oh where to begin... it's been days since i've been able to post and i have so much to write about...

Tuesday in Dublin

so tuesday morning we got up kind of late and so that meant that the germans next door (there were at least 4 of them sharing the room next to ours that shared our toilet and shower) had all gotten into the shower before us and used up all the hot water again so we had cold showers. i can't wait to get back to america and have a warm shower every day. anyway...

so we walked to O'Connell street to catch the bus for the tour of the city. it was a double decker hop on/off tour that stopped at about 20 stops all around the city. we decided that this would be the best way to see most of the sites and we had read an article on the aer lingus flight on the way to dublin that mentioned that these tours were actually pretty good. The tour headed off towards the wax museam at first where out front there's this huge celtic warrior breaking into the place. it looped back around down O'Connell street again and passed the huge spire in the middle of the street that was erected for the millenium celebrations in the city and was, i believe, called the millenium tower. we drove by the general post office (GPO), which was important in the easter uprising.

the first stop that we got off at was the trinity college stop. we took a walking tour of the college which cost 9 euros. our guide was Owen, a philosophy student at Trinity. i think he was in his 3rd year, i can't remember. owen did a very good job with the tour and handled questions from some other americans, who were very annoying and asking him all sorts of pointless questions, very well. the tour ended at the old library where you could go in and view the book of kells. the book was very impressive: beautiful with intricate celtic designs. the colors were produced by hard to come by and natural things (blue was made with lapis and red was made by crushing up beetle shells) and the paper was made by stretching the skins of baby calfs. the book is essentially a picture book of the new testament of the bible. we didn't spend too much time viewing it as there were tons of rude people crowded around it and wouldn't really let you in at all. and they were coughing, which was so gross... we walked upstairs to the long room of the library which may or may not be the longest long room of a library (they said it's bigger than the one at oxford but maybe not cambridge). it was filled with very old books and other improtant document and was generally interesting but very stuffy and smelled of old books (and smelly other people).

the next stop that we got off at was the temple bar stop. we thought we'd find lunch at one of the pubs in temple bar. we didn't have luck. we wondered around the area looking at the menus displayed in the windows and nixing each pub in turn as they were all very expensive in that area. we finally decided that we'd try the Auld Dubliner, but found the service in there to be less than satisfactory. we walked in the pub and beck asked if we could just sit anywhere and one of the girls behind the bar said yeah, so we walked behind the bar area and up a level to where there was a group of british kids having lunch. and we sat. and sat. no one came by to offer us a menu or see if we needed anything. so after we sat there for at least ten minutes without being served we decided to abort.

we walked around again for another ten or fifteen minutes before we found the Stag's Head on Dame Court (i think...). this bar was recommended to us by Glen at the Hairy Lemon - he said that it was one of the oldest pubs in dublin and definitely worth checking out...

(will finish later... my 20 minutes at this computer are about up).

just have a few minutes (less than 8 actually) to post left on this timed internet in the hostel lobby... so instead of trying to go through everything we did tuesday and wednesday i'll just write for a bit about today and then get back to the tues/wed goings on when i have a little bit more time because that'll be a long post...

so today on our last day in dublin beck and i decided to just bum around a bit. we walked back to the shopping district in grafton street and i was on a quest to find a sweater. the weather has been cold here and i didn't really bring any long sleeved shirts, all i have with me is a light hoodie, just cotton like a t-shirt. we walked in a million shops but most of the sweaters i either didn't like or they were too expensive. i did buy a small change purse in a shop called oasis: it looks like an old fashioned/old lady change purse but it's bright hot pink satin. we walked through this victorian shopping district which was pretty cool. there were a lot of little stands selling random things. lots of hippy type things.

then it started to rain. we've been lucky because the past few days we've been here we've had no rain. but today it started and it's icky. and neither of us have an umbrella. it rains kind of weird here. it doesn't really rain in drops... the whole air just gets wet all around you. so you feel damp. ick. we were going to buy an umbrella but by the time we got around to it we were already pretty wet so we didn't figure there was a point.

we stopped in a chocolate cafe for hot chocolate which was excellent: very rich and creamy. i guess it should've been for three euros.. at least you got a free truffle with it :) after that we looked in a bookstore for a while and decided to head back to the internet place we like to post/check email. on the way back we stopped in one of those tourist/gift shop places and i bought a Guinness hoodie because i was freezing.

