doolin, ireland & the cliffs of moher

The town of Doolin, Ireland only has one road – it’s a long road, sure, but if you start at one end and follow it all the way to the end, you’ve pretty much seen the entire town. All around, the Irish countryside is overwhelmingly green – it’s not called the Emerald Isle for nothing. Hills rise from the ground from one end of the horizon to the other, obstructing the point where the ground meets the sky, which is painted over with thick gray streaks of clouds. Light, weightless rain patters against the ground, pooling into brown puddles in places where the road dips. Houses are peppered across the landscape at irregular intervals, colored boxes that accent the environment. It is a refreshing change of pace for us, having been inundated with big cities for weeks now; there is no need here to cram five or six buildings all onto one corner so that they teeter like a colossal Jenga tower. It feels like stepping back in time compared to other parts of the world.

The main attractions of the town itself are the Three Pubs of Doolin. (There are actually four, but nobody talks about that last one.) There are two – McDermott’s and McGann’s – at one end of the road, and one at the other end by the name of O’Connor’s. Ask anyone you know if they’ve heard of Doolin (though chances are they probably haven’t) and if they have, they’ll probably have heard of it for its pubs, or at least for the music you find within them. Doolin is, after all, the traditional music capital of Ireland, and each night, a different motley crew of middle aged to older men and women settles down at each of the three pubs and plays music that leaps and skips through the wooden confines of the room. It all sort of sounds the same at first – a high pitched tin flute twitters and toots, while the fiddle provides a rural-sounding backbone to it all. Any sort of combination of instruments is allowed here – we saw a woman with a soccer mom haircut twanging away at a banjo, and next to her, a man with a curling white beard plays a long black traditional flute. The music they make together, though, is bright and infectious; it makes you want to get up and jig – not dance, mind you: jig.

Fun tangential fact: George Bernard Shaw, though he was from Dublin by birth, was known as a frequent visitor to Doolin – it is hard to picture him as anything but a stuffy sort of gentleman, sitting in the back corner of a pub with a quill pen and a blank book, penning Arms and the Man or some other literary masterpiece or what have you. It is altogether more likely that Shaw, given his stance that “a drunken man is happier than a sober one," - direct quote - would be sitting at the bar with an empty pint or two sitting in front of him, a sloppy drunken smile on his face as he cheered along with the rest of the patrons for the music, but I think I’d rather stick to my fantasy that he was above that sort of thing, thank you.

The reason we  came to Doolin, of course, is not the pubs, no matter how attractive they may be. We came to see The Cliffs of Moher. Seventh wonder of the world. (I made that up. But they very well could be.)

The cliffs themselves are a good six mile trek from Doolin, along the southernmost section of a well-traveled road called The Burren Way – the definite article is a new addition; up until a few decades ago, it was just Burren. Perhaps the fact that it’s now a The says something about its increasing popularity. Either way, this snakelike road leads travelers through an expanse of wide green hills, just like you'd picture Irish coutryside; they are speckled with yellow flowers and zig-zagging stone walls, many of which have tumbled down into ruin. Littered stones stick up from the ground, and it looks as though the earth is attempting to reclaim them by reaching up digits of dirt and tugging hard. 

The end of the path is marked by a small car park and stone archway through which visitors pass; there is no entrance fee to the cliffs for those who arrive on foot – if you drive in, you have to pay eight Euro for your entire car, which seems like a relatively small fee, considering the thirty-two million Euro that went into creating an environmentally sound visitors center, built directly into the side of a nearby hill. 

The cliffs themselves are absolutely massive, huge stone slabs that have settled firmly along Ireland’s southwest coast. They rise an unbelievable three hundred and ninety four feet from sea level to the cliff’s edge. Their stone faces have grown over with green moss that cascades like an emerald waterfall down into the ocean below. The sea sparkles and sways, the color of a warm, melted cerulean crayon. The ocean is remarkably clear, and even without any sun, it shines a brilliant hue. The water is a solid mass of blue, except for where it froths in white as it laps against the bottom of the cliffs, right where they hit the ocean. Channels cut through the base of the cliffs, three hundred million years ancient, vivid rivers vanishing back into the dark recesses of the cliff.

