Ireland 2009 Day 3

Day 3

After a somewhat late start, since everyone was still moving pretty slow from the jet lag (well, I should say Alicia and Phil were, Lauren and I had adjusted). We all migrated downstairs at different times to get our free breakfast which consisted of corn flakes, coffee, and tea. As I mentioned before, it was here that we learned about our roomates being from America and Australia. There were two guys who were also staying at the hostel but they weren't in our room and they didn't say much. In fact, I don't think they said anything. They might not have spoken English.

Our roomates were headed to Cashel, which is close to Kilkenny. But they were taking a bus that apparently took them to a whole bunch of medieval towns throughout the day. Cashel is supposed to have a really impressive castle, but we never made it there. We were headed to Cork.

After getting lost, yet again, on our way out of Kilkenny, we ended up on a road that appeared it may or may not go towards Cork. However, due to some poorly marked roundabouts and Philip driving like a bat out of hell, meaning he was going to fast to go the right way even if I had seen the sign in time, we ended up in Waterford. Waterford was the opposite direction of where we wanted to be. Good thing Ireland is so tiny, we only lost about an hour total. And we got to walk around the city centre for a while. (Might as well take a look since we were there). We went grocery shopping for lunch where Philip bought a bag of oranges that lasted us for the whole rest of the trip. He also bought a pack of apple juice and Ribena, the drink of the gods, I swear. I bought a small container of raspberry "Saxony" yogurt (best yogurt I've ever had in my life! I can't remember the brand, but it's printed on a receipt somewhere), and strawberries imported from Morocco. Our first experience with Irish groceries resulted in the strawberries slowly but surely deteriorating into moldberries before we reached Cork. Damn organic groceries and the lack of any type of preservatives at all. (By the way, that's really not much of an exaggeration).


A Random Building in Waterford


Waterford City Centre

After Waterford we were on our way to Cork, for the second time that day. But this time we were on the N25, and there was very little chance that we would get off track. However, we were here to see Ireland, so we were hoping to find some roads off the beaten path. That definitely didn't happen on the N25. And with the combination of Philip driving like a bat out of hell and landmarks so poorly marked they make you want to cry, any time I did see something that sounded interesting to visit, we were already long gone. "Hey look, a historic fishing vill—" "What was that?" "Never mind". Seriously. The running joke was that the signs shouldn't say "Landmark Ahead...", they should say "You Missed It, Dumbass" or "Castle: 200 Meters BEFORE This Sign"

We did find a spot to pull off the road to take pictures of the small seaside town of Dungarvan between Waterford and Cork.


Dungarvan

On a map, Cobh (pronounced "cove") and Cork look like you could walk between them. But I figured that since we came upon Cobh first, we should stop. It was a good thing we did, because when we eventually left for Cork (for the third time in one day) they were at least 30 minutes apart.

Cobh is the last stop that the Titanic made before sinking into the Atlantic. It was an awesome little city, and had quite possibly the most beautiful cathedral I've ever seen. We also got fish and chips there, since Phil had had a craving for them since the night before (I told him we couldn't get them until they were fresh and he pointed out to me that we were on an island so they'd have to be fresh). We asked the lady in the gift shop about a good spot to get them and she named about four different places but I'm pretty sure the place we ended up wasn't one. But they were absolutely delicious nonetheless.


Fish 'n' Chips


St. Colmann's Cathedral


Titanic Memorial

On the road again to Cork... this time we finally made it. The next trick was to find a parking spot since they were having their St. Patrick's Day Festival in leading up to St. Patrick's Day. We parked by a Mini Cooper with its flashers on, and I'm pretty sure that it wasn't a real parking spot anyway. We walked around and gawked at the stands a bit until we decided it would be a good thing to find a place to stay for the night because it was starting to get dark.


Cork in silhouette.

Cork reminded me so much of Nice, France. It's like... the Mediterranean of Ireland. It's very ecclectic. I'm not sure whose idea it was, but we ended up walking into The Victoria Hotel in the city centre to ask if there was a hostel around. Of all the places to ask about a hostel... >< Oh well. She put us up for 30 euro a person, which wasn't bad considering we were right on the main drag and we got breakfast in the morning.


