Today was one of the best days of England Term thus far. Top three for sure. We're in Dublin and we took a day trip to see some sights associated with James Joyce, an Irish writer and poet. First we took a ride to the James Joyce Museum located off the coast of the Irish Sea. The building was this stone circular watch tower of sorts. The guide said that there were 100 built every mile along the coast to watch for French ships led by Napoleon, the Irish were afraid of an invasion. The museum is also near the town or county of Dun Laoghaire, which as you may know, is mentioned in P.S. I Love You. (Pronounced "Dun Leary"). This made me happy when our guide mentioned it.
My favorite part about this stop was that after we took a look in the museum we all headed out to the shore of the Sea and climbed down and across the rocks to the start of the sea and tide pools. It was GORGEOUS and so fun! Barnacles clung to the rocks and there was algae on the rocks making them really slippery. A friend of mine, Nelly, thought her plan out ahead of time and packed an extra change of clothes so she could go for a dip if the moment presented itself. Needless to say she slipped in a few minutes before we left and swam for a few seconds in her clothes. My friend Emily W. took cool pictures of us on the rocks and climbing, I'll have to edit this post when I can get them from her. They are sweet, so come back and look at them!
The second part of the day came when we got back on the coach and drove to Glendalough. (Pronounced Glenda-low, low as in "aLOWed") The coach driver drove very jerkily and made us all sort of sick. He slammed on the breaks twice, which I don't think should be done to a small coach bus carrying 25 people. Glendalough is a monastic ruins site where this St. Kevin guy founded a church and people came to follow him. The site itself was okay, my favorite part about the site was the graveyards in which we found a gravestone for an Edward Cullen. YES, I am that much of a nerd. Pictures of this to come later too. But apart from that occurrence it was only okay. The fabulous part was again, the landscape. It looked similar to the lake district, placed in a valley, trees of various natures and types with moss on their trunks growing on either side surrounded by medium tall grass and a couple walking paths. As soon as we left the monastic city the adventure began.
I traveled with three other friends, Emily C., Joel, and Katie. As we walked along the path towards the two lakes in this area we stopped to recreate scenes from LOTR. These will also be posted at a soon but later date. The path ran next to a wooded hill on the left and various other landscapes on the right. The left is where all our interest lay on this particular walk. We found this huge boulder where Joel crouched on top looking menacing and about to pounce (Smegal) and I stood below looking oh so innocent appearing to gaze at the "ring" in my hands (a hobit). It was great. We also found a spot up in the wooded hill area to our left to sit and read for about 45 mins. It was also great, we could see everyone who passed by us and they could see us, though it was fun to make animal noises in their direction before they noticed us.
After this we continued along the path and came to the second lake. (We had passed the first one because we couldn't really find a good place to sit) This lake was in between giant tree-lined hills and the water lapped at the gravel shore. There were some tame-ish ducks that followed us around when we got there and one of them stole an ice cream cone from this other walked and made a run for it into the lake, only to have the cone soon disintegrate about 15 feet out, but not before we all had a good laugh. Pictures of this to come also.
We finished the day with a quick dinner at Subway and a Literary Pub Crawl. Basically it was this neat, guided tour of four famous pubs that famous Irish Writers drank in. Our guides were really funny and at the end had a trivia time for a T-shirt. Whoever got the most questions right won a T-shirt. Some lady from Canada won. The tour was really neat, and though I had heard most of the information before, it was cool to see the places I'd heard so much about in connection to the writers I'd read. Thirteen of us from the group went on the tour this time and we thoroughly enjoyed it. The pubs were severely crowded more than normal and the guides had to speak louder than normal in order to cover the voices of the drunken Dubliners surrounding us. This bring me to the celebration of Guinness' 250th Year as a beer. (These guys here were our guides. Ironically the left guy has lost weight since the picture was taken and the right guy has gained.)
Earlier in the evening, exactly at 5:59 pm, tons of people crowded into any and all pubs in the city, especially those located in the popular Temple Bar area where food and drink is always over priced, and raised their glasses of Guinness to...well the invention of the thing. From our hotel windows shouts of "Woo!" and "Yeah!" could be heard from the nearby pubs. People came straight from work to help the country celebrate this "momentous" day in history and continue to celebrate as I write this-at 1:36 am.
Walking the streets we saw the "most interesting things" in relation to this celebration. Early in the day there was this guy who was escorted into an ambulance with a bloody forearm, and throughout the night we saw person after person stumble around the sidewalk, singing songs as if trying to imitate alley cats. We heard numerous unintelligible shouts across streets and shouts from the person standing right next to you to the person right next to them. My roommate reported to me that she saw a guy try to stop traffic and wave his friends across, then proceed to dancing with arms straight and extended in front of him towards the next sidewalk. Strange things I tell you!
But this day was definitely a good one. Relaxing at Glendalough and amusing at the pub crawl and afterwards.
Thanks for reading!
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