Part 1: Dublin, Ireland

It's been forever since I've written! Ever since we got back from our Dublin/Edinburgh trip, everyday has been jam packed with class and homework... Now I finally have a break to give an update on my first travel break. :) It's chock-full of details, mostly for my own sake, so I'll remember everything, and I hope they don't bog you down. I hope you enjoy what you can.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008

At Gatwick Airport: Chris, Holly, David, me, Mary

The journey started at a little after 11 AM, when Mary, Holly, Chris, David, and I headed off across town for the bus station. Fortunately, we got there plenty early, early enough to figure out that the confirmation email we got was all we needed for our ticket, early enough for David to stop at the open market for a few apples, and early enough for Mary to stop in Caffe Nero for a much-needed coffee and a new experience: Italian cake. (It was fruity and chocolaty... almost like a muffin, but more dense.) Our coach arrived and we prayed before getting on, asking God for unity and safe travels. The group who was going to Prague was also on this same coach to London Gatwick Airport, so we sat with them. After a couple hours, we arrived at the airport and couldn't check in yet because it was too early, so we wandered around to check the place out. This was the biggest little airport I could have imagined. There were a ton of stores and all the computers with Internet access made me feel like people either can't get away from it or that people spend a lot of time in that airport. Anyway, we spent time in a Burger King because the only other real option was a Caffe Nero or some bar. I had the unfortunate experience of opening up a tabloid and seeing a horribly disturbing image, and I made sure none of the rest of the group saw it. Makes me wonder if that sort of thing is in every "newspaper" around here, but I'm not about to go leafing through every paper to find out. UGH. Moving right along (wow, at this rate, my post is going to be a novel and y'all are just going to quit reading it before we even get out of the country), after we finally checked in, we went through security (of course), which is strange at Gatwick because you do shoes completely separately from everything else, in a different x-ray machine down the hall from the initial checkpoint. Once we'd gotten into the terminal, the screen told us to wait for our gate number, so we did... pretty soon it got to about 5 minutes until the boarding time stamped on our tickets, and we got worried because we still didn't know where our gate was and all terminals took at least 10 minutes to walk to, according to the signs. We asked one of the people at the desks and, funny thing, the time on the ticket is when they post up the gates on the screen. Horribly inconvenient, but I guess it works. What I want to know, then, is how everybody else from our flight happened to have already made themselves at home in the gate area by the time we walked into the gate. Oh, well. This flight was quick and easy... 90 minutes. And then we were in Dublin!

Our awesome hostel!

From the airport, we took a bus to the city centre. This was a pretty big city, at least compared to Oxford The main street was called O'Connell Street, and our hostel, Litton Lane Hostel, was located on a lane that was just off a street just off O'Connell. When we turned onto the lane that our hostel was on, we were a little apprehensive; it looked a little shady. Once we got in, however, all things were great. The receptionist was really kind and helpful and made sure we all got in the same room. We learned that this hostel was actually former recording studios for artists such as U2 and Sinead O'Connor. I thought that was pretty cool. Once we took a look around the place (our room, the bathrooms, the common room, the kitchen), we wandered out to look for some place to eat. We had passed this divinely-scented pizza place on the way towards the hostel, and then we had to pass it again as we went out towards town. Fortunately, the hostel was in a great location: about a 2 minute walk from the main street. Unfortunately, everybody seems to smoke cigarettes there, so wherever you walk it feels like you're walking in a smoke shop, trying to breathe. At least, that's how it was at night... it seemed to not be so bad during the day. Anyway, we wandered around for a bit, noting that there were a huge McDonald's and Burger King and instantly pushing those out of the picture as options. Eventually we decided on this little pizza joint called PaPa Pizza (okay, so this was traditional either, but it looked good... and it was delicious). O'Connell Street has a few of these really weird lit-up walking clothed stick figures... I don't know how else to describe them. They appear to be completely pointless except for decoration, but they made us laugh anyway. We went back to the hostel after dinner to plan the next day. We planned in the dining area by the kitchen, and David played a game of chess with a man from Poland who barely spoke English. It was really cool. Mostly, Mary, Holly, and I planned the trip... the guys just played chess and drank soda (Chris). haha :)

Thursday, September 18, 2008

The kind old Irishman helping Mary find the National Museum on the map


Christ Church Cathedral from one angle

The morning started off with the free cereal, toast, and coffee provided by the hostel, and then we were off to Trinity College Library to see the Book of Kells. Basically, it's this intricately decorated book of the four Gospels that was mainly for ornamental purposes rather than daily reading. The library had tons of displays on how it was made, who copied it, who decorated it, the stuff it was made of, and finally, the book itself. It was amazing to see how much effort and time was put into it... I never would have spent that much time or care copying something out. Unfortunately, most of this day was spent in museums or libraries, so photography was prohibited. Upstairs was the huge and tall old library. The books were SO old. The "old book smell" was almost overwhelming. I thought it was funny how the shelves had rolling ladders attached to them to get to the highest books. They were just like the ones in movies. After a look around the giftshop, we left Trinity and tried to find the National Museum... somehow got turned around and couldn't quite figure it out, even with a map. We ended up talking to this old man on the street and he gave us directions. I loved his voice. I think that if for some reason, I could only hear everybody in one accent for the rest of my life, I'd choose the Irish accent... it's so rich and rolling. Once we finally got to the museum, we got to see the gazillion old artifacts relating to Ireland's history, including Viking times. There was also a random room with Egyptian stuff, and Chris wasn't too pleased with that because it was out of place. I think the coolest thing in the whole place would have to be this huge log boat made out of an oak tree trunk. It must have been around 50 feet long. After the museum, we were hungry, so we wandered over to the pedestrian streets to look for a place for lunch. There were several street performers: a silent clown who hit passers-by on the head with a foam hammer; a silver guy trying to be a statue; an older couple playing the keyboard and saxophone; five or so people playing string instruments. We eventually found a place called Bewley's Cafe. We were seated upstairs, kind of in an alcove, alone. I ordered a Buffalo Mozzarella Ciabatta - surprisingly, and sadly I might add, there was no meant in it. It was cheese, tomato, greens ("rocket"), and basil pesto on ciabatta bread. Very good, even though it didn't have mean like I'd hoped. It was served with these chips that were really tasty - they were on the verge of even being sweet. There was also a small salad with honey mustard dressing (I didn't really like it because of the dressing). Once we'd finished eating we had to pay, and since it was all on one bill there was some hassle trying to figure out who owed who what (not to mention the fact that, although worth more to the dollar than pounds, euros are still not all that close to dollars... so we lamented the fact that we can't get away from expensive meals).

