Ireland Day 5: A little bit of Dublin

n Tuesday I allowed myself to sleep in until noonish, since I was still recovering from being sick. Kevin was again off to his conference at Trinity College (the above picture shows the campus) all day, so after I got up and got dressed, I made my way to the little convenience store for lunch again.

This time, however, I determined to eat it someplace besides the hotel room. I decided to head to Marion Square, which is a lovely little park inside downtown Dublin. There are lots of trees and a few statues, including an amusing one of the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde. (His house was very near Marion Square.)

After I finished my sandwich, I decided I wanted to see some more of Dublin. Not feeling quite up to tons of walking, though, I opted to take a "hop-on hop-off" bus tour of the city. That was a pretty fun way to see the highlights, although I got a bit chilly up on the second story of the open-0n-top double-decker bus.

After the tour was done, I made my way over to Trinity College, where I planned to meet Kevin after his conference and from whence we would head out dinner in one of the pubs nearby. It took me a ridiculously long time to find the right building (turns out I walked past it like 3 times before realizing it was the right one), but when I got there, I couldn't find Kevin. I knew he had planned to practice his talk with one of the professors from Purdue after the conference session let out, so I just waited around for a while.



When Kevin kept not showing up, I figured he must have not gotten my text messages and just headed back to the hotel, so I grumpily walked all the way back, only to find him not there either. It turns out that he and the professor had planned to back to the professor's hotel room to practice, but the guy didn't have such a good sense of direction as he proclaimed and led Kevin off in the wrong direction for like half an hour, after which Kevin finally took the lead and led them back. So his practice took an extra hour or so because of the wandering.

I wasn't feeling great (although I *was* a lot better than the day before) and didn't want to walk anymore, so we just grabbed dinner at a blah restaurant nearby the hotel. The food was not that great, especially since Kevin "forgot" we were in Ireland again and ordered fajitas--again! They were just as silly as the last time. A word to the wise: avoid Irish Mexican food.

So, all in all, it was not too wonderful of a day, but at least I got to get out and see a couple of things! And I was glad to be on the mend finally. I don't know how I manage to get sick every time I go on vacation--the jet lag? the stress of travel? the germy airplanes? Kevin laughed at me because I was kind of obsessive about wiping down my seat and tray on the plane with disinfectant wipes and using hand sanitizer, while he refused...and yet *I'm* the one who got sick! Ah well--such is life.

Ireland Day 4: Getting to know our hotel room

Tuesday Kevin spent the whole day at his conference. I, on the other hand, spent the whole day in bed. I slept until like 2pm or something, and felt considerably better after that, but still fairly icky. I was RAVENOUS, though, having not eaten dinner the night before, or breakfast OR lunch. So, I took a shower and put on some clothes and walked about a block to the nearest food I could find--a little convenience store that sold sandwiches and stuff. I bought a boxed sandwich and like a liter of orange juice. What is it about orange juice that makes it taste SOOO good when you're sick?

Then, I went back to the hotel room and spent the rest of the day sleeping and watching Irish TV. Which was actually pretty fun, minus the sick part. I would have rather been dashing all around the city seeing cool sights, but at least we were going to be in Dublin for 5 days, so I'd still have a chance to see the city later.

When Kevin came home, we ate dinner in the expensive but very nice restaurant in the hotel (so as to avoid having to go anywhere). It was really yummy, but I think the cream of mushroom soup was just a little too rich for my stomach to handle...ugh.

Anyways, since I have nothing actually interesting to say about this day, I will just post some pictures of our hotel room. It was a very nice place, called the Schoolhouse Hotel. The building used to be--guess what? A schoolhouse. Our room was huge and very nice. Except that the bathroom SMELLED. It smelled like urine. A lot. I think it's because there was so much wood in that room. Wood tends to soak up smells. I probably would have complained or asked for a different room, but that first day I was so out of it...and then after that, we didn't want to pick up and move again, so we just kept the bathroom door closed all the time.

Ireland Day 3: St. Kevin!

