Adventure on the Emerald Isle: Part II

Dearest followers,

I am officially the worst blogger to have ever blogged. Okay, maybe not the the worst, but still, I'm really sorry this is such a terribly late post.

But in a shocking turn of events, my cold actually turned out to be bronchitis!  

(No, seriously, I got bronchitis. While in Germany. Another life event to file under: "Only Me".)

Which meant I had to take a week off of school (and also life) to give my lungs a rest.  On the bright side, I got to take 5 hour naps and catch up on all of the Game of Thrones and the Good Wife, so maybe not being able to breathe properly has its silver lining too?  (On the other hand, I might not have been fully lucid while I watched said shows, so no pop quizzes, please.)

Anyway, I have a lot of things to catch up on - or rather, catch you up on, dearest reader, so let's get started!

For those of you playing along at home, we last left off with Chelsea and me returning to Dublin. Chelsea only got one week of break (but she got two for Easter, so who's laughing now?), so she had to catch a flight the next morning, but fortunately, I was not to be left alone in Ireland.

The same day Chelsea and I came back to Dublin, another friendly face arrived - my friend Claire! (Who you may recall also went to the Alma Mater and currently teaches in Leipzig. I visited her in Berlin.) 

Also, Claire became our photographer for the second week and all of the lovely photos below are Claire's pictures.

Since I'm a big believer in the whole "Make New Friends But Keep the Old" (I can't help it - I was in Girl Scouts for a long time), we had a nice evening out on the town for Chelsea's last day and Claire's first day in Dublin.

After strolling for a while through the Temple Bar area, we found a pub, delightfully named the crowbar (no capitalization because that's too mainstream), where we perched on old sofas and arm chairs while sitting by a large window, looking out onto the street.  It was especially amusing to watch people as they headed out (or tottered back) from various pubs.  

Temple Bar

One of the best part of the evening window viewing was definitely watching a young couple, who were clearly lost, pass by us at least six times.  The girlfriend/wife looked pretty confident she was going in the right direction each time while the boyfriend/husband each time seemed to sigh and say "Yes dear" as they headed off in yet another wrong direction.  Eventually, the boyfriend seemed to catch on that we were watching them as they passed by, which was also pretty funny.

The next morning, Chelsea left bright and early for her flight, while Claire and I left (a little less) bright and early as well to explore Dublin.  We took another free walking tour - this one was better than the one I had been on before, so I learned a lot more about Irish history.

Dublin Castle

Dublin Castle and Gardens

The weird backside of Dublin Castle

Trinity College

A haunting statue to commemorate
the victims of the Potato Famine. 

After the tour, we wound up at an Irish pub for lunch with some of the other people who were on our tour and our tour guide, who was a friendly Irish college student.  We ended up befriending and chatting a lot with our tour guide and an Australian college student named Jeremy.  We swapped stories of international travel, showed off passports, and, all in all, had a splendid time.

We eventually ended up heading over to the Jameson distillery (Yes! Again! But I swear I'm not an alcoholic. We mostly went because the Guinness factory was closed by then) and Jeremy came with us.

Needless to say, good times were had.

Jeremy had to catch his flight home (after nearly 6 months of traveling across Europe) the next morning, so we parted after we got back from the Jameson factory (but we solidified our friendship with a Facebook request). 

Nevertheless, the theme of new and unexpected friends would come even more important at our next destination: Galway!

I hadn't intended to head back to the West Coast, but Claire desperately wanted to see the Cliffs of Moher and I loved my first experience in Galway so much, I couldn't say no!

Our first night in Galway was interesting to say the least: we wanted to explore the city, but were stymied by ferocious winds!  But that didn't deter us and instead we used it as an opportunity for some cool photoshoots.

Claire against the wind!

Yours Truly with the "wind at her back"
as per that all too often and obnoxiously
repeated "Irish Proverb"

Claire couldn't resist taking this one.

Solid advice.

The next morning we took a bus tour out to the Cliffs (since you can't really get there via public transportation in the off season).  

Our bus driver was filled with amazing facts but even more amazing verbal ticks, which included such phrases as "liquid sunshine" (aka rain) and "in and of itself" (which he used in nearly every sentence, apropos of nothing, in any context, and by the end of the tour the phrase lost all meaning).  But the fan favorite was the keyword: "fresh".

Nevertheless, "fresh" was the right word to describe the day we had on the tour.  It was a cool, rainy day with a chilly wind that took your breath away when you stepped off the bus.  But there is something delightful about the air in Ireland because it is both fresh and clean (or maybe I've been in Germany, with their love of smoking, for too long).

Although the sights below are familiar to you readers who perused the last Ireland entry, Claire's photos are very lovely.

Claire in a wee arch!

On the Burren.

Things got interesting on the Cliffs of Moher.

When we first arrived, it was pouring down rain, so we rushed into the visitor's center (or is it centre?). Once the rain had subsided a bit, we climbed up the right bank of the cliff, where we tried desperately not to get blown over by the violent winds.  Claire almost lost her gloves and we had to run into the wind to catch them before they tumbled off the Cliffs!

Mostly rain, but you can see the sunshine peaking
through on the left side!

Yours Truly, looking a little more
windswept than usual.

It wasn't until we tried to climb the left side of the Cliffs that things got dicey.  It started to rain again and then began to hail enormous pellets while the winds threatened to throw us against the safety barriers.

Misery.

Once the rain, hail, and wind let up...

We were happy again.

Oh and...

RAINBOWS!!!!

I use this gif so much, but it accurately summarizes
my reaction to a lot of things in life, so that's okay.

NOT JUST ONE BUT TWO!

Look to the right of the main rainbow and you can see
the second one.

