Home Sweet London

Ireland was...interesting. I can't say I know what people who rave about Dublin are talking about, but I think we had sort of an unfortunate (and possibly unfair) experience with it. Our flight was delayed a few hours due to weather, so we couldn't really do anything Thursday night once we got there, except for buying a surprisingly expensive Thai meal (yes, in Ireland) and go to sleep. The next morning we went to the James Joyce Centre, which was kinda neat, though not extensive. It did include Leopold Bloom's door, though.
Then at noon, for our 2-year anniversary, Alex hired a string quartet to play our song, First Day of My Life, by Bright Eyes, which he arranged into sheet music for the four instruments, for me in this hotel in Malahide, right outside of Dublin. So I would certainly call that a high point of the Dublin trip :) :) :)
That afternoon we spent mostly trying to figure out how to get to the things we were planning on doing, though because we were leaving that evening on a bus to Galway, we couldn't really plan too much. So we decided to go to the Guinness factory, where they showed us in an elaborate way that there are 4 ingredients in Guinness, how the advertising has changed over th e years, what the bottles have looked like, etc, and gave us a "free" pint at the top, where you could look out onto gray, industrial Dublin. Quite an experience.

Galway, though, was very beautiful, full of things you think are supposed to be in Ireland: colorful houses right next to each other on pedestrian streets, wild swans, signs in Gaelic, pubs with fiddle music, you know, things like that. On Saturday we went to their market right by our hostel and got some (really) fresh mozzarella and partially sun-dried tomatoes and olive bread and had lunch. I think it was a Greek table at the market...but I guess we got our "Irish meal" at this place called The Couch Potato, where they basically put toppings and cheese in potatoes. It was pretty fantastic, in fact.

We then walked around and saw the town a little with Nicole's friend, Michelle, who has been studying there for a month or two. We went out to some pubs and heard real Irish music in this pub that was so incredibly crowded, I can't imagine what anyone was thinking walking into it. It was cool though, very Irish in a stereotypical way. A little more so, anyway, than the Irish pub in Dublin, in which we heard a lot of covers of American and English songs (which were still fun to listen to, but not quite the same feel). The next morning Lacey and I went out to Salt Hill to see a little more of the "beach" of the bay that Galway is on. It was surprisingly pretty--very clear water, rocks and sand, cliffs in the distance. I took about three million pictures and walked around on the beach (and a little in the water!) barefoot, as though it were actually warm enough to do so (it isn't). After that we went back to Dublin (where our flight was from) and saw their National Gallery, which was ok except for the mislabeling of the rooms that a bunch of the paintings were in, as well as the suspiciously misnamed paintings that, on the map, appeared to be paintings quite famous, but in reality, the paintings that one found were named slightly differently but following the same subject. I'm not saying it was purposeful...just suspicious. They also closed a bit earlier than we expected, so we had some time to think more about how much Dublin really hated us. I don't even think it's Dublin's fault...we just didn't have much luck-o-the Irish while there, having a plane delayed almost 3 hours coming in, the bus taking longer than they said it would both to and from Galway, quite difficult and not entirely efficient public transportation (for those of us with no clue how to navigate it, especially being used to London's Tube). But again...Galway was quite pretty. And walkable.

I must say that I am quite glad to be back in London. This is really a great city, which was demonstrated to me yet again yesterday, when I went to St. Paul's cathedral. I got to see where William Blake, Sir Joshua Reynolds, J.E. Millais, J.M.W. Turner are all buried, and, best of all, John Donne himself. That was incredible. I am pretty sure that it's the death mask that he had made for himself before he died. The timeline of the church also told me that his was the only monument to survive the fire of 1666.
After walking around, I climbed several million stairs to the top (it is the 3rd tallest building in the city of London), where you can look out on all of London.
At the bottom, it was time for Evensong, and because I was there early (I guess?) I actually got to sit in the quire (with the choir...pronounced the same) so we were really close to the singing and everything (and got to sit in the tall wooden bench-chairs that they have, instead of folding chairs down on the floor of the cathedral.

Afterwards I went down to Waterloo and found a knitting shop, got some yarn, ate a terrible sandwich on the tube back towards our borough, and had a pint of cider with Nicole, our french friend Sebastien, and his friend Jillian (though I am not sure if that's how it's spelled).