Monday morning I woke up feeling rather icky. We had planned to get up fairly early so that we'd have lots of time to sight see, but we decided to sleep a bit more. Then we went and had breakfast that our B&B owner had prepared for us--our first "Full Irish" breakfast, complete with cereal, broiled tomato, toast, eggs (sunny side up--not my favorite, but that's okay), bacon/ham (the bacon in Ireland is not the same as ours--it's more like ham), sausage, and black and white puddings. I know you're wondering about that last bit about the puddings. First of all, "pudding" in Ireland doesn't mean the goopy stuff you're thinking of. It's more like...well, we thought it was a type of sausage at first, actually. But it's also kind of like stuffing? Hard to explain.

The interesting thing is that black pudding is actually made with blood. Yup, blood. And white pudding is made with kidney, I think. Although I had heard about black and white pudding before coming to Ireland, I didn't actually know what it looked like (I expected it to be more, well, pudding-y). I had my suspicions, but I didn't voice them to Kevin, and we both tried the pudding (actually, I didn't try the darker stuff because I was suspicious, but Kevin did) and liked it. Surprise! Blood pudding does not taste gross. Who knew?

Anyways, I felt a bit better after eating breakfast, but not great. To make matters worse, my shoes were still soaking from Sunday's adventure by the waterfall. (Stuff doesn't dry well in Irish air I'm afraid). This meant I was forced to wear my sandals. But, it was pouring outside and quite chilly. I couldn't stand the thought of wearing either wet shoes or having my feet freezing in sandals, so I was forced into wearing (horror of horrors!) socks AND sandals. You can see in the photos I look pretty frumpy. I blame it all on not feeling well.

My big plans for touring Glendalough followed by a vigorous hike in the mountains nearby were not looking so glorious anymore. Instead, we decided to do a lazier tour of Glendalough and nix the hike.

We walked around the visitor's center for a while, hoping the rain would let up. (And wouldn't you know the film projector wasn't working that day? Sad.) They had some interesting things in there, including some very old stone crosses.

Oh, it occurs to me that I probably should explain what Glendalough is. To quote from the Authoritative Source of All Worthwhile Information (aka wikipedia), "Glendalough (Irish : Gleann Dá Loch, meaning "Glen of Two Lakes") is a glacial valley located in County Wicklow, Republic of Ireland, renowned for its Early Medieval monastic settlement founded in the 6th century by St Kevin, a hermit priest, and destroyed in 1398 by English troops. " It was an extremely powerful and important monastery in its day, has some really neat ruins, and is set in a beautiful landscape, plus we figured since it was founded by a guy name St. Kevin, we pretty much had no choice but to go and see it.

Our guide was very funny and had a great accent. He started the tour when it was still raining, and although it looked like it was coming down as hard as ever to me, he said "see, it's getting brighter every second!" Sure enough, in about 15 minutes the rain stopped and we could put down our umbrellas.

We walked around the two lakes, which pretty much took all the energy I had left. I was feeling sicker as the day went on, actually. So we hurried and grabbed some food from the foodstands outside the site, and headed back towards Dublin.

Before I move on, I want to point out one thing in the pictures that you may not have noticed. In the photo below, you can see a tiny cave across the lake in the rocky part of the hill. This is where St. Kevin originally slept back when he was living as a hermit in Glendalough. There is a story that some woman came to him in the night while he was sleeping, and upon waking up with a start, he thought she was some sort of foul temptress, so he pushed her out of the cave and she fell into the lake and died. Luckily, Glendalough is a little friendlier to women these days. (Of course, most of the stories about St. Kevin are much more saintly, including caring for orphans and little birds and stuff like that.)

Since we hadn't gone on our hike, we had some extra time. We decided to stop by Powerscourt Gardens, which we hadn't originally planned on doing, but we were driving right past there so we figured why not? I was feeling steadily crappier, but I decided I could handle a bit more walking if it meant I got to do more touristing. Powerscourt is an old mansion just south of Dublin, and while the inside of the mansion itself is not much to look at (it's not restored and instead they've put a bunch of shops in there), the gardens are magnificent. They said we aren't allowed to publish any photos of Powerscourt, but if you want to look at their website you can see how beautiful the place is. I downloaded one picture off their webpage for you to see (I assume that's okay. I mean, they already published it...)

