Facts about Ireland and Dublin (I)

Ireland has a weird climate. It rains a lot, and almost every day. Maybe that’s why we haven’t seen any rainer, and maybe that’s why people don’t care about water consume. Irish government has put some advertisements on buses saying “Water is precious. Let’s conserve it.”, but I’m not sure if they really work. Bottled water is very expensive, but we have found the cheapest one (you know it’s the cheapest one for sure when restaurants serve it to you), and costs 1,40 euros a bottle containing two litres, but only at Dunnes Stores‘ supermarkets.

If you ask for water in a bar, restaurant or pub, and you don’t say to the waiter or waitress clear and loud that you don’t want it cold, they serve you an iced glass with a sliver of lemon and cold water… And, of course, you have to ask for ’still water’ if you don’t want ’sparkling water’ (with gas, sort of effervescent water). And what’s more, service charge is NOT always included in the bill, so you have to add an extra charge for the service (I try to avoid this when possible).

Barcelona – Day 20: 25/08/2007

We woke up at 5 am, just to have enough time for the final activities. The taxi left us in the bus stop, and the bus left us at the Dublin Airport at 6:45 am. Our flight departed at 9:45, so we had a lot of time to kill. The flight arrived to Barcelona ten minutes late (we were in an Airbus 320, just like three weeks before). When the plane landed, our journey finished…

This is the class where I have stayed for three weeks, learning English:

Dublin – Day 17: 22/08/2007

Today we arranged to visit Kilmainham Gaol, but the sun was shining brightly and we changed our mind. Núria’s teacher told her that this is the usual Irish climate in summer (and, actually, it’s the second consecutive day without raining). So we took the Dart to Malahide in Tara Station, which is very close to river Liffey, at 15:39 pm, just because we missed the previous train… We got lost trying to reach Malahide Castle and, by the time we found it, they were closing it. The castle was built more than 800 years ago in a lovely and huge garden (about 10 square kilometers).

We spent some time in those huge gardens and then we went to Howth, a peninsula in the northern side of Dublin. Howth is a small coastal village. In its harbor we saw a lot of seals and seagulls, and we can prove it because we photographed them. We spent the evening walking by the coast, and we had dinner in a restaurant next to the Dart station. The dinner was expensive and tasteless, so we left the restaurant as soon as we had paid. No matter how hard you try, it’s almost impossible to have a tasty meal in Ireland, I guess…

Cork – Day 14: 19/08/2007

We had to wake up at 6 am because the first coach to Cork was departing at 8 am. We arrived at Cork at 12:55, almost half an hour late, so we only had time to visit the city of Cork (‘Corcaigh’ in Irish; it means “marsh“). It is the second city of the Republic of Ireland, and the principal city and administrative centre of County Cork. It is 264 km away from Dublin. An island in the river Lee forms the main part of the city centre just before the river flows to Cork Harbour, one of the world’s largest natural harbours.

There’s nothing to explain about Cork, mainly because it’s not very beautiful, excepting the University College of Cork (its visitor centre offers two iMac for the visitors . We saw the entire city centre and some of the suburbs and they’re all worthless. The last coach to Dublin departed at 6 pm, so we arrived at the hostel very late (almost 11 pm), although it was an express route. It was the first day that didn’t rain since we were in Ireland.

Dublin Reloaded

All the old posts have been revised and improved; what’s more, now they come with photos Next week I’ll upload the remaining posts.

El agua que todo lo purifica

Dicen que en el Reino Unido y en Irlanda llueve mucho. He podido comprobar que en Irlanda, al menos, llueve mucho. Dicen que en el este llueve menos que en el oeste. Pero aún así no hay día en que en el este no se nuble y caigan algunas gotas. El agua lo purifica todo. El agua es un bien preciado y cada vez más escaso. Aquí la deben apreciar bastante porque es carísima.

Pero todo tiene su explicación y es que un país con 40 tonalidades de verde necesita regarse cada día. Aquí no necesitan sistemas de riego, nada de aspersores ni de gota a gota, nada de regar las calles… La lluvia lo limpia todo.

El clima es la explicación de muchas cosas. Explica, por ejemplo, porqué muchas irlandesas llevan falda o traje con bambas o porqué visten con colores más discretos. Explica los horarios de las comidas y de las tiendas (la mayoría cierran a las 18h.).

