Vacation from vacation.

Hello neglected readers. I've missed you. 

I pretty much always feel like I am on a vacation in London, but last week was spring break. So I took a vacation from my vacation and went to Ireland. It was great, but I came home feeling like a I needed a vacation. Now try to wrap your head around what I just said (case and point).

I woke up in the wee hours of the morning on Friday 25 April to catch a train with a friend to the coast of Wales, where we hopped on a ferry over to Dublin. I slept for most of the train ride, sprawled across two seats. I have found that they hardly ever wake you up to check your tickets. I have now slept through three ticket stampings! Our ferry was quite luxurious, not what I was expecting. We were probably the only people on the ferry who didn't have an elaborate picnic lunch and many bottles of alcohol. The people sitting next to us got totally wasted (in the middle of the afternoon). They were a bit ridiculous and could hardly walked themselves off the ferry. But it provided me with entertainment. My friend and I exchanged many raised eyebrows. We spent the first half of our spring break in Dublin, seeing the sites and listening to as much free music as we could (that means every night). The highlights for me were the Guinness Storehouse, the Jameson Distillery (don't judge me, these are essential visits), Kilmainham Gaol (jail), and the full english breakfast included in our hostel. An english breakfast includes: hashbrowns, eggs, sausage, bacon, beans (like baked beans), and toast. Plus they had cereal and amazing bread and jam and juice and tea and coffee and I was pretty much in heaven every morning!  We did a ton of walking in Dublin (had to work off that breakfast!) and had very good weather. We even managed to have a picnic in the sun one day!

Our last day in Dublin we decided to get out of the city and take a bus tour to Newgrange. It was definitely one of my favorite parts of the whole trip! Our first stop on the tour was the Hill of Tara. While most people wandered around on the interesting grass mounds, I decided to stalk the sheep in the distance. I managed to get pretty close and discovered that there were a bunch of tiny babies! Anyone who knows me will understand that seeing baby animals makes me very happy. If only I could have kidnapped one and brought it home.

Tiny nursing lamb

The Sheep that I stalked at the Hill of Tara

Then we continued on to Newgrange which is a UNESCO world heritage site that no one seems to have heard of. It is a passage tomb that happens to be older than the pyramids in Egypt and older than Stonehenge (no big deal)! The stone carving was amazing and beautiful. The best part was that we were able to go inside the passage tomb and see a demonstration of how it works. Some of you may be familiar with Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (another UNESCO world heritage site) where cool stuff happens on the solstice. Well Newgrange works in a similar way, only it was built approximately 4,000 years earlier. When you go into the tomb you walk along a slightly curving path so that you cannot see the entrance from the chamber. It is pitch black inside (when they turn off the lights that were more recently installed). On the solstice, when the sun comes up it shines a beam of light through the opening above the entrance, lighting up the entire inside of the tomb. The demonstration was awesome, and I can only imagine what it must be like for the real deal. They hold a lottery for people to visit on the solstice. It was a beautiful day, and I was so happy to be just where I was. It was the perfect way to end our stay in the Republic of Ireland. The next day we departed for Belfast.

The Stone in front of Newgrange

I absolutely loved my time in Dublin. All of the people that we met were extremely friendly, and it is a small enough city that we kept bumping into people we "knew" on the streets (including the drunken folks from the ferry). We even came upon another student from our program in London one evening. The music every night was great and by the end of our stay in Dublin we knew the words to all the songs. It's like a party every night.



Belfast coming soon...