"The Main Drag"

The next thing we had to do was to go back to our car and find a closer parking spot. She said that street parking was free after 6:30, but it was about 6, so we had a little time to kill. We tried a parking garage first but didn't want to pay the expensive fee. When we left, if we would have turned right, we would have been right to our hotel in no time. But did we turn right? Of course not. We went left. We figured we could just go around the block. But "around the block" turned into "around the city" since the street we thought we could get back onto never intersected the one we were on. Then we really got lost. We ended up crossing two different bridges about five times, through the scary part of town, which might even be considered the red light district at a later time, back towards Cobh, and finally back to the parking garage where we made the fatal turn out of. Lucky we killed that time, though. There was a parking spot right close to our hotel and we pulled in at about 6:35.

After we lugged our luggage into the elevator that was probably original to the original building that the existing building currently resides over, we were ready to go eat.


The stairway down to the lobby from our floor.

We ended up at a place that apparently had a club attatched to it when I got the craving for a cosmopolitan. We asked one of the waitresses if we could get one and she said that they couldn't serve cocktails. However, she did point us in the direction of an actual cocktail bar complete with cocktail menu full of beers, mixed drinks, run-of-the-mill cocktails, and shots. The place was called Long Island.

After about a five minute walk and seeing a girl who was drunk out of her mind almost get hit by a bus, we were at Long Island.

Phil started off with "Death By Chocolate" (I can't even begin to remember what was in it, but just about every single ingredient had something to do with chocolate). Alicia started off with something really fruity and girly and pretty. Lauren and I started with Liquid Cocaine. Half a shot of Goldschlager, half a shot of champagne.


Liquid Cocaine


Liquid Cocaine: Before


Liquid Cocaine: After

After those, I wanted Sex in the Forest, and I can't begin to describe what was in it (I do remember orange juice) and Alicia and Lauren followed. After those were gone, the three girls had the same shot... I can't remember what it was called but it was half Kahlua and half strawberry liquer. They weren't as great as they sounded.


Sex in the Forest


Shots of the Kahlua/strawberry: Before


Shots of the Kahlua/strawberry: During/After

Walking back to the hotel felt a lot like Oasis's Champagne Supernova. ("I was walking down the hall/faster than a cannonball"). It was freezing so we were hurrying, but the walk was taking longer than it took to get there and to me everyone was in slow motion. But I honestly think I was still good to drive. Apparently I can hold hard liquor better than carbonated drinks like beer. Also, it was at Long Island that we all came up with the idea of mixed-drink "juice" boxes. How awesome is that idea? I'm reserving all rights to that right now, by the way.


On the Walk Back

Once again that night I slept for about an hour and a half and woke up ready to go. I had nowhere to go, nor did I have a shower to take since I had already taken one. So I laid there listening to the sounds of the street. I could literally roll over to my right (which was going against the forces of gravity since my mattress was annoyingly tilted to the left for the second night in a row) and watch all the drunk girls manage to walk in high heels (except one girl fell, and that was pretty funny).

I started to think about how oddly safe it felt to be in Ireland. It might have been the ever-looming presence of CCTVs, or the fact that I was constantly with people I knew, or maybe even that we spoke the same language (outrageous accents aside), but I'm not sure it was any of those things as much as it was something else. I suppose it's in the people. They're so much simpler and happier than Americans. They're so passionate about life. They make you feel like you belong there; like it's home.

Ireland 2009 Days 1-2

Oh my word, I was so sick. I had been battling the flu for about four days before I was going to leave, and I was nervous about the flight. I used to be fine about flying, but it has progressively gotten worse and worse the more I fly. Since I had been sick, I hadn't packed. Not that I would have packed beforehand (seriously, what's with people who ask if you've packed yet when you're not even leaving for, say, another month?). I had to force myself to pack. I had to. 11:00pm rolled around and I was finally finishing up. My poor flu-ridden, exhausted, nervous body could finally get some sleep to wake up at 2:30 the next morning so we could drive to Boise in time. But no, I was all settled in, and I realized that I forgot about 5 things so I had to get up and make myself a list of everything (there was no way I had the energy to pack them right then).


