, I did manage to find out that they were in a coffee shop (they were unsure of the name) across the street from an Urban Outfitters. Fortunately, Terra (the girl who had been in Dublin before) also needed to meet people in the Temple bar area, and she helped me look for the place. So all ended up well. It turned out the reason that the messages had been so vague is that my friends were not only already drunk (as I expected) but also under the influence of a pill whose effects are similar to speed.
The people I met. Mom and TheBabysitter were among them, as well as a couple others from the AYF program, and two I didn't know at all, but were there because one was Mom's friend's roommate in Dublin. As a result of getting to know her and her friend, I now have a place to stay in London, should I end up heading in that direction.
I was starving and not drunk yet, so I wolfed down a panini and an Irish Coffee (coffee+whiskey), and we then set off to an awesome bar called Messrs. Malone. Actually, we tried a number, but they were all full, and the only reason we got into Messrs. Malone was because a distraction was caused by someone on the roof ("Jump! Jump!"), and we were able to sneak in ahead of the significant line. I don't know if he ever did jump, or if he was just some official or bar employee up there for some reason. The bar was old, four stories high, all wooden and Irishy, and the first music we heard when entering was, guess what, U2. They then proceeded to play some techno and rock remixes of Irish folk music and drinking songs, and moved on to your basic array of power-pop. There was no rap or R&B, which was wonderful.
Guinness. I would like to take this time to talk about the beer. Oh my God, the beer. The Guinness in Dublin does taste similar to that in the US, but the flavor is fuller in Ireland. It also changes as you take your time with the pint, changing from a thick, malty, chocolatey flavor to a full grain taste, and finally settling down to a wonderful, satisfying meal of roasted barley and oats. The biggest difference is the texture, though. Unlike any beer I've had before, you have to let real, honest-to-God Guinness settle before you start drinking it. It looks sort of like silt settling to the bottom of a river as the head and the body separate, and once they do there is a sharp dividing line between the two. The foam is the richest, thickest, creamiest thing I have ever drank, and it stayed there the entire time. It makes rings on the inside of the glass as you work your way through the pint, and I swear that if I had set a quarter on top of it, the quarter would have floated there. Christ, I'm drooling right now. The only drawback to the Guinness in Dublin is that it's ASS-expensive, usually going for €5 a pint. So I limited myself to only 3 pints, which was unfortunate, but whatever. I made up for it by having at least one Guinness with every single meal except breakfasts during the entire time I was in Ireland.
Enraptured after taking my first sip of real Irish Guinness.
The night pretty much flew by in a blur of dancing, music, and beer. On Sunday I did nothing in particular other than recovering with the others, who, in addition to the drugs, had had much more to drink than me. I never got past a buzz, unfortunately. I wanted to head into town to check out Dublin a little, but Sarah lived farther away from the city center than is walkable, and I didn't feel like figuring out the public transport system. So we all just stayed "home" and watched TV (which, during the daytime, is just as bad in Ireland as it is in the States) and bought beer and food to make dinner that evening (for which I managed to not pay, which no one noticed).
The West Coast Early the next morning I took a cab with Mom and TheBabysitter into town so that I could get to the Heuston train station. They were trying to get to the airport so that they could fly to Slovenia (???) to do some camping. As far as I know, they are still alive and unmolested by Gypsies. Anyway, I took a pleasant walk in the early-morning dim along the River Liffey to the train station, and the nice old Irish man behind the counter figured out a way to make me pay as little as possible to get to Galway and back. I slept most of the way on the train, periodically being awakened by the shuffling by of a sweaty, obese, and possibly retarded woman to get snacks for her sweaty, obese, and possibly retarded family at the back of the train. Whatever. The central portion of Ireland seemed to be full of puddles and slush, but it was warmer and more pleasant on the coast.
Right when I got off I didn't have time to check into my hostel, so I just boarded a tour bus that would take me to an area southwest of Galway called The Burren. The Burren is a rocky, hilly area which is chock-full of ruins, caves, and sheep. The weather was another day of the on-again-off-again rain and sun, but our tour guide seemed to be able to control things such that it was clear each time we got off of the bus. Here are a few pictures from the tour.
The inside of Ailwee (pronounced alley-wee) Cave, a cavern which stretches for several miles into the Burren. One can only go so far due to danger and the presence of a few underground lakes and rivers which block the way (which the ground underlying the Burren is apparently chock-full of). This entire cave was natural, though, which was really cool. There were bones of some extinct form of bear inside.
Flowstone and a developing stalactite.
A roughly 6300-year-old "gate" tomb put there by stone-age Celts.
