Ireland > Czech

So, my new life plan: finish school and move to Ireland! Just kidding, maybe . . . Seriously though, there is just something about Ireland that I absolutely love! I have been to some wonderful places that I've kind of joked about wanting to move there, but it's no joke when I say I could see myself there. Granted, I was only here not even five full days, and living somewhere is certainly different than visiting, but I will undoubtedly be returning to Ireland at the least!

Aly, Meggi, and I arrived mid-afternoon on Thursday. Meggi would only be with us until Sunday, so all of the major tourists attractions needed to be seen in the first few days. Aly and I don't have class on Monday though, so we had an extra day! This trip was also the first time I had stayed in a hostel. We stayed at Kinlay, supposedly one of the best in Ireland. Despite that one cold shower and spotty wifi, we didn't have any other problems and the staff was really great with helping us with everything! After more than three weeks of having to make hand gestures and use the little Czech that we know to communicate, it was really nice to hear some English! Not so nice though, was the price shock we had coming from Czech to Ireland. In Czech, everything is dirt cheap-- you feel like you're being robbed if dinner costs much more than $10. In Ireland though, we regularly paid almost double for meals there than we would have in Czech. I had accidentally pulled out almost double the amount I had wanted to spend in Ireland from the ATM, but ended up on needing almost all of it anyways . . .

I absolutely loved Ireland, but our trip could have started out a little smoother . . . Our first full day in Dublin, we were all really on edge. We had planned a day trip for Saturday and Meggi was leaving Sunday, so Friday was the day to do as much sightseeing within Dublin as possible. We were all really tired from being on the go all the time in Prague, from our flight the day before, and probably from sleeping in bunks that aren't exactly the most comfortable things ever. I also feel like it was hard being in a group of three-- it just made working out what we would do that much more complicated. I am a pretty "on the go" type of person, so walking around for hours, often in the rain, was something that I was willing to do to get the most out of our one day self-guided tour of Dublin. Having consensus on how much we were willing to put into it was difficult even in a small group though . . . I think that a big part of my frustration that day come from feeling held back a bit. Also, our hostel provided a toast, cereal, and coffee breakfast, but by the time we made it to lunch around 3pm we were close to completely freaking out on each other. Once we ate it was completely fine, but I was feeling pretty sour about the trip until then.

On Friday, when we toured around Dublin on our own, we got tickets for the hop-on hop-off double decker bus. We were able to ride that between most of the big sights in Dublin and get on and off at them as much as we wanted that day. It was a nice way to kind of orientate ourselves with the city and to get from place to place.

Our first stop on Friday was Trinity College, to see the Book of Kells. The Book of Kells is a collection of books known to be some of the first ever recorded in writing. Seeing these ancient books was really interesting, but most interesting to me was Trinity Library. I have always appreciated a good library, and this one was absolutely breathtaking! When I was looking at colleges, it was always really cool for me to see the brilliant architecture in all of the schools' libraries, but I'm pretty sure none of them have anything on Trinity's library. I wasn't able to take picture inside any part of the Book of Kells museum or the library, but here are some photos from online:

Mid-morning we walked through St. Stephen's Green. It was really peaceful there, and definitely took off a bit of my edge for at least a little while. We also made sure to cover Dublin Castle and St. Patrick's Cathedral, after a bit of shopping on Griffin St. With all the rain that day, I was glad to have my boat shoes, but Aly's got completely wrecked, so she invested in a nice pair of wellies!

We left St. Patrick's Cathedral around two that afternoon, and made our way to the Guinness Storehouse for the tour and lunch. All of the food places came after the tour, so we may have gone through a little faster than we would have liked . . . In deciding where to eat was the point when we all nearly lost it, but we all knew it was ridiculous and were fine the second we sat down with our food. We actually sat there for probably an hour and a half just chatting and hanging out, so it was definitely the lack of food that had been the problem and nothing personal . . .

We tried going to the Kilmainham Gaol next . . . five minutes before it closed. So we just got to see it from the outside. It's supposed to be a really interesting site, so it was kind of disappointing, but our day had turned around enough that it was ultimately not a huge deal.

That night we met two of our hostel roommates, Raina and Tatum, who had just graduated high school and were traveling some of Europe together. We all went to The Brazen Head together, the oldest pub in Ireland, established in 1198. I assumed it would be really touristy and overpriced, but compared to everywhere else we had gone, it was great!

After a better nights sleep, we were up early the next morning to go to Galway and The Cliffs of Moher. Our tour bus was leaving at 7, so preferably we should have been there by about ten of. Instead, that's what time we left the hostel . . . I figured it was about a ten minute walk to where we thought we were meeting, so I was slightly on edge by us leaving late, but figured we would still make it. The last block or so I jogged around the corner that we thought we were meeting at, it being just about 7. But, the tourism office we thought we were meeting at was closed and obviously was not where we were meeting. We had looked at a map the day before, and I had thought it looked like the meeting spot was on a side street of the one we were on, so I really wasn't too surprised when the place was closed-- but if I hadn't been on edge before, I definitely was then! I ran back around the corner to Aly and Meggi to tell them that this wasn't the meeting spot and then ran back the way I had come from. I had no idea where to go exactly, so I just ran to the next side street. It happened to have a coach bus parked on the other end, so I ran all the way down and caught the driver's attention just as he was about to close the doors. It was seriously like something out of a movie . . . To top it off, the driver then asked for our reservation slip-- which proves that we had paid the deposit for the trip and that we had conveniently forgot in our safe at the hostel . . . That guy could have seriously been the last straw to making my morning absolutely terrible. He could have said that we would have to repay without proof of payment, or maybe not have let us go at all because the bus was booked. Luckily, none of that happened because he believed us, so we made it onto the bus with no further problems.

