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syntheticgerbil

So Much Ireland (Help me plan my trip!)

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Oh sorry I meant to say this earlier but I'm both vegan and a person who doesn't spend money on food (I pretty much just cook my own food as much as possible) so my recommendations are useless. When I eat out it's mostly just Subway or pizza with no cheese on it... so all I can say is that those things exist.

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I really really want to try Cafe Paridiso here in Cork. It is a vegetarian restraunt, and is meant to be awesome.

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Well, how did you get on? You sure were lucky you were leaving today, the weather is turned shite.

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Some places, you never get everything done, and in case you do ever want to come back (the weather really was quite good a month ago...);

 

http://megalithicireland.com/

- go looking for any of these places, and you'll probably find some helpful locals.

 

And some amazing donegal beaches worth a visit;

https://www.google.ie/search?q=donegal+beaches&espv=2&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ei=aND7U-WvK6qg7AaMloGABw&ved=0CCgQsAQ&biw=1423&bih=1083

That you may have missed.

 

Hope you had a good time!

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I don't even know where to start. It was great! I'm going to type a shitload now and I'm not really going to double check what I'm writing since there is so much to say. The weather was really nice the whole time, except for maybe our time in Northern Ireland for a day and a half, causing us to miss the rope bridge because it was too windy. We instead heard about the dark hedges and drove there afterwards, that was pretty neat. Apparently they were in Game of Thrones, so a bunch of nerds were out there ruining our photographs.

 

We unfortunately didn't get time to really check out Donegal as we were late that day getting to the hostel in Derry, although we did hang around on a beach at the Aran Islands as well as stop at a few beaches and lakes around the Dingle peninsula. A lot of the trip was simply sightseeing what a beautiful country Ireland is. Texas just feels so ugly and dirty now. How is there so much green and so many cliffsides? Also all beach water is so clear. I think it has something to do with the sand granules? The Gulf of Mexico is pretty but still looks like mud all over the place.

 

We unforunately only spent time for dinner in Galway and after going there I would have liked to give it another day or so because it was very pretty and laid back, like you said dibs. We ate at McDonnaugh's there and walked all around the shopping and pedestrian district. It was pretty good. We unfortunately had to skip out on Ard Bia, the menu was expensive and we weren't quite sure we wanted anything on the menu. Really food ended up being a problem often in Ireland because it all kind of runs together after a while, just pub food and Irish breakfasts. When it was great, it was great, but sometimes there was some regret. There was a lot of waiting until we got to our hostel in the next city and walking around to find some place to eat but then realizing everything we may have wanted closed at 7pm. Everything that ends up open late is just more bar food or the worst fast food. We gave up and ate Domino's one night in Belfast. After ordering I started noticing signs that this wasn't "new" Domino's, with the recipe change and all from years back. Where they basically admitted they made shit pizza and revamped everything to become the best cheapest pizza place around. No this was the horrible old dominos with that nasty bread and cheese that haunted so many office parties with the "5-5-5 deal." We didn't really even want Domino's but everything else worthwhile was closed and it seemed safe enough. What a mistake.

 

But the alcohol was great. I am not a liquor drinker and I've always loved dark beers, so my small selection on draft was pretty constant and great. O'Hara's was a new one I hadn't tasted, the dark one is great. I'll have to look out for that again. I'm sorry, I couldn't get behind black or white pudding. Goat cheese is great, so I always love goat cheese. Bought some Aran Islands blobs while there. The bacon was awesome, breakfast sausages a bit weird to me, but overall good tasting. That brown soda bread was tasty and plentiful, really went good with too much butter. I had a bunch of fish and chips and I don't think I was disappointed anywhere. Also had a salmon sandwich at a cafe that was great. We picked up cheese wherever we could. We boat a blob of this cranberry goat(?) cheese in the Cork market after eating it somewhere else as a breakfast sampler thing. That stuff is so good on a piece of bread. I wish I knew half of the cheeses I ate, but it wouldn't matter, the United States is not a good source of import cheese and really good stuff costs way too much to bother.

 

On the breakfast rolls, I think I dodged them? Maybe not? We usually ended up skipping breakfast half the time at our hostels since they usually offered cereal of dubious quality and maybe toast, and just finding a generic coffee place (Costa) or going to a Spar and getting something small. But one time I was getting some stuff in the car on a day where we didn't have breakfast and I just asked for some kind of breakfast sandwich when she went to the Spar, like a ham and cheese. They gave her this three euro behemoth with fish, eggs, ham, bacon, cheese, and sausages. They didn't want her to remove ingredients. I took about three or four bites and then had to throw it away. What the hell was that? Why not just a kolache or something Spar?

 

We also ate really good Chinese food in Derry, maybe some of the best we ever had, at a place across the street from our hostel. It was expensive and in pounds, but it was worth it. Actually we bought a "buffet" even though Chinese buffets are the worst thing ever, because it was cheaper than buying a meal for each with sides. It was odd because you order the things you want in "rounds" and you can keep ordering them so that's a buffet? I think of Chinese buffets as nasty sweaty troughs of old food sitting in metal trays with pieces of other servings drifting in the wrong trays and everything is soggy. So they just made that stuff when we ordered it. It was a fuck ton of food for the first "round" that we couldn't even finish, so I don't know who they expect to come and ask for another round. We were worried because their menu said they had a five pound waste fee for the buffet that wasn't clear on whether or not that was when you ordered another round and didn't finish it or if you couldn't finish your first round. They didn't charge us for leaving our one round of food a little more than half finished so I guess we were good. Bizarre place, but great Chinese.