I finally got to sleep around 11:30 and woke up again at 12:45 because my body apparently hates itself. I drifted in and out of sleep for the next hour until I decided it would just be better to stay awake. I didn't have the energy to get up, so I just layed there, in a crumpled mess, in bed until Andy's 2:30 alarm went off.

We were off to Boise by 3:00am. Mike had volunteered to accompany Andy, which was a good thing since I layed down in the back for the whole two hours. The airport check-in went as well as it could've gone... the attendants were too cheery at 5:00am, I wanted to curl up and die, and I was convinced that I was, in fact, going to die on the first flight. Or maybe the second. Or maybe the trans-Atlantic flight so I could perish in the freezing water like the Titanic passengers. That, I knew, was for sure going to happen. In all honesty, I am not making this up. Although it is comical now, it wasn't at the time. I was so miserable that I almost didn't get on the plane.

After waiting 2 hours in the dark, almost empty, airport, I finally boarded the plane. If I did make it through the take-off, which I wasn't, since I was going to die, I decided that orange juice sounded good. I took my seat and the captain announced that they needed to de-ice the plane. Wonderful. We're going to die upon take-off. After a delay of about 15 minutes, we were lined up to take off. I closed my eyes and tried not to think about it. I tried to think of the stale air or about how long it was going to take to get to Phoenix or about on a scale of 1 to 10, how much my body hurt.


Needless to say I survived the take-off, the entire flight, and the landing. I even survived the next two flights and didn't perish in the freezing Atlantic ocean. I even got a much needed nap while I was in the Phoenix airport separated from my cousin and his girlfriend. I didn't think those airport seats could be so comfortable. And I did arrive on time to the gate of departure for the trans-Atlantic flight by chance, as I was simply looking for a currency exchange which happened to be literally next to the gate I needed. It was the only one open in the entire airport at that. By the way, the Philadelphia airport is huge.


Day 2:


I hate sleeping on airplanes. But most of all, I hate the stale air. Luckily I've found a way to sleep comfortably on planes (well, as comfortable as possible). I awoke sometime around... an hour before sunrise, haha. That's the best I've got. We were probably south of Iceland. But we didn't have monitors on the seats and the only two small TVs in sight were playing some sort of sitcom that you could listen to if you bought the $3 headphones. I couldn't get back to sleep so I stayed up and watched into the black abyss that was the atmosphere with the blinking of the airplane wing. Finally I saw it. It was the dark blue glint of hope that we were almost there. We weren't supposed to be in Dublin until 8am, so I figured we were close if the sun was starting to become visible by then. The dark blue gave way to lighter and lighter blues and finally yellows and oranges and finally it was daylight with the ocean beneath us. Then came the spots of clouds and finally the grey overcast sky off the coast of Ireland.

There were few breaks in the clouds but I could see it. Ireland was under us. We were over Ireland. It was real. It wasn't just a postcard. It was through the window. And it was green. It was the most beautiful green I'd ever seen. It disappeared about half an hour from Dublin until we (Jamie... I think her name was Jamie... the girl sitting next to me from Wisconsin) saw the eastern coast and then we completely flew past it. I knew planes have landing patterns, but we didn't bank until well after we couldn't see the land anymore. Were we over The Isle of Man? Scotland, perhaps?


After we banked and finally saw Dublin and noticed they were driving on the wrong side of the road and how mountainous it is, and had talked about how awesome it was to finally be here, of course we have a rough landing. I said to Jamie, "And now we die". We laughed about it. I was obviously feeling much better.


Dublin is building a new airport and it was easy to see why. The passageway from the gate to customs was nothing more significant than a high school hallway. A high school built in the 80s. After clearing customs and having the guy repeat himself several times before I could catch what he said (their accents are outrageous!), I was in the clear. Now my next challenge was to be able to find Lauren who had flown into Dublin from Milan the night before. She was supposed to be meeting us at the "meeting area" on the ground level.


I shouldn't have worried. This was Lauren, after all. I stepped through the doors and two seconds later, amid the chattering crowd and chaos, I heard "There she is! Aha! Shealyn!!!" I bet the taxis outside could have heard her. But we found each other, and half the hard part was over. The next hard part was finding Alicia and Philip. More like making sure they didn't go the wrong way when they came out of the doors. But no worries. After about half an hour of waiting they showed up and, after having Lauren scream for them, we were all united.