El agua es buena, la lluvia es buena. Pero el sol también es bueno y un agosto lluvioso y frío no es la concepción que tenemos de verano. Este verano está haciendo un tiempo fuera de lo común. Según dicen, la temperatura en verano puede alcanzar los 30ºC. Ahora ya me lo puedo creer. Hoy ha estado soleado todo el día, hacía hasta calor y podías ir en manga corta. Aunque lo de ir en manga corta es muy relativo, porque ves muchos irlandeses que van en manga corta mientras tú te estás pelando de frío con dos chaquetas.

Irlanda es un país que te cautiva. Dublín no es que tenga monumentos muy emblemáticos, no es una ciudad que podamos decir que es “bonita”. La belleza está en su gente, en su ambiente, en el aire que se respira después de la lluvia, en lo umbrío de sus edificios, en sus parques. Incluso en la lluvia está la belleza: le añade un toque especial.

Giant’s Causeway – Day 13: 18/08/2007

Our bus to Belfast departed at 7 am, so our alarm clock woke us up at 5 am GMT. Belfast is the capital of Northern Ireland (United Kingdom), and is 134 km away from Dublin. At 6 am we got on a taxi, and ten minutes later we were again in Busáras, the main bus station. We walked around searching for something hot to drink, but our tries were useless: everything is closed in Dublin before 7 am (excepting Spar supermarkets, but they don’t serve anything similar until seven). The bus departed ten minutes late, but we arrived at Belfast three hours later, as it was expected. It never really stopped raining until late at night.

The coach to Giant’s Causeway had the departure point at the Belfast International Youth Hostel. After taking some pounds out from the cash machine and our first breakfast in the UK, we led to the hostel. We had about an hour to kill, so we decided to connect us to the Internet. At 11:10 am we were leaving Belfast behind. We had only booked the transport, and we had almost two hours to see the Causeway, a very wide area. At first, I thought there would be enough time, but finally we were in a hurry not to miss the coach back to Belfast.

The Giant’s Causeway is, according to Irish agency tours, regularly called ‘The eighth wonder of the world’. I was determined not to leave Ireland without seeing it; but even I DID know it was going to be very beautiful, I didn’t think it was going to be THAT beautiful… It’s wonderful, marvelous, savage, amazing… and a bit frightening, I guess.

This life’s must see geological phenomenon is located in the northern coast of Northern Ireland, and it’s sort of a wild coast with more than 37,000 hexagonal shaped stones (which are estimated to be 62-65 million years old). In fact, most of the columns are hexagonal, because there are some with four, five, seven and eight sides (the tallest is about 12 metres high).

This phenomenon came about as molten rocks (lava) were cooling off. Legend, however, has it that Finn McCool, the Irish giant, who lived there with his family, thought he was the biggest and strongest giant of Ireland. Benandonner, the Scottish counterpart, challenged him to a fight, and sent a messenger to notify him – but, in fact, was much larger than Finn. Finn then started a causeway to walk to Scotland; when Benandonner noticed it, he decided to build the Scottish end. Once the causeway was finished, Benandonner sent a messenger to tell Finn that they will meet the next morning. To protect Fionn, his wife Oonagh laid a blanket over Finn and pretended he was actually Fionn’s baby son. When Benandonner crossed the bridge looking for him, he met the wife and the ‘baby’. He assumed the alleged father must be gigantic indeed and ran back to Scotland, removing part of the causeway in case he was followed by Finn. He left in such a hurry that he his boot came off and it is still here today. There are also shapes of a camel and pipe organs in the walls of the cliffs. The “causeway” legend corresponds with geological history in as much as there are similar basalt formations (a part of the same ancient lava flow) on the Scottish isle of Staffa.

We spent another two hours going back to Belfast. After an expensive lunch there (and, Núria agreed, a healthy and tasty one – chicken liver lambs and a 8 ounces beef steak), it was almost time to get back to the bus station. Three hours later we were back in Dublin.

Wicklow Mountains – Day 7: 12/08/2007

The 8 am breakfast preceded our trip to Suffolk Street (tram plus walk), where a coach was waiting for the passengers. The day tour of Wicklow Mountains was planned to start at 9 am, and be back at Dublin at 5 pm, so we moved to our first stop in Glencree Valley, specifically in a reconciliation centre (with nothing interesting to see).

As we were making our way to the next stop, we were enjoying the beauty of the sceneries, taking some photographs from inside the bus, when possible. The next planned stop was Lough Tay, a lake located in a high place in the Wicklow Mountains; we stopped for about ten minutes. The views were spectacular, but the wind and the cold ruined it all. From a certain angle, you can take a photograph of the lake and it looks like the largest Guiness in the world.

