bagheera_san: (Straight on til morning)
[personal profile] bagheera_san
This isn't going to be a big picspam because 1) I am lazy 2) my camera is crap and 3) my camera is even crappier when there's no sunshine. And there was very little of it.



We arrived by plane from Frankfurt in Dublin. Dublin is a VERY nice city. On that first afternoon, the weather was excellent and my gran and I went for a walk. My favourite part of Dublin is predictably Temple Bar, the entertainment/pub/alternative part in the heart of the city.

The next day we drove off to the west coast of the Republic. This was when the weather returned to its usual mix of rain, drizzle, showers, clouds and mist. (The water also covered some of the roads and trickled out of the bog, or was carried in from the sea by the wind. According to the Irish news, this was the wettest August in Ireland in human memory. Yay!) Our first stop was the early medieval cloister Clonmacnoise. It's pretty.





This photo of one of the stone crosses was made in the shelter of their museum (they show a very nice movie about St. Ciaran, too. Apparently, he and the exiled future-King Diarmait were such BFFs that they built the Cloister together and held hands and with God's help Diarmait became King and then poor Ciaran died in his arms. Srsly, that movie was cute, but wikipedia doesn't support its views :D)

During that first day, I sat next to a guy on the bus, because gran and I were last to get in and didn't get seats next to each other, so of course she had to make me sit next to "the nice young man". "Are you kidding me?" I said that night in our hotel room. "He's at least thirty and stinks." (If this were a romance novel, that would have been a sign of my repressed attraction to him, because it turns out that he was only 19. But in truth it is only a sign of my silly brattishness.) "The nice young man" turned out to be a Bavarian from Australia who had only three topics to talk about: cars, football and "in Australia, we...". After a few days, even my gran was deeply annoyed by him, but luckily he made friends with an 18 year old Bavarian girl who shared his interests.

The next couple of days we spent in Galway, a nice coast town near/in Connemara. It rained a lot, but there were occasional glimpses of sunshine, as for example here, in the wilds of Connemara:

(Tiny person is me.)

We visited Kylemore Abbey, which is nowadays a girls boarding school managed by nuns (It's a bit funny that these things really exist.) Sadly, we saw neither nuns nor schoolgirls.


On Sunday there was a trip to the Aran Islands, which are even rockier and rainier than the rest of Ireland. On the top of the cliffs, the winds blew me off my feet and I fell on - what else - a rock. By the time we had climbed down again my gran was so soaked that we had to buy her a tourist sweater at a small shop with a very helpful lady (thanks for your blanket and shopping bags, helpful Irish lady!)

The next stop was Limerick. In the afternoon I went shopping on my own. An older, drunk Irishman approached me on the street and asked how much money I would pay for a night with him. I said none. Then he asked how much money I wanted for a night with him, which went on for several blocks until finally I managed to shake him off at a traffic light. (It was funny rather than annoying. All Irish I talked to were nice people.)

And good drivers. You have to be, because although the Irish have recently built some freeways, most of their roads look like this:


At Bunratty Castle we had a "medieval dinner". The professional entertainers and singers wore medieval costumes and two tourist groups (forty Germans and forty Americans) were made to sit in a very small banquet room and eat with their fingers.

A highlight of the tour was supposed to be the Cliffs of Moher. They *are* beautiful, but the tourist centre there is a nightmare for anyone who hates tourist centres.



The weather was fine (only some drizzle) when we visited the beautiful Muckross House. It has the most beautiful rooms and gardens I have ever seen. Those Victorians sure knew their stuff.




We had a beautiful Hotel in Carlow (the Dolmen Hotel has oldfashioned rooms, a nearly empty bar and a whole lot of nothing around it. At said bar I chatted for a long time with two local men, one of whom was very drunk. Guiness, by the way, is the best beer I've ever had. German beer sucks in comparison.)

There was still a lot of rain:


Through Kerry, we drove back to Dublin. A stop on the way was the cloister of Glendalough, which must be one of the most beautiful and idyllic places I've ever been to. There was sunshine. A lot of the people buried there got to be more than a hundred years old.



Back in Dublin, we did (among other things) a day trip to Newgrange, which is a stone age gravesite.

The outside of the hill grave was reconstructed, but the inside is still in its original stage. During a few days of the year, the sun penetrates the small entry and a thin beam of it reaches right into the central chamber. Making photos inside was forbidden, but it was a bit breathtaking to stand inside a place this old and beautiful.

In Dublin I did a night out with three of the other young women on the tour (one 23 and the other two 33). Irish pubs are lovely, and so is Dublin at night.



Temple Bar during the day:



And that's it! Ireland is very rural, very nice, very rainy and very expensive. I would go there again if I had lots of money, but I would go without a guided tour. In fact, if I never go on a coach tour again, it will still be too early.
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