The Emerald Isle-- Finally!

One of the high crosses we discovered on our travels through Ireland

We are all moved into our new apartment, and Mark is working on week two of classes.  I finally have time to relay some of our Irish tales.  We didn't encounter any leprechauns (although there is a newly opened leprechaun museum in Dublin, oddly enough), but Mark made lots of friends on our first night in the city (more about that later...).  The first thing you should know about our trip, is that for some reason it was IMPOSSIBLE to find decent accommodations in Dublin for the week we wanted to go.  We couldn't really figure out why, so we just assumed it was because we wanted to go during the last week of vacation in France and much of the rest of Europe.  So the options were to either pay 3,000 euro (at the low end) for the week and live in a luxurious hotel, or pay 128 euro and stay in a mixed dorm room of a hostel.  Considering our budget, it was Abraham's Hostel, here we come!  When we arrived, it became clear we were situated on the dodgy end of town, and it wasn't the cleanest facility you've ever seen, but I figured "hey-- we've never done this before, and you can't knock it until you've tried it!"  So we took our sets of sheets, and headed up, and up, and up, to the most dingy room on the top floor of the building (no elevator).  The key would not work in the door, so someone inside finally got tired of hearing us argue about who wasn't turning it right and jiggling the door knob, and let us in.  It was a semi-normal looking guy, so I figured our room mates couldn't be too bad.  We chose our beds and put our sheets on, and normal looking guy left, so then we discussed what to do with our stuff.  We could either leave our bags on our bed and hope nobody would steal anything, or pay a ridiculous price to lock everything up in a locker, which charges you by the hour.  We opted to have a little faith in our room mates, and left our things (nothing valuable; we took all the important and expensive items with us in a backpack).  We headed to the Temple Bar area for our first meal, and of course we had to eat in a pub to get the full Irish experience.  Temple Bar is like 6th Street in Austin with an Irish accent, and the people all seem a bit more friendly than in Austin.  Live music everywhere, lots of people walking between all the bars, pub food, drinks, etc.  Very lively atmosphere (see below).

We chose a place called the Auld Dubliner (of course!), and opted for the menu.  Mark ordered something that sounded traditional and Irish:  the coddle.  It was different kinds of sausages and meat in a soup, and he thought it tasted pretty good.  He also had the first Guinness of the trip (which was the preview picture at the end of our last blog).  After our meal, we walked around a bit more, and then headed back to the hostel for a fairly early night-- at least, we thought...  at about 3 a.m. (I'm guessing), Mark comes over to my bunk and says, "My stomach hurts really bad."  I asked if he thought he was sick, and he says "... Yeah," after a good long pause.  He then goes into the bathroom, and spends the better part of the night in there.  I won't go into details, but we'll just say that Revenge of the Coddle is not a pleasant experience, for anyone-- neither the one consumed with the sickness, nor the 7 roommates bunking with him.  About 4 of our "roomies" came in about 30 minutes into Mark's occupation of the bathroom, and once they figured out what was happening, (it didn't take long; the hostel walls were very thin), they then debated about how to find another bathroom to use.  It got really quiet after awhile, and I thought I was going to have to break into the bathroom and figure out how to get Mark to a hospital in the middle of the night in a strange city, but he finally came out.  He approached my bed once more, and said, "Umm... the toilet won't flush."  So, yeah!  That was our first experience in Dublin!!  I'll spare you the rest of the details, but can you imagine what this story sounds like from the perspective of one of the stranger roommates??  I kind of think it would be worse if I didn't know Mark.  The poor soul; something always happens to him!  We were fairly low on energy the next day, but he wasn't sick for the rest of the trip.

I will share most of the remainder of our vist through photos, as they are much more interesting than my discourse.  I will say that having tried the shared dorm hostel experience, those of you that never have, you aren't missing a thing.

Trinity College in Dublin, where we got to see the Book of Kells!!

St. Stephen's Green, one of the beautiful public parks in Dublin.  We managed to get some photos on one of the rare sunny days while we were there.

Christ Church Cathedral

The Treasury of Christ Church Cathedral, where they happened to have costumes from the HBO series The Tudors on display.