After Powerscourt, I was totally energy-less. We drove back to Dublin, returned the car (still with half a tank of fuel left--I'm still mad they made us pre-pay for that fuel!), and got on a bus to take us from the airport to our hotel. I felt so completely lousy on the bus. Every minute I was feeling worse. When we finally arrived and checked into our hotel, I climbed straight in bed and slept/was practically delerious the rest of the night.
Kevin worked on his presentation on his laptop for a while, then got really really hungry. He decided to go out and look for food, but despite walking for a least an hour (!) he didn't find anything that suited him. He came back and grumpily ordered something from room service. Ah well. I myself was too feverish to worry about food or eating of any sort.

Ireland Day 2: An Irish Sabbath

On Sunday morning, we had our first Irish breakfast. It was, in fact, not a "full" Irish breakfast though--it "only" had eggs, bacon, toast, muesli, and fruit. We checked out of our B&B and drove to the seaside town of Bray, which is just south of Dublin, where we were planning on attending the local branch of our church [the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]. In Dublin there are actual Wards [full-sized congregations], but the rest of Ireland only has a few scattered Branches [smaller congregations].

We took the "ring road" around Dublin so we didn't have to drive through the city (this is also why we chose the Branch in Bray rather than entering Dublin city to attend a Ward). I had printed out google map directions, but once we got off the freeway, we found them woefully inadequate. If only I'd been willing to fork over the $10 or so extra per day for a GPS! I definitely would have done that differently if I had it to do over. You see, in Ireland, people don't really believe in these silly things like "street signs" or "addresses." And with all the crazy winding roads, it was VERY hard to navigate. We knew the address of the church building, but it didn't help much.

Finally, when we were pretty sure we had to be somewhere close, we decided to just park and walk around and hopefully we'd find some address or street sign or something letting us know where we were or where to go. Just as we pulled over, we noticed a couple getting out of a car in front of us, all dressed up in Sunday clothes. The husband opened up the trunk and pulled out a Gospel Doctrine manual, which we of course recognized! We hurried to catch up and asked them to lead us to the church. We were very grateful, because there is NO way we would have found it on our own--it was back a ways from the street, and you had to go through this gate to get there. There was a sign, but it was hard to see.

We had a nice time at church. The numbers were sparse, but the people were very full strong of faith. There were several people from Romania in that congregation, for some reason, and the parents of a girl I know here in Champaign! Small world when you're Mormon.

After church, we drove further south towards the next historical site we wanted to see the following day, which was a place called Glendalough. We took the scenic route through the mountains (more like hills, really) and saw lots of beautiful country-side and LOTS of sheep. The roads were of course very winding, and also very narrow--but Kevin actually found that exciting and fun rather than nerve-wracking and stressful as I would have felt--good thing he was the driver! We also passed some areas of peat bogs full of heather. They didn't look very "bog-like" to me--from a distance, it looked like grassland, but if you got out and walked around, your feet would sink into spongey ground. You could also see places where people had cut away the peat (they burn it for fuel after it dries.)

We passed a waterfall on the way, which we decided to stop at. My guidebook said there was a path "near" the parking pull-out that lead to the top of the waterfall. Imagining this as a nice leisurely Sunday stroll, we decided we would do the walk. In fact, it was quite a long ways to the waterfall along this stream, which we had to cross several times. The ground around the stream was pretty boggy, and my feet sunk down in the sponge-earth until my shoes were SOAKING. (Somehow, Kevin managed to keep his feet dry.) It was a fairly rugged hike, too. AND, it was raining--we thought it was letting up when we started, but it actually got a lot heavier once we were about half way there. Not exactly as Sabbath-appropriate as I had imagined...But it was a pretty waterfall, and it opened up into a lovely valley.

Once we made it back to the car, we drove the rest of the way to the B&B near Glendalough. When we first arrived, no one was there to let us in, and no one answered the phone. We were about to go find a different B&B to check into when they finally called us back. They let us in to our room, which was cute but VERY tiny, even by European standards. It was also very cold, and we couldn't figure out how to work the heater. But, they did have internet access, which made Kevin happy.

We ate dinner at one of the few restaurants in that tiny village--it was nice, but pretty pricey yet again. The waiter tried to get us to drink some wine--"It's on the house!" he kept insisting, but we just had to keep explaining that we don't drink alcohol. I guess its hard for Irish people to understand.