Glendalough (English word for the three-word Irish Glaenndalough, the glen of the two lakes) was waiting for us when we arrived at midday. It is one of the most important sites of monastic ruins in Ireland, and you can enjoy the XII century cathedral, a 33 metres high rounded tower (its unique entrance is three metres high, some kind of defense strategy) and two beautiful lakes: the Upper Lake and the Lower Lake.

After the stop for lunch in Avoca (our dessert was a chocolate biscuit cake; its name is strange, but it was a tasty dessert), it started to rain very heavily. Then we made a two minutes stop in the Meeting of the Waters, in the confluence of two rivers, and then it was time to come back to Dublin. Once back in the hotel, we went to the laundry, because we wanted to know how it worked exactly (not to mention because we like to wear clean clothes). While we were waiting for the washing machine to finish, we had dinner (in our room), and while we were waiting for the dryer, we had a cup of hot chocolate. When the dryer finished, we bagged our clothes into our suitcases, because next day we were moving away from this hotel to Brewery’s Hostel… I wonder if our stay will be better than our stay in Portobello Hotel. We had to check in at 3 pm, but I would like to believe it could be sooner…

Aran Islands – Day 6: 11/08/2007

We woke up at 5:30 am to be ready for the first tram at 6:15 am. We had to take a taxi in St. Stephen’s Green due to the distance there is to Heuston Station. In this railway station, trains depart towards East and South. The taxi cost us 8,5 euros. After checking in and listening to some explanations from the guide, we had a three-hour long way to Galway in a slow and old train (but for sure brand new in the 70’s). I tried to buy a hot chocolate for Núria, but they only served coffee and tea… The train finished its way in Galway Station at 10 am, and we had to wait about half an hour to get on the bus to the airport. Meanwhile, I noticed that in Galway traffic lights have four states: green, amber, red and flashing amber, which indicates to the driver the light is going to change to green in a few moments, so they can prepare their start.

The airplane to the largest island should have taken off at 11:30 am, but the rain delayed the flight until 12:35 pm. It was a short but noisy experience: it lasted less than ten minutes. Our tour group included a three-member family, a mysterious mid-aged Irish man and the two of us.

The Aran Islands are three islands 45 km away from the coast but, once you get there, you feel isolated. The guided tour included a bus tour for the main (and largest) island: Inis Mór. The island is a quiet and peaceful place, but also a wild and a hard place to live in. Despite its isolation, or maybe due to it, it has two primary schools and one secondary school, with twelve teachers, four nurses and two doctors in the entire island, that has a total population of 1,500 people, and an unknown number of seals (we saw some of them). There are only two roads: the main road and the cross road.

Once in the bus tour, we made two stops. In the first one we were able to visit the Seven Churches (in Irish: Na Seacht Teampall): in fact, only two of them were actually churches, the remaining five were monk ceilings, built in the VIII century. In the second one, we had enough time to visit the main and biggest Iron Age fort of this island, Dún Aonghas. The fortress was built by ancient tribesmen 2500 years ago, and it is located dramatically on the brink of a 91 metres high cliff, that falls away into the Atlantic Ocean. The fort has been described as one of the most magnificent of its kind in Europe. It comprises of three concentric semicircles and covers an area of 10 square kilometres, with the innermost offering the visitor a vertiginous view of the island and the Connemara Coast. Back to the civilization, Núria ate a tuna sandwich and I ate a fruit scone (a kind of a little rounded bread filled with raisins).

It was a stormy day, so we had to come back to the coast by ferry, a 40 minutes trip (my nap lasted all the way long). After that, a bus took us to Galway Station, with no time at all to visit Galway (as it was planned), due to the ferry trip. The same train left us in Heuston Station at 8:49 pm, and we made our way back to the hotel.

Facts or myths?

• 20 percent of Irish population are obese.
• You can’t see a black face in Ireland.
• August is the month of the year with the greatest rainfall.
• Saint Patrick banished snakes from Ireland.
• Irish diet is based in beer: one for each hand.

Life in Dublin is very expensive (any decent meal won’t cost you less than 14 ¢). Our language school is full of Spanish people Teachers are kind and patient, but mine (only for today) has a very fluent English, and sometimes it is difficult for me to understand her at all.