There are paths that wind up and down the cliffs, stone and brick paths carved into stairs and viewing platforms, complete with telescopes that talk to you if you insert a quarter. The paved path stops, but a muddy path pressed down by shoes at boots stretches far beyond a “Please Do Not Go Beyond This Point” sign . Everyone seems to ignore this, using the sign as a handhold to move past it, even though to move past this sign is to move past areas that are boarded off by large slabs of stone that act as fences, keeping visitors well back from the edge. The illegal footsteps of the million people who’ve visited this area in the last year along have patted down a well-worn muddy path that weaves by the cliffs themselves; in many places, the paths wander right past the edge. With all due respect to Robert Frost, forget “taking the road less traveled;” if a lot of people have been using these roads, it probably means there’s something good to see along the way.

We moved down past the sign, just a bit farther, and reached the tip of a cliff from which you can see the rest of them – they spread wide like the folds in a paper fan, and the ocean is simply everywhere. Standing there on the cliffs, you feel flight – they are old and creaky, and signs posted everywhere indicate that they could crumble at any moment – but they still evoke flight, no matter how deeply set into the ocean they are. The cliffs are that tall, that imposing, that awe-inspiring that it feels like you are about to sprout wings and coast down the face of the cliffs to the shining ocean below.

I could have stayed all day; we only had a few hours. Our shoes and pant legs were slick with mud, telltale marks of how close we came to a slippery, glory-filled demise. Forget Dublin - for all it's history, I have never seen such a charmless place - Doolin, my friends, is where it's at.

Next up: Praha. Prahabably tomorrow.

:)

london & dublin

HELLO. IS ANYONE STILL OUT THERE READING MY BLOG?

I hope so. 

Let's talk about London. My biggest exposure to London prior to this mainly involved the Friends season 4 finale, The One With Ross's Wedding, as well as reading Harry Potter. (And let's face it, the odds of me finding The Leaky Cauldron were slim to none. London's a big city and I don't have a wand. SO ANYWAY.) Beyond that, I didn't know what to expect.

We flew in on the bumpiest Ryanair flight I've taken yet - and that's saying something. It felt like were were flying in the rattle of a very energetic and colossal baby. But we made it, and coasted through back streets past billboards and storefronts until we pulled up in front of the County Hotel. If you've been to the castle before, you know the deal with this hotel. The lobby is sparsely furnished, with crumbly wooden tables and padded chairs; the concierge desk is large, wide and unfriendly - which nine times out of ten could also go for the concierge sitting behind the desk. The rooms, for their part, are tiny and cramped like shoeboxes, brown bunk beds that are about as tall as I am. There's no bathroom attached to your room, just a sink that sticks haphazardly out of the wall; you have to turn the handle four, five times before a feeble stream of water will trickle out. One late night, a fire alarm rang through the halls at four AM - eighty bleary-eyed, VERY unhappy Emerson students crowded together on the sidewalk outside the hotel, puffing anger in our breaths.

The streets of London are both familiar - bright lights, loud noise and brick sidewalks - and unfamiliar - bright red double-decker buses teeter along on their four wheels, and they look do delicately balanced on the road that half the time, I expect them to tip and tumble like toddlers taking their first steps. People kept comparing London to New York or Boston, and I disagree. It's certainly not New York - the buildings are too small, the lights aren't as glaring, and the streets wind and coil. It has Bostonlike qualities, to be sure, but there are too many people, too much happening, and it is just so uniquely London - so old and new at the same time, a city of white stone, so much brighter than Boston, the buildings firm and strong.

We were led on tour after tour after tour in London. Big Ben clambers into the sky and glimmers like gold during the day, bathed in the sun. Trafalgar Square, made of endless white stone, features fountains with statues of stone and bronze that spew water like geysers. The fountains sparkle, the water a crisp and serene blue; white patches glow on the top of the water as evidence of the sun that glows overhead. The entire square seems to glow with an ethereal light, the stones themselves shining bright. Westminster Abbey - sprawling stone floors and soaring vaulted ceilings, with windows that stretch from floor to ceiling, shards of rainbow glass fitted together to create a dazzling display illuminated from the outside in. It was loud in there, surprisingly loud; everyone talks at full volume, and their voices clamber and bounce like restless children through the halls and paths of the Abbey. Tower of London - stone towers connected with winding white paths, the crown jewels sparkling behind thick glass, a field populated by cackling ravens with clipped wings and bills like knives.