The crypt of Christ Church Cathedral contains these famous mummified cat and mouse corpses.  Apparently they were found together stuck in an organ pipe, presumably one chasing the other.  Dubliners have nicknamed them Tom and Jerry-- what else would you call them?!?

Kilmainham Gaol.  The history surrounding the Easter Rising is encapsulated in this building.  It was one of the most interesting tours we went on in Dublin.

Photos of Mark inside one of the jail cells.  The pictures are taken through the cell door.

Dublin has the most fantastic Georgian homes, and I loved all the beautiful doorways!  This one is apparently the most photographed doorway in the city (sorry the photo is so poor; we were on a night tour when this was taken!!)

Oscar Wilde relaxes on this rock, gazing over at his old home in Merrion Square.

Merrion Square, another beautiful public park in Dublin

These are fairly self-explanatory-- join us on our tour of the Guinness factory!!

Don't know if you can see it, but that is a combine cutting the barley on the screen behind me!!  Man I miss those days...

He's so excited!!

I actually don't love Guinness this much; I couldn't even make it through my free glass all the way.

The expert, pouring the perfect pint of Guinness-- he's concentrating so hard!!

Yay!  Now we just have to wait for it to settle...

Almost there...

Finishing her off...

Et voila!!  The perfect pint, ladies and gentlemen.  I'm not sure why Mark has that insane, creepy look on his face, but he was pretty happy to get his little certificate as a souvenir of the Guinness experience, as you can see below.

Rather than pour my own, I opted to head up to the Gravity Bar at the very top of the building for my pint, so we could check out the gorgeous view of the city.

I drank about half of that, and went from a thumbs up to a "here you go, Mark."  I just can't do dark beer!  The tour was fun, though.

We also toured the Jameson Whiskey Distillery.  Mark was elected a special taster, so here he is preparing to try different blends.  In retrospect, we did both alcohol tours on the same day.  That was a risky decision, considering Mark's track record...

We met up with our wonderful Irish friend Peter in Dublin, and got to meet his beautiful, kind girlfriend Katie.  We wish we could have spent more time with them!  Peter is a friend from my language training days back in Tours, when I had the Rotary scholarship in 2008.  Notice Mark's shirt:  He is sporting a Texas Ranger's t-shirt around Dublin, and while we were at this bar, I overheard someone say to him, in a rather defiant voice, "You have a Texas shirt on.  Why?"  My hair immediately began to stand up, as I prepared for Mark to get into a late night bar fight, as he replied, "Because I'm from there-- why do you ask?"  The group of people around the guy started cheering after Mark's reply (much to my relief!), as they were also from Texas, and were in Ireland for a wedding.  Such a strange meeting, as this bar was far away from the tourist areas, no where near Temple Bar.  While things worked out that night, I am hoping Mark will reserve sporting the Texas t-shirt attire for lounging around the apartment in the future...

We visited many ancient sites on our Celtic Tour of the Boyne Valley, and this is Mark posing on the Hill of Tara. 

 The Hill of Tara is a location where Neolithic Peoples would have flocked during important religious and burial ceremonies. The hill (there are many different sites/hills in the area) dates from 3000 B.C. as a place held sacred by ancient inhabitants of this region. The dating of sites begins at 3000 B.C., which would predate the pyramid's of Giza in Egypt. Like other structures that are this aged, one would have to employ a pretty good imagination to really understand what it would have looked like 3000 years before the wise men journeyed to the manger. Despite the huge difference of time between us and them, there are modern principles displayed in their construction techniques. The people who constructed the burial/religious hills were master stone masons. These mounds where constructed with rock and are still waterproof to this day. At certain sites, the stones were aligned to receive a special transformation of light on the equinox and solstice times of the year. Along many of the passageways and entrances to the mounds, there were great examples of stone art that the ancients carved meticulously into the stone. For more detailed information on the various sites and histories see this site: http://www.knowth.com/tara.htm

Another stop on our Celtic tour.  Our guide told us it was a short hike to get to this place, and we ended up climbing a mountain!  It was worth it though, especially for the view.

