Ireland, or, The Luck of the Tourists

Well, it's been a long-ass time since I've posted, and as a result, I've done many many things since the last time. I've been to Ireland, Belgium, Spain, and all over England.

I'll start with Ireland. For our first long weekend, we ventured to Dublin and then to a small coastal town in Ireland called Howth. Everyone really seems to love Ireland, but I think that when they think of Ireland, they picture rolling green hills and seaside, like the Ring of Kerry. We stuck to Dublin.

When we arrived in Dublin, it was 11:00 pm, and we couldn't find our hostel. Dublin's not as big a city as London, but we were wandering around in the not-so-great north side of town (to put this into perspective, our tour guide the next day said we "might not want to leave the south side," so that was comforting). In the dark, in a strange city and a strange country, the threat of getting our skin cut off seemed imminent, and I couldn't help but think, "WE GON' DIE!" Every barking dog, every innocuous pedestrian seemed to target us for pickpocketing, leering, and/or dramatic capoeira dance battles, at least in my imagination anyway.

Thankfully, though, we found our hostel without incident. And the next morning, Dublin was nowhere near as scary as it had seemed. Things were looking up, but rain and an hour-long trudge trying to find the Guinness plant kind of put a damper on things. We returned to the hostel wet, hungry, tired, and (at least in my case) bummed that Dublin Castle wasn't actually a castle. I did get to visit a statue of James Joyce in St. Stephen's Green, though, so the day wasn't a total bust.

Dublin Castle. Definitely NOT a castle.

I was about ready to give up on Dublin when the city redeemed itself. The day dawned clear (first good omen), and we visited the Yeats exhibit in the National Library (Can we pause for a second and talk about how brilliant WB was???) and, what was easily the highlight of my trip, the Chester Beatty Library. Chester Beatty had a shit-ton of money, for whatever reason, and he spent it collecting the most impressive artifacts he could get his hands on. Like, it's not even funny how rare this stuff was. I saw a copy of the Qur'an where all the Arabic characters were cut out individually and pasted on the page. I saw an excerpt from the Book of John that dated back to the 3rd century. THAT'S ALMOST AS OLD AS JESUS!!!

(At this point, just imagine a REALLY FRACKING AWESOME picture. No cameras allowed in CB.)

And then to top off a good day, we ate dinner at Boojum, aka Irish Chipotle. And it made me so happy and homesick all at the same time. Seriously, why don't we have it in England??

We were feeling pretty good about the day, until we met our roommates. Hansel, Dylan, and Doug. They were three German bros who really, really liked to party. Doug and Hansel were over six feet tall, blonde, and had chiseled jaw lines. So, basically, really, really, really stereotypically German. That night, our sleeping was interrupted by a drunk-off-his ass Dylan, who couldn't even get into bed he was so wasted, and almost started a fight in our hostel room. But hey, cheap lodging.

Day three, probably the highlight of the trip, we ventured to a small fishing-town suburb of Dublin, Howth. Howth was everything I wanted from Ireland: dramatic crags, vast ocean, and the best fish chowder I've ever eaten. Plus, there was SUN. It was lovely.

And the whole time I was alternating between happy tourist/grumpy tourist, I was constantly being reminded that Dublin is a city full of ACTUAL people and is a place with ACTUAL problems. Ireland the landmass is thousands of years old, but Ireland the country is less than a hundred. There are political ads in Dublin that still advocate for independence today. Only a hundred years ago (not long in the scope of history as I've come to learn) Irish Catholics were protesting for the right to get weekends off, and the only employer who would listen to them was Guinness. They have a spire in the middle of the town that cost 2 million euros, but they don't have a monument to one of the most influential female journalists ever. It's important to remember that. Because, *CHEESEBALL ALERT* more than entertainment and souvenirs, the most important takeaway we can get from visiting any country is learning how the people there live and what matters to them. And, surprisingly, they're not always the same thing.

Commemorating the Dublin Lockout of 1913

Surprises in Edinburgh

Well, after the last two weeks I feel woefully behind in posting, but it's been a hectic time. We took our first British Studies exam last Wednesday, which essentially consisted of writing three essays in two hours and then I was in Ireland for four days. So, yeah.

But enough excuses. BLOG NOW.

Before my life devolved into the psychotic chaos that was preparing for an exam and a four-day trip (imagine me alternately shoving clothing into my backpack, flipping frantically through mountains of handouts about kings who are ALL NAMED EDWARD, and stress-eating Aero bars while wallowing in self-pity) I went to Edinburgh for the weekend. Woo.

Edinburgh is not what I thought it would be like.

I don't know. Maybe I thought Scotland would be a shit-ton of sheep-covered bluffs, or maybe I thought Edinburgh would be like a mini-London, but neither of those were the case. At all. I was pleasantly surprised.

(I've generally tried to include like a little life-lesson I've gotten from each place I visited, but I don't know if I have one for Edinburgh. It was just cool. Sorry if you were expecting some soul-searching.)

We stepped out of the train station in Edinburgh, only to be greeted by a big-ass castle. You'd think I might be bored with castles by now, but it really never gets old, especially not when it's Edinburgh castle, which is situated on a freaking CLIFF overlooking like a whole block of gardens. Not only was it a beautiful castle, but it also would have been very effective as a military fortress, given its height and impressive size and how close it was located to water. So that was impressive, and I wasn't really expecting a castle in Scotland, probably because I had zero expectations. Everyone talks about London and Ireland, but poor Scotland gets neglected, I feel.

And maybe it was better that I didn't have any expectations, because then it's impossible to be disappointed.

Anyway, there were lots of neat shops in Edinburgh, which we went into and which inevitably left me feeling pretty pathetic because all the beautiful sweaters and bottles of scotch cost more than £10, which is approximately my entire budget for a day of travel (only joking).

