Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Weekend in Ireland

Thursday, June 23, 2011: Daniel, Claire Ahlstrom and I hopped on an airplane and headed to Ireland for the weekend.  We left early in the morning, landed in Dublin around 10am, hopped on a bus and went to Galway for our first night. There wasn't a ton to see in Galway, but it was enjoyable nonetheless.  When we first got there, we stopped at the tourism office and they gave us a little walking tour of things to do. 

Did you know that they love JFK in Galway? Not only is there a bust of his head in Eyre Park, but there is also a mosaic of his face in the Galway Cathedral.  Interesting.... Apparently he gave a speech there in the 60's before he was killed.

So yeah, we walked through Eyre Square and headed for the real touristy part of town.  I loved it--street performers, no cars allowed on the streets, random old buildings and beautiful scenery scattered about.

I couldn't figure out how to rotate the video.  If you know how, let me know and I'll fix it! Thanks.

Anyway, we saw the Galway "city" Castle (which is actually a bank now), an old cathedral (I can't remember the name), the Spanish Arch (which is incredibly old), pretty landscapes, the old university buildings, and Galway Cathedral (which was only built about 50 years ago).





I love the plants that grow out of the bridge

Galway University

Galway University

We stayed in a hostel with 5 other people the first night.  We only talked to one kid called Phil though.  He is from England and took off two years of life basically to travel.  He came to Ireland to work on an organic goat farm.  Random.  haha 

Daniel didn't sleep well that first night.  There was another kid in the top bunk near him that snored REALLY loudly.  I woke up to Daniel throwing/giving another girl's pillow to him saying that it should help.  haha It was really funny, because I also woke up to the girl coming into the room, most likely drunk, and confused because she didn't have a pillow. She also flashed me a few of her goodies.  Yuck. At that point I closed my eyes and refused to open them until daylight.

Our morning was... interesting.  We stopped at a bakery and got breakfast and then I went to a pharmacy to get some stuff.  When I came out,  Claire was making friends with Oscar Wilde and a homeless man who loves the camera.


Then we went on a tour to the Cliffs of Moher.  Ever seen Princess Bride?? or Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince?  Well these are the cliffs shown in both of those movies: in the Princess Bride, the giant carries everybody up these cliffs (the Cliffs of Insanity!) and in Harry Potter, this is where Harry and Dumbledore search for the horcrux (on the island).  Cool.


The cliffs were beautiful. The weather, not so much. It POURED the entire time we were there. I was drenched to the point that I wrapped a sweater around my waist and took my jeans off on the bus and Daniel rang out his fleece sweater and literally had a loch form below him. It was INSANE!!




Christmas card 2011?



On the tour we also went  to the Burren.  It was beautiful.  The landscape was filled with limestone.  The limestone also formed these really cool vertical lines and swirly pots in some places--seeing this landscape made it easy for me to understand why people believed in fairies.  It was beautiful.

We also came across these ancient tombs.  I forget how old they are, but they are OLD.  I think something like 600BC? I don't know, but there are thousands of them scattered around the Burren. 
The landscape is also just beautiful.  We saw old castles, fortified walls,  fairy trees (apparently these trees always grow in a circle and there is suspicion that if you cut them down, really bad things will happen to you! Like, you usually die)


 In this picture, me and Claire are standing on the walls of like a 6th century fortress.
On top of the hills, where it looks darker green, is actually pure rock pieces scattered about
 These are the Fairy Trees ^^
Behind the rain on the bus window is a 12 century cathedral I believe...

At the end of the tour, we had the bus driver drop us off in a small village where we stayed with an LDS family we met at church while they were celebrating their anniversary in Edinburgh.  The Livingstons :-).  I wish I would have taken a picture with them because they were great and they had a gorgeous home.  Being a member of the church is awesome--we have this HUGE network of people willing to help if needed.  We only met the Livingstons ONCE for about 2 hours and they took us in for a whole night.  We even got pancakes in the morning!  It was so wonderful to be in a home and it was probably the best night sleep and the best shower I have taken since being in Europe.  It was great.   

The next morning we headed to Dublin.  We heard a lot of people say that Dublin isn't all that great because it's just a big touristy city with a serious lack of Irish culture.  I somewhat agree, but I loved it anyway.  We got there around 4pm and it was actually HOT outside and not raining.  Glorious.    We went and looked at the Dublin Castle, but opted not to go in when we heard that all the tours were booked for the day.  We then walked to St. Stephen's park and just wandered around enjoying the beautiful weather.
 Dublin Castle

 Bust of James Joyce (Author of The Dead-- I read it a TON in college) in St. Stephens Park
 Famine sculpture in St. Steven's Park
Pretty scenery with me and Daniel

Then we went over to St. Patrick's Cathedral.  It was already closed, so we just hung out in the gardens.  Then we found out that you have to PAY to get inside the church anyway unless you go to a service, so being cheap college students, we decided to go to the Evensong on Sunday at 3:15pm-- We got in the church for free, enjoyed a beautiful choir mass thing and I got to rest my feet for an hour and a half after days of constant walking.  It's a beautiful cathedral. 

