Ireland, Irland, Eireann

In my last blog, which I wrote approximately 4.2 million years ago, I mentioned that I was going to Ireland for spring break. Here's the the rundown on my Irish adventures.

On my flight from Berlin to Dublin, I happened to run into another teaching assistant, Aislinn, who is Irish and was heading home for break. She and I kept each other company as our poor RyanAir plane was blown hither and yon by mass amounts of wind. This wind was just a precursor of wind to come. We also discovered that we were retreating from warm and sunny Germany to a colder, wetter, and grayer Ireland.

Melanie (my sister in law Meredith's sister) was there to pick me up at the airport and drive me to their house in County Tipperary. Adventure ensued as we visited Hoar (pronounced whore) Abbey in the middle of a cow pasture complete with cows and then the Rock of Cashel. Ireland is filled with green fields with random abbey, church, and castle ruins scattered about. I'm a huge fan of this and far more excited than the average person about stumbling across ruins. Therefore, Melanie decides that we will go find another ruin that's shown in the driving atlas.
This is an important time to mention that in the countryside of Ireland, roads have no names or numbers. It's just like oh, there's a road over here. Turn at the mass rock. Turn at the tree. Also, the atlas people apparently did not think it was important to actually match the roads in real life with the roads on the atlas. Needless to say, we drove about through some crazy tiny windy roads until we finally hit Irish rush hour...
Yes, that is a man walking his cows down the road. We were behind him for a good 20 minutes. Cows are fascinating creatures.

The week at Melanie and Paul's was filled with making Easter bread (an entirely too addictive Italian bread made only at Easter) and homemade ravioli, sitting by coal fires, playing Settlers of Catan (and watching Melanie thoroughly beat Paul and I), and wandering about the southern part of Ireland. We visited Kinsale on the southern coast, many castles, and the mountains nearby. We learned about an apparently distant relative of the Pfohl/O'Donnell clan, which is Red Hugh O'Donnell who helped fight against the English for Irish independence in the 1500-1600s. He fought at the battle of Kinsale. Nothing like dredging up ancient Irish ancestry. But he also has a Disney movie made about him, so really, it's probably the coolest relative I have if the family legend is true.

Then I headed up the west coast to Galway for a few days with a Centre friend, Tonya and her boyfriend Daniel. Galway is a cute city with all sorts going on there it seems. Lots of crazy tourists as well. Tonya and I walked along the Galway Bay, visited the Claddagh part of town (Yes, that's where the Claddagh ring comes from, and yes, I bought one), and got out into the countryside a bit to visit the town of Clifden on the Atlantic coast, the region of Connemara, the Burren, and the Cliffs of Moher which are really really impressive. This is probably the windiest place I have ever been in my entire life. We didnt' make it to Belfast as planned because the Irish rail system doesn't work quite like the German and in order to go to Belfast from Galway, it's either a 7 hour bus ride on windy Irish roads, or train to Dublin and then train to Belfast.

For my last day, I had a 6 am flight out of Dublin to Berlin. RyanAir sucks! So I spent the night with Paul's parents in Dublin and his dad lovingly got up at 3 am with me to drive me to the bus station. I've also never seen an airport so crowded so early in the morning and that includes when I spent the night in the terminal in Atlanta over Christmas.

The Irish adventures are of course photographically documented on Picasa and Facebook. I loved my visit. Ireland is one of the most beautiful places to visit and definitely one of my favo(u)rites!