Luck O' the Irish

"If you're lucky enough to be Irish, then you're lucky enough" - Traditional Saying

I loved this country. Maybe it was speaking my own language, or the friendly people, or the beautiful landscapes, or all of the above, but I adored it.

Two friends and I all had the same weekend free, so we decided to go to Dublin the weekend of November 22nd. It wasn't originally on my travel plan, but I kept hearing of people visiting and loving it so I had to go! I arrived late Thursday morning so I had some time to get to know the city on my own before my friends got in that evening, as I like to do. After checking into our hotel I made a beeline for one of the most famous fish 'n chips shops, Leo Burdocks. Even though I don't really like fish, it sure lived up to its reputation.

Yummy

 

After that I just did a lot of walking. Dublin is a pretty small city, a lot like Amsterdam, so I hit most of the big touristy spots in that first afternoon. I passed through the Temple Bar area on my way to Trinity College, where I saw an exhibit of the Book of Kells. Created around 800 AD by Celtic monks, it is a splendidly decorated version of the four gospels of the New Testament. After the book, the exhibit led into the Long Room of the library, a beautiful room that holds 200,000 of the country's oldest books.

 

 

Trinity College

 

The Old Library

A copy of Ireland's Declaration of Independence from England, written in 1921

 

From there I went to St. Stephen's Green, Dublin's largest and most famous park. After wandering for a bit by the duck ponds, I came across the Garden for the Blind, which I thought was a very cool idea. You could touch and smell all the plants and there were braille name plaques installed.

 

 

Garden for the Blind

 

From there I walked down to the River Liffey, which cuts the city in half, to see the Jeanie Johnston ship, the Famine Memorial, and the Custom House, all of which are memorials to the potato famine and the wave of emigration to America. Our hotel was off of Dublin's main street, O'Connell Street, so I also saw the General Post Office and the Spire of Dublin. They make a pretty big deal out of the post office on all the tourist maps and it's apparently because that's where the final rebellion that sparked the successful revolution began. The Spire is also an interesting monument; it was built in 2003 to commemorate the millennium and it is gigantic. There's also no explanation of what it is so I would've gone on thinking it was some huge modern lighthouse thing if I hadn't asked a cab driver.

 

The GPO and the Spire (also known as the Monument of Light. It is 400 ft. high)

 

On the way back to the hotel I passed a cobbler that promised while you wait service and since my boots have been falling apart I decided to try it out. The Irish cobbler was the nicest man and we had a great little chat while he fixed my boots. He was shocked that I'd never had fish and chips before and wanted to know what in the world we ate instead. I told him (jokingly) McDonalds and (very seriously) Mexican food, but he didn't know what Mexican food was even like! He promised to try to find it after I told him what he was missing out on.

 

Bangers and mash for dinner

 

A "Full Irish" breakfast. Overall good, but you really don't want to know what those discs on the right are. Google black and white pudding if you're curious.

 

We took a very early bus the next morning to Galway, on the West coast of Ireland. After checking into that hostel, we had breakfast and then got on a tour bus with a jolly Irishman named Paul who took us through the lovely countryside with stops at the Ballyalban Fairy Fort, the Poulnabrone Dolmen ancient burial tomb, and the Cliffs of Moher.

 

Fairy fort! Unfortunately it's just a really old castle. When Christianity was spread to Ireland it justified the pagan belief in magic by saying leprechauns and fairies were fallen angels who only fell halfway and ended up on Earth.

Poulnabrone Dolmen - Hollow of the Sorrows. Believed to be the burial site of 22 priests over a period of 600 years, it is more than 1,000 years older than the Pyramids.

 

There were lots of sheep and cows, but I didn't take any pictures of sheep, I don't know why.

 

702 feet high and covering 5 miles of coastline, the Cliffs of Moher were absolutely stunning

 

A fort on the cliffs. There used to be a fortress, but it was destroyed.

 

Cliff selfie, you're welcome Dad

 

When we returned to Galway we had Irish stew for dinner and explored the Christmas markets which had just opened that day. That night we found a bar that was playing awesome live music - that seemed to be a big thing in Ireland and we loved it!