From the Burrens we proceeded to the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, on top of the towering Cliffs of Moher. The Cliffs of Moher are over 400 feet high at the highest point, and drop straight off into the ocean below. The Cliffs of Insanity from The Princess Bride were actually the Cliffs of Moher. Unfortunately, enough people have died falling off the cliffs (not only are they fairly unstable, but the wind blows like all get-out up there) that the Irish government has decided to put in a safety wall and only allows one to walk along certain areas. That, in addition to the huge number of tourists that were there, took some of the splendor away, but they were cool nonetheless. Afterwards I went to a pub with some people I met on the tour, where I had a pint of Guinness (not quite as good as in Dublin, but almost) and a fantastic Irish stew.
The Cliffs of Insanity! ... uh, Moher.
Back in Galway, I checked myself into my hostel to find my room to be mainly populated with a group of Croatians that were there for some reason. They were pleasant, though they didn't speak a lot of English, and one of the guys had a big cut along his face, like he'd recently been in a fight. I left to check out the city, and decided I wanted some fish and chips. I got into the restaurant (which apparently is a local legend - "good old-fashioned heart attack stuff," as the desk clerk described it to me), and who is standing in line in front of me but JOE FUCKING MCANDREW and his family. I never had much to do with Joe in high school; I had the impression that he was kind of a dick, but he was friendly enough. He said that he was working on a bunch of papers so unfortunately he couldn't really hang out, but that was fine. His parents and very hot sister (?) were suitably amused at the coincidence. It was by far the weirdest small-world experience I've ever had. I spent the rest of the evening in a bar, drinking pints of Guinness (which is much cheaper in Galway) and chatting with some awesome Irish dudes that I met, as well as a guy from Alaska who was on vacation, and some Spanish girls who were just there for the hell of it. Very cool people, all of them. One of the Irish guys told me that he had lived in Boston for 10 years, and that American Catholics are really just wannabe Protestants rather than real Catholics.
A sign in my hostel's bathroom that made me feel pretty good about staying there.
I took an early bus/boat ride to one of the three islands in Galway Bay (the Aran Islands - I went to Inis Mór, the largest one), rented a bike, and spent the day exploring the island. Had some fantastic seafood chowder and another pint of Guinness, which I bought from a girl whose native tongue was Gaelic and who spoke almost no English. The seafood in Galway, by the way, is fantastic, which makes sense, since the ocean is right there. It was one of the few times in my life when I had access to fresh seafood, and I took advantage of that fact. Inis Mór is beautiful - the whole island is just an outcropping of limestone in the middle of the bay, and the only reason that it has any dirt at all is because the first settlers mixed sand and seaweed to make some soil that they could farm on. I wasn't always able to bike because of the scree, steep hills, and rocky terrain. The island has its own array of impressive cliffs, which have no safety walls, as well as several very large and very old buildings. Two of these are 4000 year old forts, both perched on the edge of the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic. They're both dry-stone, which means that they have no mortar - only flat stones stacked on top of one another. I loved the Aran Islands. They're a rugged, windswept part of the world with few people and fewer tourists, and dry-stone pasture walls crisscross everywhere. It was nice to be there by myself, too. It gave me time to just enjoy it and do what I wanted at my own pace.
Me perched at the top of some 200-300 foot cliffs on Inis Mór. Another biker took the picture.
"The Black Fort," the smaller of the two clifftop forts on the island.
Dun Aonghasa, the largest dry-stone fort on Ireland (and possibly in the world). It's about 4000 years old, which puts its construction at before the time of the Egyptian pyramids.
My knees hanging over the edge of the cliff enveloped by Dun Aonghasa, with the sea about 300 feet below me.
I spent the night in Galway again, and I treated myself to some fresh (raw) oysters, prepared according to some traditional Galway recipe. As luck would have it, I ran into Joe McAndrew and his family again. Once again, weird and amusing. The oysters, by the way, were awesome, and the texture of raw shellfish is indescribable. Rubbery and slimy, but in a good way. I went to a bar again that evening, where a band of musicians played Irish folk music. They were really good too - the guitar player and the mandolin player both went faster than I can understand. They even played a couple tunes I knew, so I was even able to sing along.
Irish musicians.
Unfortunately, I had to leave early the next morning to get back to Dublin so that I could catch my plane back to Germany. 4 and a half days are nowhere nearly enough time to spend in Ireland, though, so I'm planning on going back, if not this year, then sometime next year. Anyone who's actually reading this should consider the possibility of taking a trip with me. As a matter of fact, I liked Ireland so much that I'm playing with the idea of putting med school off for a year and getting some research experience in Galway or Cork. We'll see what happens. For your amusement, here are some pictures of Dublin as I was on the bus to the airport, as well as another unrelated picture that I find entertaining.
This guy is pretty pissed, for some reason.
Bear Cavalry!