the internet place was full so we ended up in the lobby at the crappy pay internet terminals. and now i have less than a minute so i should wrap up... heading to the airport shortly...

just a quick post for now. it's our last day in dublin and we've checked out of the hostel and stored our bags for the bulk of the day in the basement lockers at the hostel. just popped into the internet cafe to check on information that my dad left us regarding a different place to stay in london. we decided to take him up on his offer of booking us into a proper hotel for our night in london tonight rather than going back to the hole that is the Atlantic Paddington... he's booked us into the ramada at heathrow and i can't wait to have a shower again that's not freezing (yeah, i forgot to mention that, but the showers in dublin have all been freezing).

THANKS DAD!!!!!!! I LOVE YOU!

anyway, it's off to enjoy our last day in dublin and get some lunch (pub f00d ru1z). i'll post more the next chance i get! -ali

Dublin: Sunday evening

so we travelled to Dublin from London Sunday afternoon. We found Heathrow to be kind of confusing when we went to check in in the departures area in terminal 1. There were desks for airlines all over the place, but no signs pointing in which direction which airlines were located, so you kind of had to just wonder around until you found your airline. We had our passports ready when we got up to the counter and handed them to the agent at Aer Lingus along with our tickets. She didn't seem interested at all in our passports, in fact, I don't think she even looked at them. This was kind of shocking to us, especially at a huge airport like LHR, because you can't get anywhere at Albany airport without a photo ID. We weren't sure when we were checking in if we had business class seats again, so we were pleasently surprised when the ticket agent handed us our boarding passes and said, "you may use the lounge." #

We practically skipped to the gate, giggling, and saying to each other, "you may use the lounge!" When we got to the entrance to the gate area they asked to see our photo ID, but they didn't check it against the tickets. We had to go through the security screening: the typical xray machine and metal detector and a female guard patted me down. No one patted Beck down. I guess I either look more sinester than Beck, or they figured that I had cargo pants on and therefore more places to hide things or that guard thought I was cute and wanted to pat me down.... (shudder).

The lounge at LHR for Aer Lingus wasn't half as impressive as the BA lounges that we visited. It was a big room with lots of comfier chairs than were out in the regular waiting area at the gates and you had to show your boarding pass to get in. There was a TV in the corner but some business man already had a hold of it and was watching track and field events (that's really a kind of boring thing to watch on tv...). On the other side of the room there was a bar area with free alcohol and that was cool. I poured myself a nice glass of Bailey's with ice and beck had some wine. We sat around for about 45 minutes and then it was time to board the plane.

Aer Lingus's plane was not so impressive either. Again, we've really been spoiled by BA international business class flights. Business/First class consisted of the first three rows of the plane. We were seated in seats 3a and 3c. We were kind of confused as to why they wouldn't seat us right next to each other, but that was explained right away when we saw row 3... 3c (Beck's seat) was next to the window. 3a (my seat) was next to the aisle. In between 3a and 3c was (of course) 3b. 3b was tiny. I think it was less than half a seat wide. there was a matching tiny pull down tray on the seat in front of it. It was really the strangest seat I ever saw on a plane. I don't really know what it was for... I guess it's a child seat, but how many times do you see little kids travelling in 1st/business class? strange...

anyway, the flight was nice. we had to wait forever to take off, and there was a delay when we got on the ground as well, but as we had nowhere important to be that didn't bother us. we were fed deli sandwhiches on the flight out of a little bag that said "premier" on the front of it. Also in the bag were creamer and sugar for the coffee they offerred, a small bottle of water, a plastick knife and spoon, a fruit cup and a chocolate bar with honeycomb pieces in it.

