prague

Okay, this is me getting my blog caught up.

Last weekend, we ventured eastwards on a chugging train through Germany to the Czech Republic to czech out what everyone likes so much about Prague. We boarded an overnight train, in which Gregory, Katherine, Collin and I were packed tightly into a six-bed sleeper car, the temperature gauge of which was broken. They didn't czech our passports, which I thought was kind of weird. That's only happened to me on an international train once, which doesn't really make sense to me but ah well. The sleeper car was cozy and warm and we watched the first half of a movie on Greg's laptop until we drowsily decided to rain czech the rest so we could settle down for a surprisingly comfortable sleep.

Okay, enough of the Czech puns, I'm done. I swear.

But czech this out. My neighbor Beth taught me how to spell Czechoslovakia when I was ten years old one day in her kitchen. She made chocolate ice cream milkshakes for me and my friend, and we stood there in the middle of her apartment, sunlight shining in. She was on the opposite side of the kitchen table, and she made us guess before she would tell us. I've never forgotten. Too bad it's moot.)

Prague is gorgeous; after crossing the Charles Bridge - the oldest bridge in Prague, mind you, and absolutely pouring over with tourists and kitchy shops - we clambered up a hill in the Mala Strana, or Lesser Town, which was speckled with trees that bloomed with flowers that were little explosions of pink and yellow. At the peak of the hill was an Eiffel Tower replica - no, seriously - as well as the stunningly ornate Prague castle, which is like a city in and of itself, its towering brown facade dotted with windows is only the first of many architectural marvels.

Most of our time in Prague was spent walking. Trams chugged through the city, but we stayed on the sidewalks, passing graffiti'd buildings and cheery storefronts that twinkled with glass and jewelry. The money there is relatively better on our wallets than the Euro is, so we feasted - in a sense - and the food was scrumptious. 

Unbeknownst to us, Prague likes Easter. Prague likes Easter so much that they bedeck their city in flowery colored streamers, blue and green and yellow; eggs hang from the branches of trees, and red-roofed tents sprout in town squares, peddling steaming food and desserts and trinkets. A stage was set up directly in front of an old church; one day, an Irish pop band performed - the next, there was an oyster shucking contest. All surrounded by the milling of hundreds of people, the natives babbling in Czech, a language stuffed to the brim with consonants - and tourists, chatting in English, Italian, French, Spanish, German. It was insane.

We spent half a day visiting Terezin, the concentration camp situated about forty minutes outside the city. Terezin, we learned, was not an extermination camp along the lines of Auschwitz, but rather a transit camp, from which people would be sent to camps of the former variety. It was - interesting. I felt, of course, as though I should feel something powerful or moving or harrowing or sad, but the experience for me was a very stoic, emotionless one. It snowed the day we were there, gently and quietly; it wasn't cold, just diamond dust sprinkling over the worn gravel and waving grass.

We concluded the weekend on Easter Sunday night, sitting in our hostel room with a chocolate Easter bunny, some popcorn, and a movie. It was quiet and content. Good job, Prague.

Also, unrelatedly, it should come as no surprise to any of us that I am now bottom of the barrel dipping into my savings living in a box when I get home working twenty eight hours a day can you spare some change sir I just spent a semester in Europe poor. But I'd say this is all pretty worth it, wouldn't you?

This weekend - travel break part deux. We begin with five days in Croatia and Bosnia, and then a quick jaunt to Barcelona where I will perhaps run into The Cheetah Girls (no I won't) before returning back here for two days, and then it's off to Italia.

My goodness.

See you in ten. :)

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.

:)

berlin

So, I knew I was going to Berlin with my mother and aunt, which, naturally, meant it was going to be very cheap. This was exciting. I was also, however, traveling by myself for the first time. I saw nothing wrong with this, but in retrospect I probably should have expected some crazy antics to go down on the way there.

Well.

Apparently, people from the Netherlands do not take many trains to Germany. They take so few trains, in fact, that SOMEONE high up in the Netherlands rail administration was sitting in his office one day, and thought, "Gee, let's only run trains to Berlin from the Netherlands every four hours!" and all of his cronies applauded and so it was.

This wouldn't be so bad if not for the fact that the Netherlands train website neglects to inform you of a few things. One, by saying "you have five minutes to switch trains," the website actually means, "your train will be late and pull into the station exactly thirty seconds before the train to Germany leaves." Two, just because the train has the word "reserveren" next to it, it does NOT mean that you should stop and ask someone if you need a reservation to get on the train because if you do stop, the conductor will say "no, but you should get on because the train is leaving," and you will turn to get onto the train but the door will slam in your face, the conductor will smirk at you, and the train will pull off into the great white frontier, leaving you slackjawed at platform number two, wondering what the HELL just happened.

So there I was, standing on a train platform in Deventer, the Netherlands, backpack slung over my shoulder, with four hours to kill before my next train pulled in. It figures.

