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.