Dublin airport was the least impressive so far. when we got off the plane it wasn't clearly marked who should go where. there was a passport control area, but they didn't seem concerned that we actually went there, and when Beck and I found our way into it the agent pretty much yawned, didn't really look at my passport when I handed it to her, and kind of mumbled something about how long we were going to be staying in the country. Then we went down a hall to the baggage area and after we got our baggage off the belt (and this part of the airport was the least impressive... it looked like Albany Airport during their remodel) we walked to the beginning of a hall where you had to pass through 1 of 3 channels. the 1st one was the blue channel, and that was pretty much for citizens of ireland and anyone with a EU passport. the second was the green channel, which was pretty much for everyone else. the third was the red channel, and i think if you classified yourself as red they jumped you when you walked down the hall and that's how they caught any terrorists or whatever trying to enter the country. after we figured out which channel we should go down we walked down the short hall and were dumped out into the arrivals area along with everyone else. we couldn't believe how lax they were with security in general... no one really looked at our passports or made sure that they matched our tickets, and they didn't even ask the baggage questions when we checked our bags, they just had a sign up that said that if we answered yes to any of the questions (had we left our bags unattended at all or had someone else packed our bags) it was our responsibility to tell the agent.

anyway. so we found our way onto an airlink bus that took us to city centre. we were dropped off near the bus station. it wasn't obvious though which building was the bus station. beck and i and a couple that also got off the bus were kind of left there wondering around trying to figure out (1) where we were and (2) how to get to our hostel. i flagged down a couple who was passing and had a map and we found our way to the issacc's hostel.

this hostel is much better than the hole we stayed at in London. it was down a cute alleyway and in an old wine storehouse. the lobby area inside was full of international travellors eating and talking and playing cards and there was a courtyard to the left with the same occupancy. the guy at the desk was nice enough and he bothered to explain where breakfast was and other important things (unlike that annoying French Tool in London). Our room had two single beds in it and a closet. In the same vestibule area that our room was off of was a toilet/sink room and a shower stall room. everything looked clean and appeared to be in working order. we were so thankful to be in a place that wasn't a hole, especially because we were going to be there for 4 nights.

since it was after dark and we had no bearings of the city yet beck and i decided to spend our first evening in dublin just hanging out at the hostel and planning the rest of our stay here. we went down to the lobby where there were these little pay internet terminals (1 euro for 15 minutes) and we tried to check email and I was going to post, but they didn't work very well. we took a walk down the street later that evening and foudn this place that i'm posting from now (2.50 euro per hour plus software that works with hotmail and blogger). we grabbed some chips from the vending machine and went back to the room to plan. the chips we got were called "Taytos" and we got 2 flavors: onion and cheese and vinegar. the onion and cheese chips somehow tasted just like Chicken Ramen. I loved them. after we pigged out on our chips and devised a skeleton plan for the next day we went to bed...

Dublin Monday

Monday we decided that we'd just wonder around the city and do some shopping. First we had to buy beck a towel, which we did at a shop right around the corner from our hostel on Talbot street. we think they ripped her off, because they charged her 8.99 euro for a plain white towel, and that didn't seem to be any of the prices that they had listed near the towels. whatever, she needed a towel and she got one. After we brought the towel back to the hostel we walked the same way up Talbot street towards O'Connell street. We looked in the shops, including Clery's which is apparently Ireland's oldest department store. We made our way up O'Connell street towards the Grafton shopping district.

We wondered around the Grafton Street Shopping District for a while before we got very hungry and focused our attention on finding something to eat. We wondered around forever looking at the menus in all the windows of the various restaurant and pubs looking for somewhere that'd be suitable to have our first pint of Guinness in Ireland at. We settled on the Hairy Lemon.

The inside of this pub was dark and the furniture was mismatched. Beck and I decided on a table behind the bar area almost underneath a flight of stairs and next to an almost hidden fireplace. Our waiter was a friendly guy named Glen and he got us started with our pints while we figured out what we wanted to order. I ordered a cheeseburger and beck got a chicken burger. The food was ok (i didn't really enjoy the meat of the burger, it was very dry) and the beer was excellent.

what they say is true: the guinness here is better than the guinness in america. it's smoother, less bitter. it's awesome.

turns out Glen knew where Albany was because he'd worked in Long Island for a summer or two and he wanted to get back to America so he could be an actor. Glen said that he missed peanut butter m&m's the most from America, which I thought was kind of random. At the end of our meal Glen produced a little handwritten list of things that we should see while we're in town. Glen ruled. Beck and I were thinking that we might send Glen a bag of peanut butter M&M's: "To Glen, c/o the Hairy Lemon, Dublin."

We headed up towards the Jameson Distillery after lunch, which was on the North West part of town and kind of a hike from where we were. The distillery tour was interesting, guided by a nice young man named John. There was this woman on the tour though that kept coughing, which really was grossing us out, especially at one point when she kept turning around and coughing on Beck and then looking at Beck like she was the one being rude (I was almost hysterical laughing... really hard to keep that in sometimes).