Enjoying our meals at Bewley's Cafe.

Dublin Castle is surprisingly colorful. It reminded me of a fairy tale.

The Chester Beatty Library was next on our list, but we found Dublin Castle first. We didnt' go in, but we took pictures of the outside of it and the big round lawn with designs moved in it. The library ended up being right next to that. This was probably the best place we'd been to so far that day. It had a bunch of manuscripts on the first floor of Chinese stories, written and illustrated on scrolls. They were so beautiful, colorful and detailed. There were also samples of Indian, Arabic, and Egyptian writings. There was a piece of this Egyptian scroll that was part of a larger scroll that had about 70% of all known Egyptian love poetry written on it. Upstairs was the best part though. I spent a lot of time looking at and reading about Eastern religions and their texts and a few artifacts (Buddhism, Daoism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Janism). It was so interesting to learn all about them because, although I knew basics about a few of them, I definitely had never learned that much, and it was cool to learn about all their similarities and differences. Besides, I had never even heard of Janism before, so that was completely new. Then I spent a little time in the Islam section but I had recently learned a lot about Islam (thank you Rebekah, Provider of Everything You Wanted to Know About Islam, According to Wikipedia), so I moved on pretty quickly to what I found to be the best and most exciting part: the Christianity section. We saw pieces of the Bible written in common Greek on papyrus... one tiny piece of John was dated 15o-200 A.D.!!! It was so amazing that it was still around, even if it was only like 2 inches by 1 inch big. I don't know where the rest of it was, though, or if it was still surviving or not. There were larger pieces of other books, like Deuteronomy, Genesis, Acts, Philippians, Galatians, Romans. Most of those ones were dated 200 A.D. But really... that's SO OLD! I still can't get over it. We were talking about them afterwards and were wondering if they were written at about the time that the apostles' grandchildren (if they had children, and their children had children) or great-grandchildren or something... and if they could have had a chance to read them and ask their parents about them... "Dad, is that really what Jesus said?" "Yes, He did. Talk to Grandpa Peter for further details." 'Twas fun to think about... but really, it was mind-boggling to think of how soon after Jesus' life and death they were written. I know there are other manuscripts that were written even earlier than these, but it was amazing that we got the chance to look at and think about these. AMAZING.

Liffey Bridge

After this strange experience, we walked over to Christ Church Cathedral and decided that we didn't want to pay 6 euro for admission, so we decided to just come back for the Evensong service at 6 PM and explore St. Patrick's Cathedral in the meantime. St. Patrick's had massive scaffolding because the were restoring part of it, but most of it was normal. I don't think it was as beautiful inside as Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford - the stained glass windows didn't even begin to compare - but it was still pretty. We spent a while in there and then debated on whether or not to find dinner or ice cream or something to munch on. Instead, we stopped in at a little convenience store and a couple people in our group got something. I didn't get anything because I was low on cash and didn't want to use my card. After that little pit stop, we walked back to Christ Church and waited about 15 minutes outside. To be honest, the exterior of that church is a little intimidating... not exactly welcoming. But it was beautiful nonetheless, in its own way. Inside was pretty much like the other cathedrals we've seen. I'd never been in one for a service before, though. We got a program/bulletin/order of worship (I don't know what it would be called, but it had everything that was said/happening written on it). There was a lot of sitting down and standing up throughout the service. It was beautiful though. The choir was an absolute joy to listen to. The whole thing was only about 45 minutes long. After it, we had nothing else planned, so we wandered back towards the hostel. We crossed this old bridge, the Liffey (Ha'penny) Bridge that was built in 1816. It's this big wrought-iron thing over the Liffey River, one of several bridges over it. We walked along the boardwalk, found an ATM, then went to a grocery store to pick up a couple of cans of chili to eat with the rice Holly had brought (we were trying to save money, if you couldn't tell, haha). Then we went to a couple of tourist shops, stopped by a place for Mary to get her Irish coffee, and then went back to the hostel kitchen to eat our rice and chili. Our dessert was random Cadbury chocolate candies from the vending machine. My favorite was called Moro. It was chocolate-coated chocolaty crunch/smoothness...? with caramel. It's really hard to describe, but it was SO GOOD. Everybody else seemed to really like it as well. I looked it up online when I got back in Oxford and apparently they only produce and sell them in Ireland... although there seems to be a version of it in New Zealand. Either way, I have been searching for them here in Oxford with no luck, so I doubt we'll have them in the States. Sad day! :( Oh well. So anyway, from our hostel room we could hear the music from the pub next door... it would have been annoying if it was Irish people singing their drinking songs (which sounds kind of weird, but it's really cool to hear).

Okay, so I realize that was actually only one whole day of travels... but I'm going to break this trip up into more than one post so that at least there's something up while I gather enough energy to finish it off. The journey continues... next time I post. :)