The 5 pictures above were all taken by Trevor Brown. I wish i could take credit for them but i can't. They are all from around Dublin. The two pictures below are just things i got with my phone so they're nothing great. I wish i could capture how quaint and beautiful it is here much better than I have been able to. But i guess a taste is a taste.
In my head right now, I’m literally having a debate over whether or not I should add pictures to this blog. I don’t have very many at all but I did take a few with my phone today while I was out walking around…I just don’t feel like they will even come close to doing this place justice and so if I post both the pictures, and a large amount of verbal praise for the beauty of this place, you will be forced to question me. So who knows…I’ll decide by the time I finish up writing this.
You know how people always go places, take a bunch of pictures, come back home, get really excited to show you their pictures, and then finally convince you to sit through all of them? What is the disclaimer that is thrown out 95% of the time? “These pictures will not be able to do this justice.” To which you reply with an “I’m sure” or a “yeah of course”. Well I feel like Ireland might be one of those places that you actually could do justice to with photographs. Like if a really good photographer came here, I think that he or she might actually be able to capture this place in pictures. From a purely visual standpoint that is. The really incredible thing about this place is just the amount of GREEN!
So today I woke up early and caught a bus from Dublin to Galway (west coast of Ire). It was about a 3-hour bus-ride and even though, from a third-person perspective, I’m sure it would have looked like a very tranquil, smooth bus-ride. However, if you could have been in my head during this bus-ride, it was anything but tranquil. So I’m sure you’re wondering why it was so stressful mentally but I think I’ll make you wait a minute to hear why. Instead, I’ll go into the views driving across Ireland. Ireland is beautiful in a way that is different from anywhere I’ve ever seen before. It is very close to flat most places. There is very little elevation change anywhere. It’s just small rolling hills. And the entire country seems to be sectioned into sheep pastures or something. Like its just squares of perfectly smooth, green grass each bordered by rows of small trees. Then there are random streams winding their way through the countryside. Each bringing with it some very quaint, shire-esque bridges. Then there are the little perfect houses; each sitting on the highest point of land on each plot like the watchmen of paradise. And of course, the oversized cotton-balls with legs are EVERYWHERE (I’m speaking of sheep). And now, though my current literary train of thought is just all over the place, I shall now explain why the bus-ride was stressful. It’s really a stupid reason and probably one of those things that only someone like Alex will really be able to understand fully. So there were only 4 people on the bus I was riding on and I’m going to guess that this bus has at least 50 seats (and no, I’m not saying alex could understand best just because it deals with a bus). So anyways, whenever there are only four people on a bus, and there are 50 seats, you expect that people will spread out and give each other some space. However, as we’re about to pull away from the stop in Dublin, a girl got on the bus and walked all the way back to my row (2 from the back) and sat, not just in my row, but in the seat next to me! I think she asked whether I minded but she was from Finland, so I couldn’t understand her REAL well. Anyways, after she sat down, I decided I should try to make friends so I made some small talk. Her English was not so good though so that didn’t last long. After about 15 minutes, she decided to try to sleep. Long story short, I ended up spending the next 2 hours and 45 minutes telling this girl not to worry about it each time she nodded off and ended up with her head on my shoulder for about 5 seconds before jolting to awareness. It was incredibly awkward but she just kept doing it!!! Like I’m not exaggerating, she put her head on my shoulder at least 20 times during the car ride. I was like, “are you kidding!” I mean I didn’t actually say that though. And every time she did it, she’d give this little laugh that at first was OK, but by the end, I found myself mocking the laugh in my head for the 3 minutes following each time she did it. Needless to say, I was happy when we got to her stop.
Well, I thought about just going ahead and posting this now, but I just read back through it and it is just kinda flat. SO I think I’ll wait til later when I can add more too it and maybe I’ll be in the mood to be more ridiculous.
**18 Hours later**
Wow. I’m getting behind now. And even though I have now two very big nights to tell you about, I must first make some meaningless observations about the room in which I am currently sitting. Ok so see if you can picture the wall décor that I am about to describe to you. O the wall directly opposite me, there are 8 red dots all in a horizontal line and decreasing in size from left to right. Each one has a clock in it with the local time of a different place in the world. There are three things about it that are bugging me. Firstly, I don’t understand why they made the dots decrease in size if they were going to put the same size clock in all of them. That just doesn’t make sense and it kinda looks weird because the dot furthest to the right is almost disappearing behind the local time in Tokyo. This brings me to my second observation. The local time in Tokyo is found on both the 4th and the 8th dots…that’s just kinda weird. I mean there are 24 time zones in the world (I believe) and here we have space for only 8. But instead of choosing 8 different ones, we have chosen Tokyo twice. Then, on top of that, the décor itself is 8 different red dots surrounded by white…each very reminiscent of it’s own personal Japanese flag. I dong know. It’s just confusing me. Then my last problem with this is that the 6th dot is larger than the 5th. It’s like they’re out of order. The 2nd is smaller than the 1st, the 3rd smaller than the 2nd, etc. All except the 6th. It’s kinda driving me nuts the more I talk about it though so I’ll move on.