Deventer, as I found out, is a small town, but the streets weave in and out of each other like some ridiculous crochet peice, and finding a computer on which you can email your poor little mother to tell her you'll be four hours late is nigh impossible. It's almost old hat by now to see streets paved with cobblestone instead of pavement, and canals everywhere you look. There were banks everywhere, with huge glass windows that revealed everything that was going on within them - as though I really want to see what's going on inside a bank - as well as were adorable little storefronts peddling jewelry, which dangled and glinted in the sun and small cafes that I passed by longingly, but set my face straight once I saw their menus. Nowhere was there an internet cafe. I began to wonder if this place had internet at all - and then I found, of all things, a Mac Store. IT FIGURES. I sent my email - and started wandering.

Four hours later, I caught my train. Five hours later, I chugged into Berlin and started walking. Forty five minutes later, I got to Bonnie's hotel. Forty seven minutes later, I had a drink in my hand and all was well.

Berlin is such a city, and it seems as though it's awake twenty four seven; it's bigger than Paris, brighter in places than New York, and louder than anywhere I've been. Towering modern architecture meant that we saw stone buildings with pillars crammed up near boxy buildings that gleam with silver and gold plates, and buildings with all clear windows. It would have been a jarring sort of thing, if not for its prevalence in the city. Everything - and I mean everything, from the buildings to the trees to the construction equipment - was decked out in twinkling white lights, so that the entire city was made up of little glowing stars at night. Some buildings had spotlights in front of them, illuminating their faces with bright blue or red. The city was so thoroughly modern that it's hard to tell what makes it stand out from everywhere else I've been, but it did - you can see the sheer size of the city in the crowds of people that bustle from one side of a street to the other, hear it in the honking of car horns (more here than anywhere else I've been), smell it in the exhaust, and just feel it, the city pressing down on you - not on the brink of collapse, but holding you, pinning you tightly.

It's a city so full of history - the wall (you all know which one, I daresay) stands like a crumbling behemoth, tired and in ruins, coated with layers upon layers of withering, fading graffiti. We went to a museum and as tiring as it was to read lines and lines of text, it was a very cool museum; half Berlin Wall history, half nonviolent protest history. The walls were waxy white, but had been lovingly decorated with plaques and photos and newspaper clippings in an extremely endearing way.

Berlin's Jewish Museum was such an experience - the architecture needs to be experienced to be fully comprehended, so I'll settle for saying that it was an altogether educational, moving experience. There is one part of the museum where you are asked to walk across a floor covered in thick metal slabs carved into shouting faces; their mouths are wide open, wailing, and with each step, the noise is loud and echoes like screams up and down the walls. It is absolutely bone-chilling. I don't know that I can adequately relay the experience, so I'll trust that someday, you'll visit the museum so you can see what I'm talking about.

Overall, this weekend was one of relaxation - I spent two and a half days with my mother and aunt; we did a lot of walking, took in some sights, and I paid for one thing - my mother's souvenirs at the Jewish Museum. I ate like a king - well, okay, a plate full of meat and a steak at the cafe in Well isn't exactly eating like a king, and the king's mother probably does not pay for the king's food, but STILL. Good eats.

Next up: Ireland, days before St. Patrick's day - all right.
This weekend: Prague. Let's see if I can catch my blog up before then, hm?

paris

Ah, Paris. City of love.

Is it the city of love? I don't actually know. I may have made that up.

Either way - after Dublin, we cruised our way into Paris, and oh, was it wonderful. The city is huge, sprawling, like a picnic blanket draped over a rocky terrain; viewed from above, it is a checkerboard of black and grey. Our first night there, the city is hugged by a tight gray mist, cramping but cool. Our hotel (not a hostel this trip - we went up one step to a one star hotel. very classy.) clings to the base of Montmartre, a huge hill that rises up out of the flat buildings and winding streets. Endless stone steps clamber up; we climb like mountaineers. I huff and puff by the end, hunched over and clinging to my knees. It is at this point that I realize I should work out more.

A towering white basilica by the name of Sacre Couer tops the hill, guarded by two green statues of horsemen. Three enormous domes protrude from the ceiling, tiled in the same white stone that the rest of the basilica is construced from. At night, tourists and locals alike blend on the steps, sipping wine and eating bread; two children fight with wooden swords, jumping and swinging, an adventure of imagination set against the Parisian skyline. Paris lays down in front of us, wide open and lit up. The Eiffel Tower shines like a beacon in the distance, blue light knifing its way through the mist from the very top.

We retire to our hotel with its fading pink and yellow wallpaper and crumbly brown carpet. The windows peer down upon a busy street, cars zipping by. Buildings light up with neon, and we clutch glasses of cheap, delicious wine and lean over the railing, breathing in cool air and exhaling our breath into spirals.

Our first real day in Paris is a whirlwind of The Sights, capital T, capital S. We begin the day on the Paris Metro, loud and rumbly. We embark on a walking tour of Paris beginning at the Bastille Monument, a tall phallic stone tower that gleams with a golden statue on top; we realize that nothing of the Bastille itself remains on this spot, the only record being this towering thin pole.

"Sorry guys," Katherine says, "Guess it's not here anymore."

We wind through Paris, two baguettes sticking out of Greg's black backpack providing sustinence throughout the day. We keep a bottle green canal to our right most of the time, its sparkling water glistening in the early morning sun.

