February 24, 2012 - IRELAND!!!

Driving through the Irish countryside

Get ready for an explosion of pictures and descriptions of the best weekend ever.  Something you should know before I get started – Ireland is the best place in the world.  This is a widely accepted fact worldwide.  It basically goes without saying.

Oh, get ready for some Ireland lovin'

So my day started bright and early (you’d think I actually enjoy not getting sleep…) at 1:30 AM with a drive to Stanstead Airport.  It was a good thing we gave ourselves 2 hours at the airport too, because they are paranoid at Stanstead.  And it’s not even a huge airport!  But they were anal when we went through security.  We had to wait for around 30 minutes while Annie got strip-searched.  Apparently the Annie set off the metal-detector because she had a ton of bobby pins in her hair holding in her bun.  The lady spent like 15 minutes feeling around the bun, trying to find the secret gun Annie had hidden in her bun.  Luckily the lady never found it, but that didn’t stop her from making Annie strip down completely.  While we were waiting for Annie we got to see two huge policemen with the biggest guns I’ve ever seen in real life escort a man in handcuffs out of the airport.  I could tell the trip was already off to a good start.

Dublin

We arrived in Ireland and hopped on a bus to take us into Dublin.  Some policemen got on at a bus stop and started checking tickets.  I started panicking; remembering our awful encounter with Italian police on the bus in Rome, but this was Ireland.  Home of the nicest and best people in the world (with the best accents in the world).  They checked our tickets, and saw us looking at a map.  They showed us how to get where we were headed, and proceeded to chat with us about Ireland and our visit to Ireland.  When they heard we were headed to Glendalough (pronounced “GLEN-da-lokh”), they informed us that Glendalough is the most haunted place in Ireland and asked us if we wanted them to accompany us to Glendalough (asking what our hotel’s name was and what our room number was).  They were a group of 5 older, stout, married Irishmen and were just kidding around and entertaining us (oh, and you have to imagine that half of this conversation is going on with amazing Irish accents, and is therefore the best conversation I had had thus far on my study abroad).  I, however, thought for a split second that they were serious and was about to jump on a chance to marry an Irishman so I could stay in Ireland forever.  This, you see, was the objective of my trip to Ireland – marry an Irishman and live in the Irish countryside (spoiler alert – I failed). 

Spire of Dublin

We had about an hour and a half before we caught the bus that would take us to Glendalough, so we walked around Dublin and got some lunch.  Dublin is a lot like London, New York, and Rome in its big city feel and look.  Busy, lots of people, tons of tourist shops, monuments here and there, etc.  However, Ireland was different from all the other big cities in the fact that is was filled with smiling IRISH PEOPLE!  Lifelong goal of being surrounded by Irish people – completed.  

Glendalough!

Countryside time!

We took the Glendalough Bus from Dublin to Glendalough and got to see miles of stunning Irish countryside and billions of sheep.  Ireland is FILLED with sheep.  There are sheep basically every other plot of land.  And Irish sheep are much more colorful than normal sheep.  They the tops of the sheep blue or green, probably to differentiate between herds or something like that.  Or maybe the leprechauns did it.

Blue sheep.  Quite rare.

Fancy blue sheep.

A real Irish cow.

Glendalough is in County Wicklow, and means “glen of two lakes.”  It is situated in the Wicklow Mountains and has tons of picturesque walks, beautiful lakes, mountains, and fantastic ancient buildings and ruins.  We decided to do one of the shorter walks that took you around the major historic sites.  

Yes.  I AM holding the tower.

The first site we saw was St. Kevin’s Church, the graveyard, and the round tower.  St. Kevin’s was a small bricked church complete with a steeple.  

Inside St. Kevin's Church

St. Kevin's

About 20 feet away was the famous round tower that is probably the most iconic marker in Glendalough.  The round tower is a bell tower used by early Irish monestaries in around 900-1200 AD to summon the monks to prayer.  This tower is 100 feet tall and had six floors with wooden landings (that are no longer there).  The door to the tower is 12 feet above the ground, and was reached by using a ladder that they could pull up after them to keep enemies from attacking the tower.  The tower is soooo tall and breathtakingly impressive.  That tower was a perfect little model too, because I basically took a picture from EVERY angle of it.  By the end of my trip to Ireland I think about half my pictures were just of the round tower.  