 

On Saturday we had another early morning to get to back Dublin for a full day of sightseeing. I took Kelly and Emily everywhere I'd been on Thursday as well as to St. Patrick's Church (he's Ireland's patron saint). We then went on a tour of the Guinness factory, which was fun and we got a lesson in serving Guinness with a certificate saying we had mastered pouring the perfect pint.

 

I spilled mine...The guy laughed and said "there's always one" which should maybe be my life motto

 

We heard more great music at two places on Saturday night and then Emily had to leave on Sunday morning. Kelly and I were spending an extra night, so we went to Dublin's old jail, Kilmainham Gaol, built in 1796. The tour was freezing and pretty depressing, but interesting all the same. We spent the afternoon exploring Dublin's Christmas markets and ended up being surprised that evening by a Christmas festival on O'Connell Street; since it was November 24th the Lord Mayor and Santa were lighting up the big tree.



 

 

Nobody can get mad about it being too early because they don't have Thanksgiving over here

 

Overall Dublin reminded me a lot of home - not just the language, but the food was familiar and the people were so friendly. I made eye contact with a few people on the street and all of them smiled and asked how I was doing. Somebody bumped into me once and apologized and I nearly hugged him, I was so shocked after dealing with the Paris attitude for the past few months. I was surprised by a few things though:

 

Security cameras on public streets. Not everywhere, but definitely noticeable

Almost everything was in Gaelic and English, which was cool because I didn't know it was that widely used. My cobbler friend said he learned it in school and promptly forgot it, but many people speak it in the South and West.

The driving on the left wasn't actually a surprise, but I still almost got hit a few times, despite these helpful signs everywhere.

 

A Long Spanish Holiday

"To go to bed at night in Madrid marks you as a little queer. For a long time your friends will be a little uncomfortable about it. Nobody goes to bed in Madrid until they have killed the night." - Ernest Hemingway

We had a mini fall break from November 6-11 so I gave myself a bit more vacation time and took off the 5th and the 12th too so that I could visit two good friends in two places in Spain, Madrid and Granada.

I got to Madrid on Wednesday morning and my friend Julie was nice enough to play hooky and pick me up from the airport and spend the day showing me around the city. Madrid is huge and has beautiful architecture and is so so sunny compared to Paris. Our first stop was tapas of course.

Potato, blood sausage, and a quail egg. Since each tapa costs 2-4 euros I could afford to be adventurous!

 

From there we went to Buen Retiro Park, which is like Madrid's version of Central Park. You could rent paddleboats on the big lake so Julie and I took a romantic paddleboat ride. The gardens stretch out forever and there's always new things to discover. We found a big glass pavilion called 'The Crystal Palace' that was next to this beautiful little waterfall.

 

Rowing on the lake

 

Palacio de Cristal

 

Some street performers

 

All the sanitation workers were on strike, so the city was pretty dirty.

 

After wandering the city for a while we went back and hung out at her apartment until the normal Spanish dinnertime which is about 10pm. I thought my host mom's 8 o'clock dinner was pushing it, but Spain runs on a whole different level. Everybody I know in Spain says they've more or less gotten used to it and it was actually pretty nice to leisurely leave for the night around 12:30 am instead of running out soon after dinner. Apparently the thing to do is stay out late enough to get churros and chocolate around 6 am, which we did the second night.

 

 

Julie had to go to class on Thursday so I spent the day wandering around Madrid. My big goal was to find the Reina Sofia Museum where Picasso's Guernica is kept, but I ended up just getting very lost. At one point I decided to be clever and use the five Spanish words I've picked up in Boulder over the years (not counting taco) to ask where it was. I guess I was convincing enough to get directions given to me in Spanish...so it was a good try, but for the rest of the trip I just said Ingles? and looked hopeful whenever I needed something. I ended up not at the Reina Sofia, but at the Museo del Prado, Spain's national museum, which had some very cool stuff in it too.

Including this guy.

 

The Third of May 1808 in Madrid by Goya y Lucientes

 

When I came out of the museum I found myself back at Retiro Park, so I walked through it again and saw some more hidden gems. Julie's apartment is right around the corner from one of the Spanish Royal Family's palaces.

 

 

It's also close to the city's big indoor market called the Mercado de San Miguel, which has all sorts of interesting ready to eat food things.