But the best part of Edinburgh was the (free!) hike we took up Arthur's Seat. For those of you unfamiliar with the world-renowned geology of Scotland, Arthur's Seat is part of a volcano. It's a little more than 800 feet high and pretty rocky, so, though my Indiana friends are going to find me pretentious for saying this, it's a really tall hill.

 View of Edinburgh from the castle!

 Well, all my best pictures of Arthur's Seat are trapped on my phone. Maybe I'll add them later.

That's not to undermine its impressiveness, though. It may not reach above tree line, but Arthur's Seat was still incredible. (And I did make fun of my "flatlander" friends, but it was a moderately difficult climb, especially when you make the poor decision of wearing Toms to hike in...not my best plan.)  It's amazing to me that we live in a world where people have found a way to settle environments as varied as deserts and rainforests. And looking down from Arthur's Seat and seeing the tops of skyscrapers I'd been walking underneath for two days made me feel separate from it all, like I was able to step back and reflect and not have to worry about assignments or politics overseas or money. But it also made me feel connected. I stood in the same spot as probably millions of people have before and looked out over a city of several hundred thousand and think, "so that's what we all look like down there."

And the music swells. I'm sorry if my earnestness is like eye-rollingly obnoxious or anything. I promise I'm not trying to be an inspirational postcard. But really, I thought I would feel much more isolated overseas, when in reality, I feel weirdly connected to places here. It's just cool to think of all the people who have stood in the same places I have, who lived in these houses and walked on these streets. I like that I've been able to feel that in places where I don't live. And that's a nice note to end on, so I'll stop.

Next post: Encounters with crazy drunken hostel roommates.

Yay! You made it to the end! Enjoy this picture of Totoro from my hostel!

MIND = BLOWN

Everybody who's ever blogged about Europe has written a post that goes like this: "OMG Europe is just so old compared to the US. We're just such a young country. We've been around for like, no time at all. OMFG MIND = BLOWN."


I personally consider this one of the more obvious observations a traveler can make, but after visiting Stamford and Lincoln this past week, I can understand why bloggers freak out about Europe's age. In Stamford, we saw streets that were functional in medieval times. In Lincoln, we walked through a gate that was used by Roman emperors. At the Lincoln museum, we saw plates and goblets that were actually used by actual people in Romano-British times, and my friend summed up the awe we felt perfectly. "That plate is older than the United States," he said.

Actually, almost everything in the Lincoln museum was older than the United States. By a whole fracking lot. And while I was very much bowled over by that, what I almost found more impressive was the weird juxtaposition of time periods throughout English towns. The current Lincoln Cathedral (which is, like, too beautiful for words, by the way) was built in the 11th century on top of an even older cathedral that was built by the Anglo-Saxons. There were walls built on top of walls, glass-covered Roman wells that were built before people forgot how to do plumbing and then remembered again (weird, I know), and there was even a CASTLE.

Okay, so the castle was under construction. Still cool though.

And in the midst of all these crazy ancient artifacts, there were real-life modern people. When we were there, two men got in a tussle because one tried to park outside the other's house. A street musician heard our American accents and played "Yankee Doodle" on a piccolo. People had cell phones and music players and Instagram, and they had all of these things while they were standing on top of the castle or walking through the Roman gate or viewing a cadaver tomb in the cathedral.

Cadaver tombs are metal as shit, by the way.

The cathedral. Pictures don't do it justice.

And all this was really cool and really weird to me. It's like, modern culture and the preservation of ancient cultures don't have to be mutually exclusive. It's a little magical. But mostly it just makes me realize that we are not the only generation to live here, on this Earth. There have been billions of people here before us, and they weren't all club-thumping cave-men. They had art and religion and some of them could even build DOMES. Then I kind of wondered what our civilization will leave behind on the planet. What will insanely advanced cultures think of us? Will someone look at our silverware in the distant future and think how cool it is that real people just like them actually ate off of plastic? Will they think our relics are as hardcore as cadaver tombs? Who knows. I tried to fight it, but I guess my point is, "OMG EUROPE IS OLD. OMG MIND = BLOWN."

Geeking Out in London

On my London trip, I had the chance to make one of my biggest childhood dreams come true.

I got to enter the world of Harry Potter.

Okay, so I ended up paying ₤29 to view sets and props from the movies in the studio tour, but despite the price, it was really freaking cool. At this point I already feel a little like I'm living at Hogwarts, what with the students in my program being sorted into four houses and living in an English manor, but the Warner Bros. studio tour just cemented this feeling.

Some of it was pretty straightforward: I saw the interior of the Burrow, props like broomsticks, and Hermione's Yule Ball dress. Other parts of it were unexpected: I saw six identical costumes in various states of destruction all worn by Daniel Radcliffe in the Deathly Hallows. I learned the gruesome secret about Hagrid's robot head. And most of all I got to stand on the ACTUAL tiles of the ACTUAL floor of the ACTUAL Great Hall. (And I teared up a little when I did.) 

Yeah, the tour was pretty fantastic. But no matter how excellent and in-depth tours like this are, or perhaps because of it, they always turn out to feel, at least in my experience, a little bittersweet and sacrilegious. Learning the true magic of the film industry is kind of soul-crushing because what was once miraculous and mysterious to behold is rendered explainable. It makes you realize that, truly, there is no such thing as magic.

But there are, however, incredibly talented and innovative people who believe in the power of ideas and the emotive force of a story. And to me, their dedication, their passion for the same world that I'm passionate about is the most magical thing about Harry Potter.

Well that, and the fact that I SAW REAL-LIFE HOGWARTS.

(Okay, this wasn't about me traveling. Just fangirling. Oh well. Enjoy these excellent selfies taken on the tour.)

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