K, you'll have to zoom in to see how tiny I am
at the bottom of the tower.  It was HUGE.

There, standing a bit closer so you can
actually see me.

The area around the tower and the church was a graveyard filled with hundreds of Celtic gravestones, crumbling under years of age. 

The walk took us around the smaller lake around scenic areas filled with blue-backed sheep, billions of frog eggs, a couple deer, Irish natives (YES!), trees aplenty (Irish trees, to be exact), and gorgeous landscapes.  The walk was easy and beautiful and full of Irish scenery – everything I could ever ask for.  

After the walk we went to the visitor’s center to ask for directions to our B&B.  The lady working the front desk was the nicest little old Irish lady!  She kept telling “that’ll be grand” and “you’ll love that.”  She was adorable and basically became our best friend.  Unfortunately best friend old woman gave us wrong directions to our hotel.  She sent us to the left down the road towards a B&B called “Riverwood,” when we should’ve gone to the right towards our B&B called “Riverside.”  We figured out what had happened about half an hour down the wrong road (by this time I was freaking out a bit that we wouldn’t be able to find our B&B and would have to just sleep outside (which may not have been that bad, because I was assuming Gerard Butler would come save me and sing songs from Phantom me as he leapt out of the bushes)).  About an hour and a half we finally made it to our B&B, which was a cute little house owned by a couple who rent out 3 of their rooms to tourists.  They told us about the best pub to go to in town (really, it was the only pub.  Glendalough is a pretty small town) and chatted with us about how amazing Ireland is.  They were a sweet little couple with fantastic accents and I loved them, even if the husband was wearing a creepy rubber suit that looked like it was a cross between a biking and scuba-diving outfit.

K, I didn't even edit this picture if you can believe that.
Look at the little sheeplings in the background!!

The wife gave us a lift to the pub that night around 7, because it was pretty dark out.  It was so nice of her, and she had to take us in two trips because their cars only fit 5 people.  All the cars in Europe are TINY.  The pub wasn’t very far away (a bit less than a mile away) and the wife left us with a “torch” for walking back home.  The pub was bursting with drunk, happy Irishfolk.  Precious little souls.  I was bummed because they have live Irish music on Saturdays, so we just missed hearing a live Irish band by one day!  But the food was great and the ambiance was really fun.  Our B&B owner warned us to beware of Irish men because, “they’ll charm you over a glass of Guinness but in the morning they won’t remember your name and will be off on their way.”  Words of wisdom to be sure.  Too bad all the men at the pub were either with their wives or were old, balding, portly Irish men who didn’t talk to us, or I would’ve tried to charm one of them.  Alas, it seems I will not be an Irish bride any time soon.

Our B&B

We left the pub around 11:30 and were absolutely exhausted from only getting around an hour of sleep the night before and from walking around all day long.  The tiredness wore off pretty quickly though as we started freaking ourselves out walking home in the dark.  The road we had to take to get back to our B&B was a narrow two-way road with trees lining both sides of the road.  We linked arms and started running down the road, freaking ourselves out with every sound we heard.  Then we saw some far lights in front of us a ways down the road, coming up fast.  We started shrieking and rushed to move to the side of the road.  Unfortunately, I completely forgot which side of the road they drive on in Ireland, and started to dash to one side, but then changed my mind to go to the other.  I’ve decided that in cases of “flight or fight” I’m definitely a “flight” person, because in my mind I started telling myself, “Serpentine!  Serpentine!  It’ll confuse them and throw them off your trail!  It’ll confuse them and they’ll stop or swerve out of the way!”  Luckily I spotted my friends off to the left side and I joined them in safety.  I’m glad I didn’t get the chance to put my defensive strategy to the test.  After being scared out of our wits we sprinted all the way back home, laughing and yelling all the way.