At the end of the tour we were given a free glass of Jameson Whiskey. I'm not sure how people (Alex) can drink this stuff. I mean, it was ok after the ice we put in it melted a bit, but it's really something that I think has to be mixed, like, in a coke with lemon or something. we visited the gift shop briefly after the tour before making our way back to the hostel to drop off our purchases before going to eat.

Before we ate we stopped here to post for a bit, and we were delayed from eating for over an hour while I typed the previous posts and by the time we got to the pub where we were planning on getting dinner, the Knightsbridge at the Arlington Hotel, the kitchen was closed (at 21:20!). We walked across O'Connell bridge to a local fast food place, Beshom's, which served a fast food version of fish and chips. the meal was actually pretty good: served on real plates with real silverware a nice big piece of fried fish and a generous helping of fries (which we promptly sogged up with malt vinegar) and a big pile of peas (that tasted wonderful here, much better than any peas i've ever had before) along with two slices of bread and butter.

after dinner we went back to the Knightsbridge where we had a couple of pints while enjoying some irish dancing and afterwards a short trad session. people are so stupid, and most of them left after the dancing. beck and i enjoyed the music though. the band was small, consisting of a guitar player a fiddler (i think) and a keyboardist. they played a few songs that we knew, but they did more talking than singing. the bar closed early... the music was over by a little after 11 and by 11:30 they were putting the chairs on the tables.

all the pubs close early here. by 12:30. it's very strange. people are starting their night out already at 8:00, whereas at home on a friday night i wouldn't even know if i had plans yet for the night by 8... strange. kind of hard to get used to, because i feel like a loser getting back to the hostel around midnight, but there's really no where to go (well, i guess the dance clubs might be open later, but those are gay, i prefer pubs and live music).

so yet again i've spent over an hour posting and my hands are getting tired. i'd like to post about yesterday, but i'm just not up to it... i'll write more when i get a chance i guess :)

new update on the travel blog...

so we're in dublin now, but i've been sitting here working on this blog for the last, well, over an hour and i'm getting tired of typing and i want dinner. so i'll post about dublin tomorrow sometime and it's off to dinner now... :)

beck just informed me in the prior post that i got the address for the hostel wrong again. it wasn't queensway, or queens gate. it was queens gardens. i blow.

london sunday morning

so we woke up at about 9 or so sunday morning because breakfast was until 10. we used the toilet (ew, that thing wouldn't freaking flush the whole time we were there) and the shower which was a room that was just a stall behind the door to the hall. no division or anything. there was a scummy curtain, but it was all mostly unhooked. there was no place to put your clothes or hang your towel. and the drain was mostly clogged... 2 little holes were unclogged and while you showered it would randomly make this ominous gurgling sound. anyway, so after that we headed down for breakfast.

breakfast was a scene. all the freaks that were staying there were in line or in the dining area and it was hot and smelly. people smell in europe. and that's gross. next time i come here i'm going to bring small samples of deoderant to hand out to people. anyway, it was nearly 10 by the time we got to the front of the line. we each grabbed a hard roll and some butter or marmalade and we rounded the corner to find that there were cornflakes in a big bowl but no bowls to put it into and no milk. there were also no cups for juice/coffee. when someone asked a staff member passing by about it he said he wasn't allowed to put anymore out because it was ten. we put our plates down and snuck a knife out along with our rolls and went up to our room to eat. this was not a satisfying breakfast. we threw the knife behind one of the beds and packed our shit to leave.

we lugged our shit down all those flights of stairs and went to check out. beck turned in our key along with the cards they'd given us the first day and asked if there was anything else she had to do and the dumbass girl behind the counter said yes, and then looked at beck like a freak when she remained standing there and told her she was all set. so we left.

we went to paddington station and left our bags at the excess baggage stand there. we dropped £5 each bag, but it was worth it not to carry our shit around or have to go back to that shithole before we had to again (yeah, we're staying there again thursday...).