 St. Patrick's Cathedral
 St. Patrick's Cathedral.  It was built in the 12th century!
Apparently, this is the site where the well was that St. Patrick baptized some of the first Christians in Ireland.  The thumbs up is for COOL.

We walked by Christ's church.  This picture is Daniel making sure that Claire's face didn't get into the shot. haha

 Famous "Dublin Doors"
 Me on a bridge, looking at another bridge, with DUBLIN in the background.
 The Molly Malone Statue-- Apparently no body knows why shes famous.  It's either because she was the only chaste sales woman or because she was such a skanky one.  I wonder which one the artist believed...
Daniel asked me to focus the picture like this, highlight the important aspects of the sculpture.... Oh, and he really wanted to look like he has a bowl cut. (just kidding... haha I thought I was being funny when I took this... and I was.)

On Sunday, after a failed attempted to get to Church, we went to Trinity College.  AWESOME.  It has the Long room in the Library, which is one of the most beautiful libraries I have EVER seen and it also houses the Book of Kells

"The Book of Kells (Irish: Leabhar Cheanannais) (Dublin, Trinity College Library, MS A. I. (58), sometimes known as the Book of Columba) is an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament together with various prefatory texts and tables. It was created by Celtic monks ca. 800 or slightly earlier."

It was created by Celtic monks ca. 800 or slightly earlier.

 Me in the room where the Book of Kells was :-)
This picture was taken right after Daniel was pooped on by a bird.  It was a big bird poop too.  Me and Claire laughed for like an hour.  Daniel... not so much. haha

Anyway, I studied this book in school and it's incredible.  I'm so excited that I got to see it in person!  Naturally we couldn't take pictures of it or the library for that matter (which Daniel and I did anyways.. of the library...) So these pictures are pulled off the Internet, but they are so beautiful. The library has busts of all the worlds greatest thinkers (besides Jesus and Joseph Smith).  It's really cool.  Daniel said I can have a library like that one day in my house.
Here is the picture we took.  It's not nearly as cool, but it proves we were there!

After Trinity College, we decided to go taste a little bit of Irish mythology.  We went to.....
LOVED it.  We got to learn about the history of leprechauns, walk through a tunnel that made us leprechauns, sit on chairs that were way too big for people the size of leprechauns, walk through a rainbow and find the pot of gold at the end of the it.   Okay.  It wasn't that cool.  In fact at the end of it, I kept thinking how Ireland really should have hired Disney for the place.  But it was fun none the less. 






It was at this point we went to St. Patrick's Cathedral for mass and after that I think we just walked around.  We were all hot and tired and pretty much ready to kill each other.  So we sat by the government buildings and played fargo.  Claire was beating me by a ton and got to 9950.  I then rolled a fargo and ended up with extra rolls putting me at 10, 650.  I thought I had it in the bag.  Nope.  She beat me by 150 points.  (If you don't know the game fargo, you wont understand but I was devastated.)  Beginners luck!  That lightened the mood and we went to the best Italian restaurant in town.  It had won a bunch of awards and we were expecting greatness.  It sucked.  But we had a good time making fun of the food and sitting outside, people watching.  My favorite quote of the evening was from Claire, "I feel like I should go in and steal their toilet paper or something."  Granted, we did order the cheapest stuff on the menu so that might have been why it wasn't all that great. haha but anyway. 

We headed back to our hostel (which was actually great.  Claire and I had our own little loft in a room of 12 people, and Daniel just came and hung out with us up there until he went bed just below us) .  Daniel's bunk mate was a 70 plus year old homeless-man who was pretty funny.  There was another couple in the room living in Germany (in the military-- originally from upstate New York) and the old man kept telling them money making schemes throughout the night.  We woke up at 2am, headed to the airport, and got back in Edinburgh by 8:40ish.  Daniel went straight to work.  I went straight to bed and then ran some errands afterwords.

Today (Tuesday, June 28, 2011): We went to work. Watched a street performer on the way home, and then Alex Neil (Daniel's MSP) took us out for a really nice 3 course dinner in New Town (my dessert had bourbon splashed all over it.... raw bourbon.  Luckily I was able to work around it haha).  Then we came home and are currently packing for Palma de Mallorca.  An island off the coast of Spain...  It's what I'm calling our one year anniversary gift. 

I need to go to bed now!  But I wanted to update everybody before I got too far behind. 

When I get back on Monday... I'll be an aunt (hopefully twice over (in addition to the little boys I already have)... at least once by Mrs. Rinda who is currently in labor and has been forever)

Loving Life.