I spent time in more museums than I can count over this break; British Museum, National Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum - all in London.  One thing I notice - they all smell the same: old and musty, like a book with yellowing pages. I think my favorite museum was the British Museum: cascading tile floors, with an ocean of a ceiling made up of interlocking white triangles. The artifacts found in these museums are insane - ancient jewels and jars, statues older than the city they live in. I feel like it's redundant to say everything, but the sheer amount of beauty sculpted in white marble still blows me away.

Katherine and I went to see Billy Elliot the Musical one night in London; it was hands down the most wonderful show I have seen in a very long time. I'm by no means a good theater critic, but god, almost everything about Billy Elliot was absolutely astounding - the music, the dancing - I was left with chills and a permanent slackjaw. So beautiful. Wow.

We went to Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford upon Avon, and it was a refreshingly quaint little town, bathed by the sun with buildings of white and brown wood. Shakespeare's garden was very nice, with a gnarled and knotted tree at the center, grown from a cutting of Shakespeare's tree. A calm brown canal slithered around the town, with boats floating on the surface that functioned as ice cream stands and restaurants.

The next stop after Emerson released us was Dublin - it was unimpressively dank, to be honest. Very urban, very modern, very dirty. Trash was scattered on the sidewalks, and the entire city smelled of car exhaust and bacon. One long canal filled with brown water that sluggishly lurked through the city - a chair and an old shopping cart stuck sorely out of the water like miniature Titanics sinking into the murk. Gray clouds smeared themselves across the sky almost the entire time we were there, allowing almost no light to shine through except at the horizon, where a few strings occasionally peered through, feeble and small.

In Dublin, we met up with a girl from Chicago named Brittany who was bright and cheery to match her bright complexion and shiny blonde hair, with a twang to her speech. She was traveling on her own, and joined our group for the two nights we spent in Dublin. We went to the Jameson Distillery and sampled whiskey at eleven in the morning; we stopped by the Guinness Storehouse - the rest of our time was spent wandering through Dublin's winding streets and hopping from pub to pub. The pubs were wonderful, even if the city itself was dank -

stretching wooden floors and walls and ceilings, all of it illuminated by bright lights. There was music in every pub, high-pitched and cheerful, infectious; it put us all in good moods.

The thing about both England and Ireland is this - they speak English. I should have no problem understanding them when they speak.

Yeah. Right.

A combination of different inflection, different accents, and different speeds makes the language I allegedly am fluent in sound like a foreign tongue. It is only when someone articulates that I can understand them if they're simply in passing. If they talk directly to me, so long as they don't speak at the speed of light, I understand them.

We thankfully didn't spend a long time in Dublin - we flew out after two nights. We'd barely gotten into the air, when an announcement crackled into our ears:

"We apologize for any inconvenience, but we've got a warning light on in here, so we've been asked to return to Dublin so we can check this out - we'll alert you when we're about to land."

PERFECT. About five minutes later...

"Folks, the warning light has gone off, but we're still going to 

We rolled to a stop back in the Dublin airport, and had to switch airplanes after about ten minutes on the ground - we trudged from one blue tube to another, the Ryanair airplanes crunched, looking like midget planes in comparison to full-sized airplanes that land and launch around them.

I love flying - especially the first few minutes, right after you've launched into the air. The ground lies down beneath, green and patchy; you can gape at the view for just a moment, before it's gone, washed away by a white blanket that obscures the windows entirely, and you feel yourself moving up, up, up, and the plane bursts like a volcano out of the clouds and you find yourself above them. They spread out in all directions, father than the eye can see - like any classic depiction of heaven. The only things missing are winged babies and gold halos. The sky is blue again, and more clouds hover far from you, just out of reach. Peer down through a break in the clouds, and the ground is so far away - a deep ocean of white, not blue, and it's a long way down. The sun is nothing but a hazy yellow blur, and you feel like Icarus - don't want to get too close. 

We rolled to a smooth stop in Paris - but that's a blog for a little bit later.

I don't know if it's at all interesting, but my first assignment for my ridiculous Travel Writing class was to combine word and image in some way, so I went and made a website from which a lot of this blog was ripped directly. You can see it here if you're at all interested, but the words might be similar to you, and if you've seen my facebook, so are the pictures. But consider it a preview for the Paris blog, if anything. Yeah. ANYWAY.

We're swathed in midterms here at the castle, and next weekend I'm off to Germany to meet up with the one and only Bonnie - should be interesting.

For the record - unlike Mallory, I did not discover famous ancestry in London - but the trip is young.

:)