After the car rental counter we were directed outside to wait for the shuttle bus to take us to the parking lot to pick up the car. And we waited. And waited. And waited some more. Seriously, Hertz's bus came by about 4 times before ours showed up. It was easy to see why it took him so long to get there. It took us 5 minutes to get to the parking lot, which was a good thing because it was far enough away from the airport chaos so Philip could concentrate more on driving on the wrong side of the road than not running into an airplane or something.


"Caution: Horses"

We were finally on our way to Kilkenny on the M50, which completely bypasses Dublin. It took Philip about 20 minutes to truly get the hang of driving on the left side of the road, but we were on our way. The drive there included about 6 different castles/ruins, dozens of little villages, and driving like we had never seen before. Seriously. In Ireland, the main roads (not the freeways or whatever they call them) consist of two lanes on a road that's about 3 and a half lanes wide. When you want to turn right, you stop in the middle of the road and turn and the other cars go around you. When you want to turn left, you get over to the left side of the road and cars pass you on the right, even if that means crossing the line. Good thing the cars are small.

We stopped in Kilkenny by chance. We were going to drive by until we saw Kilkenny castle, which is extremely impressive and beautiful. We figured it would be worth the stop. As we were creeping along in the winding city streets we started to notice the signs said Kilkenny ____. Good thing we stopped. The next trick was to find our hostel. We finally got directions at a tyre (yes, tyre) shop from a guy who had the least heavy accent I think of anyone we met on the whole trip. Again, since we were lost, we passed our hostel which worked to our advantage because we were able to turn around a find a parking spot just up the street from it.


The rest of the day consisted of looking for the castle. We stopped at a place for lunch, which, by the time we got there, was at 3. They had brown sugar. Not raw or demerara sugar, actual molasses-mixed brown sugar in packets. They also had Ribena, which is a black currant juice.


Kilkenny Castle


We finally found the castle at about 4:05. I know it was about 4:05 because the last tour left at 4:00 and we missed it by that much. So we wandered around the castle grounds by ourselves for about 45 minutes until we decided we were about ready to hit the pub and go to bed. On the way to the pub we got sidetracked and lured into the tourist office. They were about ready to close up, but I got to see the lady lock the door with the key that was probably original to the building. It was about 8 inches long and two inches thick on a heavy chain. It was the coolest key I had ever seen. It took us around an hour to find the pub we wanted to go to because we had to retrace our steps to find it. We literally walked around the city of Kilkenny twice in one day.



We found the pub, called Brennan's, around 6:30 and ordered... what else besides Guinness? It was so good. It's even better off the tap fresh from Ireland, not three hours from where it was made. A patron gave us a lesson (well, more like Lauren, but we all listened) about how a Guinness is ordered. When the bartender pours it, they don't pour it all the way full. They let it sit a minute before they finish it off and you can't drink it until it turns black. After one round (two for Philip) we were ready to hit the hay. The walk back to the hostel was a little easier than the one there. We were out by 8, which felt like at least 10.



I wish I could send this to Shanna


Brennan's of Kilkenny


Apparently, and I had never known this before, all I need is a beer and a two hour nap and I'm better than new. The other people in our room came in and they were trying to be quiet since they saw us asleep, but they woke Lauren and me up anyway. I said, "Guys, hey guys?" "Yeah?" "What time is it?" "It's 10 o'clock" That took me a second to figure out... I thought they meant 10 in the morning because I felt so rested and it felt like I had slept all night but it was still dark outside so I couldn't put two and two together. I finally asked "At night?!" "Yeah" "Oh... thanks" One of them said, "No worries." (She hadn't spoken before, but with that comment, it was obvious she was an Aussie :D). We later learned at breakfast the next morning she was Australian and there were two Americans with her and they were all studying in Spain.


Anyway, I couldn't get back to sleep so I decided to get up and take a shower. That shower was amazing. If you're ever going to be staying in Kilkenny, stay at MacGabhain's. The shower is worth the trip to Ireland. After that I still couldn't sleep so I layed there for a while listening to the sounds of the night life on a Friday in Kilkenny, Ireland.