Ireland Day 1: Tombs and Towers

So, where did I leave off? Oh yes--we had just left the Dublin airport. It was something like 9am in Ireland (3am IL time), so the day was just starting even though to our bodies, it felt like we should be tucked peacefully into bed. I'd planned a full day of sight-seeing for that first day, which was probably a good idea in terms of forcing us to stay awake and get used to the time change. But in terms of getting the most enjoyment possible out of the sights, well, it wasn't the best plan. Nevertheless, we blinked our sleepy eyes at the sunshine and set out on the LEFT side of the road.

We headed north towards Newgrange. (A little note about geography here. The Dublin airport is actually north of Dublin, so we never even entered the city thus far--we planned it that way on purpose, because we wanted to avoid driving in Dublin in general and also wanted to start out our first day on less stressful, less populated roads. Here's a little map so people can get their bearings. The green tent represents Newgrange, and the blue flag is Trim, which I'll talk about soon.)

It was a little tricky finding the visitor's center once we got off the freeway--our first small taste of the windy little roads with less than stellar signage (although the signs around here were actually much better than they were later on in other places...) It wasn't too bad, though, and the drive was less than an hour in all.

I wanted to hit Newgrange first because it is very popular and tickets are often sold out by the afternoon. What is Newgrange, you ask? A huge ancient burial mound 1,000 years older than the Egyptian pyramids (built about 3,000 B.C.) There are many of these "passage tombs" in Ireland. They were built by assembling HUGE rocks into a long passage way (or set of passageways) leading to a cruciform chamber in the middle, then piling up massive amounts of dirt on top to build an earthen hill with a narrow passageway leading to the center, where they would bury human remains.

The special thing about the passageways is that they are aligned just at the right angle so that on the winter solstice (or summer equinox at some sites), the sunlight will penetrate all the way down the passage and light up the tombs in the center for 17 minutes. (Which, as my mother-in-law pointed out, sounds very Indiana Jones-esque, don't you think?)



At Newgrange, they let you walk all the way down the passageway in small groups, and then they recreate the solstice effect with electric lights to show you what it's like.

We also saw another giant burial mound called Knowth, which is very nearby. This one is actually bigger and older, but you can't go inside the passage. Knowth has a huge amount of prehistoric stone carving art on the outside of it, though--much more than at Newgrange, which was pretty impressive.

It also has 18 smaller satellite mounds all around it, and a circle of post-holes where they had a wooden stonehenge-like sun calendar thing (archaeologists found the post holes, and they've put new wood in them to show what it would have looked like.)

It was all extremely impressive--5,000 years old! The visitor's center was very interesting too, although you can see my exceeding I-just-got-off-an-overseas-plane-flight frumpiness in the picture of me standing by the display. And I don't know why the picture makes it look like there are white stripes on the sides of my jeans...

















After we were done at the burial mounds, we drove inland toward a town called Trim. The castle at Trim is very impressive--in fact, it's where they filmed Braveheart, apparently. (I haven't seen it, but that's what everyone said.) It is has not been "restored" like some other castles, but it is in pretty good shape. Not bad considering it is almost 1,000 years old (I think it dates from 1200 or so).

We had an excellent tour guide who took us around and showed us everything. Kevin really enjoyed it especially, because this castle was a true defensive castle, built with war in mind. He finds that more interesting than the other "floofy" castles we have visited that are really more like ornate palaces.

Anyways, it was very cool to see. We even got a distant view of the Hill of Tara from the tower (which is where the Irish high kings ruled before the Normans took over). In the shot of the countryside, you can see the small hill with a few trees on it--see it?

We ALSO saw a wedding party at the castle, which was kind of fun. I think they were just taking pictures, not actually having the wedding there, however.

We stayed the night at a little bed and breakfast in Trim, which we checked into after seeing the castle. We had a short nap, and then went to dinner. It was raining, so we just ducked into a close place that seemed nice. It *was* nice, but pretty darn pricey too. But I really enjoyed my duck! Kevin ordered fajitas, which was a very funny experience. Let's just say that Irish fajitas aren't quite what we are used to. As we left the restaurant, there was a giant double rainbow over the castle. I took that to be a good omen that we would have a fantastic trip!