TWO FULL DOUBLE RAINBOWS!!

WHAT THE WHAT

It was a good thing we were basically alone on that side of the Cliffs because the amount of screeching and squealing probably would have made anyone else's ears bleed.

And for the record, if you saw a double rainbow you would freak out too.

Bringin' around this classic viral vid from 4 years ago.
You really only need to watch the first 30 second to get the gist.

Double rainbow, man.

It was pretty amazing and we kept talking about it for most of the ride home.

The evening picked up when we returned to the hostel and met one of our roommates - another American named Abbi!  

We immediately bonded over stories of traveling (she had been in England as an au pair and is currently traveling around Europe) and then we headed to a local pub for a pint.  At the pub, we chatted with some locals at the bar and some French students studying at the university in Galway.

But when we got back to our hostel, we discovered that someone had taken Abbi's bed in our room!  So we immediately rushed downstairs to the front desk to figure out where Abbi was going to sleep. We then discovered that Abbi had been given the keys to the wrong room and that she wasn't supposed to be in our room! Yet fate intervened and we made a new friend that night - a friend who would later visit us in Germany!

In the morning, we also befriended the roommates from Abbi's new/correct room, who were both German university students on vacation.

All in all, our experience in Galway was great, just proving that a great hostel in a great city can really make a trip memorable.

We returned to Dublin in the evening, where we met another new friend - an Italian boy named Alex who had just moved to Dublin to find a job. He was just starting to learn English and was eager to chat with us.  We also found out that his English classes at a night school were followed by salsa dancing lessons!  (It was really cute; apparently, he and a Polish girl from his English class are dance partners and while they dance, they practice English because that's the only language they both know.)

Which meant then for the next three nights at our hostel, we exchanged English lessons for salsa dancing lessons with Alex.  The hostel manager was pretty obliging and would turn on some classic ballroom dancing hits for us every night.  To no one's surprise, Alex was a much better student at English than I was at salsa!

During the day time, we visited some of Dublin's main attractions and museums.  

One of my favorites was the National Library of Ireland (NLI) which is not a gorgeous building, but also had a really cool exhibit about W.B. Yeats (aka "my main man Yeats" as I like to call him).

Obligatory picture next to the library gates

Now before I gush on about the exhibit, go do yourself a favor and edify yourself by reading some Yeats poems.

Back?

Okay.

So here's the thing.  Even though I am/was an English major, I was never really a poetry person. 

Even though I had a very good middle school teacher, who tried to instill a love of poetry into me, it got beaten out of me in high school with all the "Look, the stanzas make the shape of a wheelbarrow! This is great poetry!" nonsense.  (For the record, I still hate that poem. Why can't high school literature anthologies pick another, any other, William Carlos Williams poem?!)

Throughout my college experience, I bumped into other poets and poems, but the big turning point (I almost wrote "wendepunkt" - there goes my English) came during the fall of senior year in one of my research classes.  It was time to submit ideas for our papers and I still had nothing, and I found myself in my professor's office vaguely mumbling about various stupid ideas before he cut me short and told me to write about Yeats.  I left his office, confused and slightly overwhelmed about what I just agreed to:  A research paper on poetry?  I hate poetry!

And so began my love-hate relationship with Willy B.  Long nights were spent agonizing in the library, reading, swearing at my poetry book, explicating, swearing at my poetry book, writing, and swearing at my computer.  

And slowly but surely, I found myself sort of falling in love with this crazy, angsty, Irish occultist, politician, ladies man, and damn good poet.   Yeats' (or Yeats's?!  It's both in the academic literature, which convinces me that no English speakers can properly use an apostrophe) personal life just as weird as his poetry and everything about him made the paper writing actually (slightly) fun.  Yeats brought me back into the world of poetry and, in hindsight, I'm grateful for having to write that extremely stressful paper.

Which meant, when I strolled into the Yeats exhibit in Dublin, I majorly geeked out and had a really good nerdy time.  

Pictured:Me, geeking out, the way
English majors are wont to do.

Claire was a very good sport about the whole thing and eventually, I brought her over to Yeats lovin' lifestyle.  It also helped that the exhibit was really gorgeous and very well presented.  My favorite part, by far, was the poetry experience section, where you got to sit and listen to his poetry as the words and thematic images were projected in front of you.  

One of my other favorite museums was the Chester Beatty Library museum.  Alfred Chester Beatty was a famous rare book collector, who donated his amazing stash of books and manuscripts to Ireland (even though he was American).  He really only collected books for their aesthetic value and, man, did he have exquisite taste.  

Although the museum is mostly religious texts (the library is the second largest holder of Qur'ans outside of Mecca, which is pretty cool), they also had some other gorgeous books on display.  While we were there they had a display of Mrs. Beatty's turn-of-the-century fashion plates and dresses, which I really loved.

We wrapped up our week with some more art galleries, some shopping, pub hopping, and salsa lessons!  By the time we had to fly home, we were both very reluctant to leave the country! 

All in all, I loved my time in Ireland.  It's a gorgeous country with ridiculously friendly people, which in turn made for a friendly vibe at the hostels!  Galway was my favorite city, although Dublin has a lot to offer.  If I could do it again (and hopefully I will), I would definitely try to rent a car and drive around the island, stopping in little B&Bs.

Oh, and the guy at customs saw my last name on my passport and my pasty skin and asked me if I was visiting relatives in Ireland, which made me feel really special about my 1/4 Irish-ness.

So leor de ghrá or Lots of Love,

Your Humble Blogger

PS.  If you have any burning (or not burning) questions about Germany, my school, or my life here you want me to talk about in future posts, please shoot me an email at travelswithsimba@gmail.com!