Cheers Darlin'

Ireland

This retroactive post thing is highly lame, but you do what you must, I suppose. I’m finally accepting that I really am home and find myself half-heartedly attempting to get back into the proverbial swing o’ things. But it is comforting to be back in routine, and I enjoy not living out of a painfully heavy bright purple suitcase. Little things like walking to/from work with Ipod blaring and shopping for groceries make me surprisingly happy. Which is good.

So, anyway, Ireland. I always fancied that I had a good ear for accents and was adept at understanding other’s accents, but as I discovered in Yorkshire, I ain’t as good as I thunk. Ireland was challenging at first in that respect, but then I discovered that if I tuned my ear to Newfie, it worked like a charm. I suppose that’s where Newfoundland got the accent, after all.

Belfast was really interesting. I’m probably being redundant as I already posted about this, but it felt very much like home, or somewhere close to home, anyway. Odd. Except for the barbed wire everywhere, as seen above. We took it easy here, shopped at Tesco, wandered around museums, saw a few movies. Finally saw “The Squid and the Whale” which was excellent, and minus the foul mouth, the Jeff Daniels character was so disturbingly familiar to The Pants and myself it was frightening. Come to think of it, almost every single movie we saw on the trip had some sort of highly inappropriate content, considering the presence of my 17 year old sister. Those European ratings mean nothing, clearly. It’s like being in Quebec. But oddly enough, the tamest film we saw was French. Ironic, n’est ce-pas?

As we were forced to eschew small town Ireland, we hightailed it over to Galway, and I’m glad we did because Galway was grand. It felt a lot like Southern California – very laid back and humid. There’s a park in the centre of the city called Eyre Square where it seems the entire population hangs out and drinks Guinness. The mess afterwards was appalling, but the city cleans it up. Bizarre. We spent three languorous days here, wandering around in the heat, shopping at the plethora of shoe/handbag/jewelry boutiques that peppered the winding streets and lounging in Eyre Square (minus the Guinness, of course).

We did, however, decide to splurge and go on a bus tour of the countryside. The sunshine pulled a disappearing act that day, so we wandered around rural Ireland in the gloom. This delighted The Pants, who had been pining for the misery and gloom she’d so been looking forward to. Our guide, Billy, was hi-larious. I asked him a question at one point and he said “Oh, ‘tis a very sensible question,” and I actually almost giggled.

The Aillwee Caves on The Burren. They took us to this caves deep in the earth - pretty neat the with stalagmites and stalactites. It was a little spooky and when they mentioned bats both The Pants and I got a little anxious, but all was well. Perhaps not worth the 7 Euros we paid for it, but ah well. The Burren is this bizarre part of County Galway that is essentially a sea of limestone rock atop the grass and flowers. It looks rather bleak at first but had a charm of its own, I think.

Poulnabrone Dolmen - "A remarkable megalithic monument and the most famous is the vortal tomb, or portal dolman, located in the heart of the Burren and dating from about 2500 BC. This was also an ancient burial site." Pretty gnarly, no? That's another dolman above.

This is where I became entranced with the tiny flowers growing in between the rocks on the burren. "Are you serious?" I'm sure you're asking yourself. But it was sort of pretty, and think of all the cheesy analogies relating to beauty and adversity you could come up with. The Sunday School lessons practically write themselves.

The Cliffs of Moher. They don't look so big in pictures, but I assure you they were almost 800 ft. high. Billy told us that a woman died here last year when she got to close to the edge and the soil broke away and she tumbled down into the sea. I still stood at the edge, despite the warning, but on the rocky bits so as not to meet a watery death. They were insane, these cliffs. One might even call them...The Cliffs of Insanity. I nearly neglected to mention the friend we made on the tour, Yaele from Bordeaux. She was hilarious, spoke as much English as we did French, but we had a great time. My favorite was when she told us she was going to Dublin "To, uh, make party," dance moves included. Cheers!

Dunguaire Castle and the little tiny flowers growing out of it. See above for the rocks/flower obsession.

Dublin. City of garbage and stench. Sorry, Dublin, but that's all I got. Well, I did get a nice jacket here. The above shot is the river Liffey. Which smelled like sewage. I suppose if someone who knew Dublin and what to see and do had taken us around it would have been different...but it wasn't. And it rained so bloody hard we didn't get to see the Book of the Kells and we'd, ahem, forgot our umbrella. So maybe it wasn't entirely Dublin's fault. But the smell certainly was.

Farewell, Ireland, we hardly knew ye.

Stay tuned for Paris. Ah, la ville d'amour. Je t'aime!