Destination One: Notre Dame. As in, Hunchback of. I was getting Disney flashbacks the entire time, picturing emerald-clad deformed gentlemen swinging from bell ropes and singing "I Want" ballads.

The ceilings of Notre Dame, inside and out, are positively gravity defying. Stone vaults so impossibly high, and I try to picture people in the Middle Ages carving and creating, and I can't do it. Everything is so perfectly supported, and it is all smooth like glass, even though it's hard and heavy stone. Windows that evoke rainbows and flowers are everywhere; I count fifty before I stop, realizing how futile that effort is.

People, tourists, whatever they are, mill around us. Nine out of ten hold cameras up to the ceiling, despite numerous NO PHOTOGRAPHY signs. Flashes keep going off, illuminating dark corners and making it all look so fake. I don't understand this. A picture cannot capture the immense glory of this place. Notre Dame catches your breah, takes hold of it, and twists it right around. The atmosphere should be serene, but buzzing cameras bring it down. They can try to capture the preciseness of it all, the exactitude of placement. I fixate on the windows with petals of every color, blinking wide and facing the sun. It is stunning.

We move outside and begin our trek across the city. Next stop - the one and only.

That's right, boys and girls. The Eiffel Tower.

Mind you, to get there, we have to pretty much walk across the entire city. That tower is such a tease, because it's so enormous that you can see it from so far away - I'm almost there, you think, when you see it prodding up over the horizon.

No. You're not. It's just really big.

We wander and wind, our feet aching the whole time, but then there it is, a monumental digit scraping away clouds from the blue skies above. It is better in person than in any picture I've ever seen; more solid and real. It has a lace-like quality to it, crossing iron beams forming an intricate pattern of x's and spirals and arches that the eye can't quite fully grasp. Four solid pillars slam into the ground, supporting the obelisk that is the central tower. It is all the same color - they paint it every ten years, someone tells me - a mustardy sort of brown that is most clear when the sun hits the tower in just the right way. It is a soothing, calm and pleasant color.

We climb the stairs halfway up. There are informative placards every few hundred stairs, but we plow on by. I wonder if anyone really stops to read those things. The journey up is almost as harrowing as the journey accross the city to get here, but finally we reach the midway point, where a steadfast elevator pulls us the rest of the way up.

I have realized, being here, that I really like views from high places. Standing on top of the tower, I feel effortless, wind whipping around my head. The view is magnificent, of course, but there's something more than that that keeps me up here. Being so high up on such a creation feels powerful somehow,

French people aren't as bad as pop culture portrays them, at least at first - we run across a language barrier or five, but beyond that, people tend to be rather genial and helpful. But then, I suppose there are stereotypes for a reason, I note, as a family jostles by us, not even looking where they're going. The road around the Arc De Triomphe seems to personify the French - it is a circle of death, with an absurd seventeen roads converging into one roundabout (or so I hear). Pedestrians like us are resigned to crossing through a dank gray underground tunnel, which seems unfair for some reason.

The Arc itself is - well, an Arc. At this point in the day, we are all tired and want to retire for dinner and some more wine. But Napoleon's monument is certainly impressive, adorned with sculpture and inscriptions of France's great victories, now buried in the past behind stereotypes of those damn defeatable French. It figures.

The next day is dominated by the Louvre, which I find myself without words to adequately describe. It is a labyrinth - I half expect a minotaur to plow by. It is a child's maze, each hallway leading into four more hallways, half of which have stairs attached. Every room is ornate - gold doorframes and sculpted wood carvings in every wall and paintings on the ceiling of angels with speckled wings and massive yellow halos.

(The Mona Lisa is quite a letdown, by and by - the crowd around it is so massive that it is about the size of a postage stamp from where we stand, and honestly - I don't get the big fascination with that painting. Thanks a lot, Dan Brown.)

We pass by the inverted glass pyramid - I know people objected to the modern architecture smack dab in the middle of the courtyard of this ancient palace, but I like it. It glows with the sunlight and has a sort of quiet majesty to it. A little boy walks by, pauses. He can't be more than three. He reaches up, straining his arms to reach the point, but it evades him. He lets his arm fall and stares up at it, eyes sparkling and curious.

"Whoa," I hear him mutter.

That pretty much sums up the entire experience.

Paris draws to a close as we board a high speed train, green and brown whistling by the windows. It is a long way home; my eyes waver and shut. I doze for a lot of the trip.

In retrospect, I've realized that I wrote this one in present tense for some reason. I don't know, mixing things up a little bit, I guess.

Next blog: Berlin. This weekend: Back to Ireland.

Luck of the Irish. Allll right.

technical difficulties

It figures it would happen - my computer won't start. Naturally. Which is a shame, because I was planning on writing Paris & Berlin blogs during classes this week on my laptop. But alas. Until next week at least, they will have to come from the computer lab - so stay tuned.

:)

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.

:)

travel break

I'm back from ten days pillaging across Western Europe. In those days, we hit up London, Dublin and Paris, and it was an insane whirlwind of laughing, walking, and some of the most incredible things I've ever seen. Expect a blog or two in the coming days - I need to prepare to write what I expect to be behemoths of blog posts.