In other news, I definitely watched almost all of Spiderman 3 with some people last night and Toby Maguire has got to be the cheesiest possible character in that movie. I mean when spiderman starts moving his hips in a pelvic thrust motion repetitively, you know that you have moved from the genre of “awesome comic book movie with superhero that I secretly (and I guess now openly) reeeeeally desire to share superpowers with” to the genre of “what the heck is happening and why am I still sitting here? /SLASH/ haha this is kinda funny actually…”
So two nights ago, I was on my last night in Dublin. And it was a great one. At, I believe, around 7 or so, I set off with Trevor and Jean (the tight couple I met there from N. Carolina. And I don’t think they’ll read through this, but on the offchance that they do, I’m not going to go into details of why they’re so awesome because that would be awkward. But we’ll just say that they’re tight and that as far as couples go, I’ve never met one that was as easy to hang out with. And they obviously loved each other a lot and understood each other really well. Ok I’m done) where was i? Oh yes, I set off with Trevor and Jean on a journey. Trevor is a creative writing major back in college and so he’s into cool books and stuff. Anyways, he had read a book of short stories that take place in Dublin written by the one and only James Joyce. Joyce apparently liked to be very cartographically accurate and so he put maps in the book to go along with the stories. So Trevor had one of these short stories that took these two children out into this field on the coast of Dublin and so we were going to try to walk the path. Well, turns out that Dublin is very different in 2009 than it was in 1920 and so there is a lot more going on around the shipyards in Dublin than there used to be. Anyways so we weren’t really able to walk the exact path but we did end up finding the field we think. Even if it wasn’t really the field though, the hike was AWESOME! I feel like we really got out of the touristy area and saw some of what the real Dublin is like. And once we got to the coast, it was beautiful. Trevor took a ton of pictures so when he puts them up, I’ll put some of them on here so you can see some of our trek. I think we probably walked somewhere between 7 and 10 miles total and it was great. Totally loved it.. And then that night, I just went back to that pub that was playing the good music the previous night and hung out for just a bit before going back home. Great night.
Now to last night. Last night I went to a pub here in Galway that was playing some traditional irish music and I was totally planning on just staying for a little while and then heading to bed early, but I met these two American girls in there and I ended up going around with them to a few different pubs looking for a good place to get our irish dance on. Their names were Ashlee and Alycia and the reason they were so fun to hang out with was because they weren’t like every other american girl here who just wants to meet guys who are down to have a random fling for the night. They were actually just fun to hang out with for the night and they weren’t getting wasted or anything. Plus they danced like my friends back home do and didn’t seem to care much that everyone was watching. So it was a real fun night. It’s weird though how you can spend an entire evening hanging out and just having fun with some people and then at the end of the night, you say bye and you’re pretty much positive it’s literally the last time you’ll talk to them. It’s just kinda weird but is kinda a pattern on this trip just cause people are always moving on to other places (including myself).
Ways to tell if a girl is an american:
1. If it takes her more than 20 minutes to finish a beer, she’s got to be american.
2. If she makes a little sour face after every sip of the beer, she’s definitely an american.
3. If she’s wearing flip-flops when she goes out at night, she’s an american.
4. If, when the irish music starts playing, she moves her hips first instead of her feet first, there’s a good chance she’s american.
5. And if she’s not wearing a lot of make-up when she goes out, she’s an american.
How to tell if a guy in a pub is american:
1. If he’s part of a group of people, and you watch them for more than 5 min, you will see that the american guys are all looking around the room and trying to find the cutest girls that look the most drunk. Then after about 7 minutes of searching, they will each try to place themselves near the girls they have chosen, “accidentally” bump into them, and use that to start a conversation. Americans, in general, are annoying and just trying to make out with a girl each night.
2. If he his not part of a group (he is alone), the american guy will be leaning against a wall, beer in hand, trying his best to put of the cool guy, John Wayne vibe. I think his hope is that a girl will just come talk to him if he looks cool enough or something. Regardless, it doesn’t work. But that american guy is very easy to pick out.
I have decided that the best way to meet people is to just go up to them and start a conversation. I’ve found that most people are also interested in meeting people and that, even though this is contrary to my former thought process, the start of a conversation does not have to make sense. You just have o say something, anything, that breaks the ice. Then you exchange names, origins, etc etc etc and now you’re friends. It’s actually very easy.
And I really like it that for some reason, which makes no sense to me, people think I am british. I don’t think I’m trying to talk differently or anything either. I am just glad though that I don’t sound like I’m from Oklahoma. Even the american girls I was kickin it with last night said they thought I sounded like I was from the UK. It made me way too happy.
OK this is waaaay too long. I’m going to stop without a closing.
Christian
OH and obviously, i decided to add pictures...
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