All the white is mozzarella cheese!

 

Iberian ham is a specialty of the region

A monkfish and some sea urchins. When we went for the second time they had switched places. How? Why?

 

 

On Friday morning I took a 5-hour bus ride down to Granada,  a small city in the south of Spain where my good friend from high school, Kristin, is studying. I got there in time for a sunset tour of the city and then we ate more tapas.

 

A statue of Queen Isabella and Christopher Columbus

You can feel the Moorish/Arab influence much more strongly in the south, most strikingly in the architecture. This is Granada's famous cathedral.

 

On Saturday morning I got up before Kristin and went walking around the city to do some touristy things that she'd already done.

 

The interior of the cathedral above.

 

Next to the cathedral, in a separate building, were the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella. You definitely weren't allowed to take pictures in there, but trust me, it was super neat.

We spent the day exploring and having Kristin be a tour guide. The region is very hilly so up on one side of town there's something called the Gypsy Caves. Apparently though real gypsies don't live in real caves up there, they're just small houses carved into the mountain. Still cool.

 

Gypsy caves

"otra mañana de vacio existencial sin anclas" or "another morning without existential vacuum anchors" according to google translate...

 

We had lunch (more sangria and tapas!) at this old bullfighting ring: several restaurants were built into the exterior.

Look at that funny walk sign on the stoplight! As time ran out, the man went faster!

 

We decided to do a day trip on Sunday to the city of Ronda, about a 2 hour train ride away. Ronda is one of the oldest cities in Spain; it's this amazing town built on a ridge of the Sierra Madre mountains with bridges and squares zigzagging down. 

 

They let you go inside this bridge and poke around and look through those little windows.

 

The Andalucían countryside and the Sierra Madres

 

Ronda boasts one of the oldest bullfighting rings in the country and is also the hometown of the Romero family, known for inventing modern bullfighting and their legendary skills.

 

Maybe that's why Hemingway liked this town so much

 

Ronda is split in half by a giant gorge that is over 300 feet deep. The gardens and the 'House of the Moorish King' hide the entrance to a series of moldy tunnels with steep, slippery stairs that lead all the way to the bottom; apparently this was the system by which slaves used to bring water up to the town. There were lots of ledges to peer through holes at the face of the opposing mountain and even something called the 'Chamber of Whispers.' Allegedly the king could say things in the middle of the chamber that nobody could hear in the corners, but Kristen and I experimented with it by playing music in the middle and we got some weird looks so I think he was mistaken. When we finally got to the bottom, we were surprised by a pool of crystal clear water that was surrounded by towering rocky cliffs and the town perched on top of them.

 

The gardens of the Moorish King

The mines

The water is a lot deeper than it looks - we threw some rocks in to test

 

 

We were exhausted after long nights and long touristy days, so when I got back to my hostel room around 8:30 Sunday night I was ready to crash. But my nice roommate was looking for someone to go to a flamenco show with her so I thought it over for about two seconds and decided I was in. I went to a big performance when I was 12 in Barcelona and couldn't stop laughing the whole time. The dramatic movements and flamboyant costumes were too much for me to handle. My poor teacher was so mad! This time around I'm proud to say I had a much more cultural experience. It took place in a small bar that had a literal cave carved out in the back for their flamenco shows. The group was just 4 people and they were awesome, they looked like they were just having the best time and the audience was joining in by clapping and yelling "ole!"

 

 

While Kristen was in class on Monday morning I did my final touristy thing of the trip: the Alhambra.

 

 

The Alhambra is a huge Moorish palace and fort that was originally constructed in 889. Additions were continually added by different monarchs who took control of the area. Its main features now are the Muslim Nasrid palaces, the palace of Charles V, the Generalife gardens, and the fortress.

 

I didn't realize how big and amazing it would be or I would've planned to spend much more time there. As it was, I ran through it in 2 hours (sounds like a long time, it wasn't), hung out with Kristen, then took the bus back to Madrid. I got back in time for Julie to cook me dinner! I spent one more night at their apartment and flew back to Paris on Tuesday afternoon, after one last tapas lunch.

 

Veal

Calamari. So adventurous. But I didn't like it much - it was like eating a fried rubber band.