I honestly don't know (nor do I want to know) what I would have done or been like if we had missed that bus. I was so angry at how close we had come to missing it that it took me a good while on the bus to fully relax. I honestly think I would have had to go off on my own somewhere for the day, because I would have probably been really unpleasant company. Luckily it didn't come to that, but I was still furious at the situation. We stopped for breakfast on the road somewhere along that way, and at that point we all settled with each other and no one had any hard feelings about the few hours earlier.

And so this is when the trip fully became amazing and I can stop recounting my angry emotions . . .

We eventually made it to Galway, on the western coast of Ireland. The sea breeze instantly made me think of everything from last summer in Belfast, Maine! It had been a great summer, and was something I knew I would really miss when I went abroad this summer. Smelling the sea breeze in Galway was more of a comfort though, and didn't at all make me miss it in a home sick kind of way. Touring around Galway and driving through the Irish countryside before and after that stop was when I really fell in love with Ireland. It really just has some sort of true charm and character to it! In the states, I like to think I prefer the city, or at least something a little more happening than Littleton . . . but being out in the true countryside made me kind of appreciate the beauty that my parents probably saw when they decided to leave the Boston area for the northern New Hampshire country and mountainside.

Our tour that day had a portion through Galway, but unfortunately didn't leave us any free time outside of the walking tour there. There were tons of fun looking shops and an outdoor market we had wanted to explore a bit. Had we planned a little farther in advance we agreed it might have been nice to have a night in the area. The lack of free time was really kind of a bummer, but visiting at all is better than nothing I guess!

After our stop in Galway, we made our way to lunch before visiting the Cliffs of Moher. The coach bus winded around on all kinds of curvy hillside roads. It was a lot fo fun to me but made Meggi feel really sick. The whole entire ride was just so picturesque too-- we constantly drove by castles and sheep covered hillsides that were really just like you would imagine of the Irish countryside. Before even getting anywhere, I absolutely loved it. Aly and I just had these huge smiles plastered onto our faces.

The Cliffs of Moher are without a doubt one of the most stunning sites I have ever visited. I need to think back really hard to Australia and New Zealand, but without even doing that the cliffs are definitely in the top 2-3 places I have ever been! We viewed the cliffs from above-- apparently you can view from below by boat too. We went up the right side of the cliff first, and seriously, every single time we'd climb a little farther I would turn for another view and be more blown away than I had been before. It hadn't rained once that day, surprisingly, and when we made our way down the right side to go explore the left, the sky ever cleared up and made the cliffs even more gorgeous! The left side was even better than the right! Breathtaking doesn't even begin to explain how glorious the cliffs were from that side. And again, the farther up we went, the more spectacular the view became. Eventually on that side the barricade ended and you were just walking along a cliff with the wind roaring all around. Looking down at some points made my stomach drop a little, but it was so worth it. This one guy slid down onto his stomach and propped his head out over the edge to look down-- his wife then burst out that she would like to be married to him for more than the mere seven days it had been, it was really funny and luckily he made it back up okay! Some girls in front of us were sitting on what looked like the final part of the ledge of the cliff taking photos. I took a peak and saw that it wasn't too bad and then did the same. There was still a little bit of a slope left, but from the angle of the photo, it looks like I could have fallen off if only moved over just a little bit. Even though it still felt safe enough, I clenched onto the grass around me just in case-- not that it would actually help much at all if it came down to me falling . . .

Looking back, the Cliffs of Moher were definitely the highlight of the trip! We also visited Poulnabrone Dolmen on that tour, but by that point it was starting to rain, so I only got a few quick shots of it. We were back to Dublin around 9:30 that night. We got Meggi settled with all of her airport stuff for the next morning and then had an earlier night-- Meggi was leaving early the next morning and Aly had a migraine, so we decided just to sleep as much as possible that night.

Our "sleeping in" was only until 8:30, so it wasn't like we wasted a lot of Sunday with sleep, but Aly and I were definitely more refreshed than we had been in a while . . . We just kind of did things as they came to us. We had had two long days before and knew that this coming week was going to suck time and sleep wise, so we really just took it easy. We walked all around and saw some of the things we hadn't gotten to with Meggi, eventually made it to a cafe where we read and I started writing this, and then we finished with a nice dinner out-- despite our jerk waiter. We could have ran around all day and done a lot more, but we honestly really needed a low key day. We've spent the last three weeks traveling around Prague trying to see and do as much as possible while still fitting in school work-- Aly also want to Rome last weekend-- so it was a nice day! It even didn't rain at all yesterday!

This coming week is going to be absolutely terrible . . . I have a presentation Wednesday (hopefully whipping that out tonight), a final on Thursday, and then we'll be trying to squeeze in all of the last minute things that we haven't gotten to do yet. Thursday night we have a dinner cruise all together, and then there will probably be a few sad goodbyes to people who opted out of the field study that starts Saturday morning. I'm leaving from our last destination of the field study for Krakow, Poland and won't return to Prague until the morning of my flight to Cape Town, so I will ultimately have to have my other luggage for Africa all packed and ready this week as well . . .

So ultimately, while it would have been great to have had another full fledged touring day in Ireland-- maybe a day trip to Cork or Belfast-- I was really happy to have a more relaxed day! I'm so happy that we decided to travel to Ireland this weekend! It's somewhere that I would have liked to visit eventually, but hadn't necessarily been right at the top of my list for whatever unknown reason. All three of us were a little quiet about it at first, not quite knowing how the other two felt about it, but by the end of the weekend we were all half wishing we had studied abroad in Ireland instead of the Czech Republic. Prague has been great, I don't want to take anything away from it and am glad that I went, but Ireland just felt a little more "me" . . . I may not have studied abroad there, but I will definitely be back!