It was FREEZING and extremely windy on top of that mountain!  And so beautiful; hard to capture in a photo.

We had to include this photo of Slane Castle for all the rockers reading this (ahem, Dr. Vandehey, ahem!).  This castle was inherited by a man who did not have enough money to fix it up, so he decided to hold a rock concert there to raise money for renovations.  It was the debut of U2's career, and he has been inviting bands to rock out ever since.  A few of the more famous concerts have been The Rolling Stones, Coldplay, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Queen, Foo Fighters, REM, Bob Dylan-- you get the picture.  And for those of you who have ever seen that Celtic Woman ad on PBS (the KERA station in Wichita Falls) with scenes from one of their concerts, well, that was also filmed here.  Mark gets sucked into that ad every time it is on, and he ends up watching the whole thing.  Not sure how he'll feel about me sharing that about him, but she who writes the blog decides what to say!  How cool would it be to attend a rock concert in a castle??

The three photos above are from our favorite stop on a tour to Kilkenny and the Wicklow Valley.  They are from a little village in the Wicklow Valley, and I wanted to stay there instead of returning to France!

The view here was spectacular, and not possible to capture, obviously.  This is the site where the cover image for Braveheart was shot.  We visited several famous sites from scenes in the film-- yes, it was filmed entirely in Ireland, even though it is a Scottish tale.

We found a Paris, Texas shop in Kilkenny, Ireland--had to share it with you!

Another Celtic site, this time on the way to Belfast.  This is a megalith, built with techniques similar to those used for Stonehenge.  No one knows for sure who or how these were built, but they are thought to be sites that are important to the Pagan religion of the Celtic peoples.  Mark thinks they were built by giants.  At any rate, we had several little Japanese girls with us on this tour, and our guide told them that if they toss a small stone and it lands on top of the big rock on top, they will find true love within a year (see all the little stones on top?  Apparently others had been searching for their loves well before we arrived).  We then watched the grand spectacle of each Japanese girl tossing a stone, and then squealing with delight if it landed, or squealing with sadness if it rolled off.  They would have stayed there and continued to throw rocks up all day if our guide would have let them.  Those girls were so much fun to have on our trip!

Mark is standing in front of a famous wall in Belfast which separates the Catholic community from the Protestant community.  There are still occasionally riots in Belfast, but the two groups co-exist peacefully now, for the most part. There is still a strong difference between those who wish to be a part of Great Britain, and those who wish to be an independent republic-- you can tell how a certain group feels by which flag is flying in a particular part of the city.

That giant hole is where they built the Titanic in Belfast-- pretty impressive.

The two photos above are from our delicious meal in the beautiful Crown Bar in Belfast.  We shared the beef and Guinness, and it was delicious!  Hard to tell here, but that is a scrumptious puffed pastry cooked over a dish of beef slow cooked in Guinness.

This is a wall from one of the monasteries we visited (also a cemetery), called the Jumping Church.  The wall has moved about 3 feet from its original foundation, and legend has it that someone who had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church was buried within the wall of the church, which is against Catholic dogma.  So, the wall reportedly jumped inwards to prevent the body from lying within its confines.  Irish legends are the best!




  And that completes this small snapshot of our trip to the homeland!  I loved it so much there; we definitely have to go back someday.  I would love to spend more time in the countryside, maybe in a little B&B somewhere, now that we have pretty much exhausted the sites in Dublin.  Oh yeah, we did finally figure out what was going on in Dublin that week-- apparently there was this American football game, Navy versus Notre Dame, that was being played there, and a small crowd of 30,000 Americans were in town for the game.  That's right, folks, 30,000!!  They took all the good hotel rooms, and they weren't even there to see the country.  Sigh...  Talk about bad timing on our end.  

This post sums up Ireland, but much more has happened since then, so we'll post again in a few days.  Of course, we visited many other sites in and out of Dublin City, but it is simply impossible to share everything.  I'll end by saying that it felt like home, and I will never forget the wonderful smell of the Long Room in the Trinity College Library-- I wish I could bottle the smell of those old books and carry the comfort of that room with me always.