we decided that we'd go shopping and that we wanted to go to Harrod's so we took the tubes to knightsbridge and got off to find that harrod's is closed on sundays. ah well. so we looked in the windows and then took a walk in that neighborhood and looked in some of the shops. we passed a sign that had "chard" written on it which cracked us up so we took a picture. we also took a picture of one of those tiny mini european cars that crack us up. i totally want one. some of them are convertable: you can roll the cloth top back... we don't know what they're called, so beck came up with a "pug". i need to import one. then i can have a pug and a bug. :) we ended up eating at a restaraunt on that street, the Shanghai Knightsbridge. the food was excellent. beck had the kung po chicken and i had the chicken with cashew nut. it was the best ever. seriously, i loved it.

we headed back to paddington station after that. our train got stuck a couple of times on the underground which was hella annoying because there were these obnoxious girls on it (probably between 12 and 14 y/o) who kept singing "i love my auntie, my auntie lola!" and laughing and just generally being obnoxios. i wanted to smack them. they got off at Notting Hill Gate and we were so thankful.

so London was ok. the buildings were beautiful and the transportation system was easy to use. things were generally expensive, but you expect that in a big city. what we didn't expect was that there was, like, no one out on the streets saturday night. i guess we were probably just in the wrong area for it, but it was so weird. the streets were almost deserted. very odd. anyway, it was a good time even though people stank and our hostel was kind of a hole...

so i finally found another place to post from...

london saturday afternoon

so beck and i travelled into london saturday afternoon from heathrow airport via the heathrow express. we'd come into terminal 4 and were going to have to leave from terminal 1 the next day so rather than leave our baggage at heathrow at the excess baggage counter in terminal 4 for £5 each and then pay the £4 each to ride the tubes we thought we'd just take the comfy express train and pay a little more. i don't think we'll be doing that next time we're in london because lugging our bags from paddington station to the hostel wasn't so awesome. live and learn. but the heathrow express was pretty cool: clean with little tvs that showed snippets of BBC news and odd british commercials and little clips on where to go while in london.

when we got to paddington we realized that we really had no idea how to get to the hostel. we asked some dude at an information desk who had to consult a map and seemed really unsure but he pointed us in the right direction for the address that i gave him. too bad i gave him the wrong address. i told him we needed to get to 1 Queensway, when it was 1 Queens Gate that we needed to get to. oops. we walked all the way to Queensway and when we got to #1 and it wasn't the hostel (it was like some random commercial building) i almost paniced. i checked the address in my palm and realized that i gave the guy the wrong address and that i'd led beck all over london (it seemed like we walked forever). so i looked up and beck and said, "ok, please don't kill me but... i gave him the wrong address..." neither of us had a map, so we looked at the one in the underground station that was right next to #1 and realized that we weren't too far off, but that the hostel was much closer to paddington station and we'd pretty much passed right by it.

so we walked back to the hostel and when we got in there beck went to the counter to check in. the guy behind the desk was french and he kind of seemed very... snotty/trendy. she told him that she had a reservation and gave him her name: "it's knowlton with a 'k'". so he looked through his paper and said, "i don't have a reservation for you" so she said again, "it's knowlton with a 'k'", and this time he said, "oh, with a 'k'" and started looking through his sheets again. beck and i exchanged glances: "what a tool" and then he inormed her that he still didn't have a reservation for her. beck turned on the bitch immediately and was like, well i made the reservations over the internet and put down a deposit and started to go through her stuff to get the reservation number that she'd printed out. what was most annoying about this fucking french tool was that he just really didn't seem to care that she'd made a reservation and put a deposit on the room and they'd fucked up. we were so irritated. beck was like, find me a room! she'd booked a private two bed room. they finally came up with a room for us: a four bed room that'd be a private, number 325. he made us fill out sheets with our information on it and gave us these little cards that said that we were guests at the hostel with our room number on it. he then gave us the key to the room and informed us that everytime we left the place we'd have to turn in our key and we'd be able to get it back by showing that card to the person at the desk. we were not happy with this situation. i mean, if someone got a hold of your card they could just go in and request your key. whatever. we were annoyed at the shitty people at the desk but at least we had a room.

we made our way back to the sleeping area and began climbing the narrow stairs. the higher we got up, the shittier everything looked. and that wasn't great, because the lobby was kind of shabby. we kept climbing, i think we were on the 3rd floor or something... we definitely climbed many stairs. and there were two sets of stairs per flight and it was so narrow that if someone was climbing up with baggage someone couldn't be going down at the same time. fortunately beck and i have great senses of humor... we were hysterical with laughter as we were climbing the stairs, laughing so hard that it was difficult to climb the stairs at the same time. some woman asked beck if she was ok and she was laughing too hard to answer which kind of annoyed the girl, i think. when we finally got to the floor where our room was (amazing that we found it, there were no signs pointing out which rooms were where) we spilled out into the gross hallway still laughing. we walked down the hall past a bathroom which was out of order and rounded a corner to find our room, which was right next to the shower stall and bathroom.

we opened the door and found our room not to be as filthy as we expected, but not a great place either. there were two bunk beds on either side of a large window that had a dirty, holey sheer and two old drapes on either side of it. there was a sink in the room with a mirror that randomly had the bottom part blacked out and another full length mirror mostly covered by one of the bunkbeds. beside the other bunkbed sat a crude wooden shelf unit. in front of the window was an old, dirty chair. we sat our stuff down and laughed for about five minutes while we marvelled at the foulness of the room. we set to work putting our sheets on our beds so that we wouldn't have to sit on the filthy sheets that were on the bed (actually, they didn't look filthy but from the state of the place you couldn't help imagining what you couldn't see on the sheets). we chose to sleep on the top bunks because we reasoned that the bottom bunks would catch any filth falling off the top bunks.

we hung out in the room for a bit before we decided to venture out. we took the underground to the tower stop so we could see the tower of london. we got there pretty close to 17:00 so we decided not to try and go inside but just to take pictures from the outside. then we wondered over to the tower of london monument where we took some pictures of the top of a private building across the street from it, 10 Trinity Square, because it looked hella cool. we wondered around for a while and stumbled across St Magnus the Martyr Church where i took a picture of a tiny door that looked like you'd stuff torture victims into and a 2000 piece of wood next to it (leftover from the romans).

we followed the signs for london bridge expecting to be able to take pictures of some awesome looking bridge. we were dissappointed when we found it... it was just a bridge... we looked to our left and discovered that that awesome looking bridge in all the pictures of london was the tower bridge so we walked back towards that to take some pictures. then we wondered around some more and ended up going to Shakespeare's Globe theater where we rested on a low wall for a bit and took some pictures. we decided that we were starving/thirsty so we walked down the path a little ways to the Tate Modern Museam. outside there were these huge inflated figures: one was a blockhead and the other had a conical pointy nose. we took pictures and decided to check out the collection inside (called "cruel and tender") because it was free. we didn't get far because we saw the tate cafe and decided to stop there and eat.

our first experience eating in another country was kind of confusing. we weren't sure of what the choices on the menu were and were self-concious about ordering and using pounds. beck got a meatball dish and i ordered a potato omelet. we both got cokes. they are damn proud of their cokes over here because they charged us £2.10 each for them and they came out with just a small glass bottle and a glass with lemon and there were, of course, no free refills. they brought out our small dinners along with bread and mayonaise (what's with that?). beck's meatballs were good until she realized that they seemed raw in the middle. we weren't sure if they were or not and we weren't sure if maybe they were just always cooked like that in London, so she didn't say anything. my potato omelet ruled. it was potatoes and eggs and veggies all cooked up into a solid-like dish. very good.

after dinner we planned on heading straight back to the hostel. but then i mentioned that we should go to buckingham palace and see it lit up at night. so we went that way and discovered that they don't really light it up at night, but the Queen Victoria Memorial in front of it was lit up so we took pictures of that. then we were going to go back to the hostel but we caught a glimpse of big ben in the distance so we walked that way instead and took pictures of big ben, a church at westminster abbey (can't remember right now what the name of it was) and the house of parliament. then we decided to head back towards the hostel.

and i got us lost again. we walked forever. the signs in london point to nowhere. seriously, there was a sign for victoria station, where we were headed, and it pointed diaganolly, when there was no diaganal street. rock. not. we walked forever. we passed a bar called the Barley Mow which we were all excited about, but we didn't stop because we were too thirsty (needed water) and tired. we talked about finding it again when we're back in london, but i can't really remember where it was. i think it was horse ferry road or something weird like that. we finally found victoria station and bought 2 cokes and 2 waters and went back to the hostel where we slept soon after.

finally found another place to post from. london is wussy. dublin is more like nyc. read about it on my travel blog.