 

Anyway, the day we went to Galway we also visited the Cliffs of Moher, Ailwee Caves, and drove out to The Burren. Ailwee Caves was an expensive tourist trap, wish we had skipped that, but oh well. I figured if Ailwee Caves were the best caves in Ireland since that's what everyone mention, than all caves otherwise are even more uneventful, so we skipped any more possible cave trips after that. The Natural Bridge Caverns in San Antonio spoiled me I guess. Cliffs of Moher were breathtaking and it starts the trend of me not believing how close I can get to a cliff and no one seems to care. My wife put her feet off the side in some areas for some pictures, starting that trend, and it was freaking me out. But man, we walked around from multiple angles to see how cool they were. You could also see the Aran Islands from there, so that was cool too.

 

Also thank you for recommending The Burren. It was kind of a bizarre introduction to the confusing roads of Ireland. The picture you posted of the roads was a bit more mild did not prepare us really for the dreaded one lane road that we kept encountering. It was already funny enough that there was no shoulder on almost any road South and then every once and a while the median would disappear and I guess the custom is just to sort of pull off in to grass and plants to let someone buy, or if you're lucky there is a little side somewhere along the road to let people pass. I am not sure where the GPS was actually telling us to go with The Burren, but we were going down a wet one lane dirt road for a long time wondering if it were correct. Then we reached a desolate intesection where if we kept going forward we had to go through a gate. The GPS said that was the way. So the gate wasn't locked and I opened it to get us inside. There was a hiking sign with an up arrow, so I guess it was okay? We kept driving on there and the roads were getting more wet and worse and we had apparently another quarter mile to go on the GPS to whatever it thinks The Burren is, but the way was roped off by one plastic rope so I guess it may have been temporarily closed? We went under the rope on foot and just reached an old abandoned home and a bunch more mud but we didn't bother going past that, since it was already beautiful and exactly what Google Images shows The Burren to be when we stopped at the rope.

 

We had a little picnic out there from food my wife somehow got through customs that day. Irish customs doesn't really care you made sandwiches and stuff I suppose, we hardly got checked for anything. Besides the strangeness of the flat rock formations and the soft mossy stuff between them that makes you trip because you think it is solid, the whole area was silent. There are hardly any trees around the area and I guess I never really took in to account on how much white noise trees actually add with leaf rustling and animals they attract. I don't think I've ever been in a wilderness setting where it was just dead silent. A bit creepy at first but then you start

to appreciate what a unique situation you are in.

 

On our way out we were stopped in a road by a ton of cows coming towards us. It was just in the middle of the road and we had to stop. They were just walking head on in to the car, I guess a guy was moving them. They all managed to not hit or ding the car at all, which was what I was super worried about. We had to put a ridiculous deposit on the rental car. That was a really bizarre 10 minutes.

 

The Aran Islands was the day after and we splurged on a small plane to get there, it was double the cost of a boat. Besides that this was well worth it and much faster, we had to take a boat to the Skellig Islands later, so it was good not to double up. This plane was the smallest I had ever been in and it was so great to look out the windows and see all of the clear water on the islands' coasts. We had a very early flight and made it to the main village of the Aran Islands by 8:45am. We were the first to rent the bikes and we rode all the way to the Dun Aonghasa fort. Unfortunately the bike I chose had really low handle bars and I ended up really hurting my butt skin. If that makes and god damn sense, but my cheeks hurt for days after and it was difficult for me to finish this bike ride there and back. Guess since I hadn't ridden a bike in about a decade, my glute muscles weren't so up to those seats anymore. The fort is seriously one of the most amazing views I have ever seen. The ancient fort itself is cool, but when you do that uphill hike and finally reach the destination, there is nothing like it. I just got up there and sat next to the highest cliff for at least 45 minutes. My wife got some great pictures (She's the photographer, not me) before the many other tourists showed up. It was just us and a German family for a while. As we were leaving to get our bikes it turned in to a madhouse of horse carraiges, shuttle buses, and cars. We made our way back down the coast and got off our bikes to hang out at a beautiful beach there. This is one of those things in life where I am not sure it can be easily topped, at least besides my bike butt.

 

Speaking of other tourists, almost everywhere we went there were only tourists. I guess all of the sites to see in Ireland are there for tourists, like all Irish folk have seen them all more than enough and don't really indulge much? It was a bit disappointing because I do like to be around locals if only to overhear them. There seemed to be very few Americans around us though, and tons of Germans, Englanders, and Italians around as well as some French. Really no one native in Ireland we met seemed interested in talking to us at all, not at the hostels or anything. To be fair, only the workers at the hostels may have been native, but even then I think most hostel workers are foreigners. It was all Northern Ireland folk who chatted us up. I guess that's kind of narcissistic, but it's nice to talk to someone from the country you are in. My only other experience is France, but a lot of Parisans seemed to like to figure out why people from Texas were there, and it was kind of nice. I think French people just like to blab though as I'll note in a bit.

 

When we went to the rope bridge pub in Northern Ireland before going to the rope bridge itself (and finding we couldn't do it), we met a nice older couple in the bar who decided to talk to us. Well really just the man's wife and he was trying to pull her away from us. Erin couldn't really understand what the man's wife was saying, and I tried really hard to piece together what she said after she said it, her accent was so thick. She said something about how they got married in the United States in the 90s before it was cool and that it was in Daytona Beach, which she found very pretty. Haha it took me like a few sentences after to realize she said Daytona Beach because what she said sounded like something incredibly foreign to me, so we both said we didn't know Daytona Goddamn Beach. Then the husband, who looked distinctly like the director Danny Boyle, went on about how getting married means you never get sex and to show me his ring is tighter on his finger and cuts off the circulation to his penis. This banter kind of went back and forth between the two before he admitted he had sex with his wife like two days ago. And then they kind of settled on every few days they still have sex after 30 years. Haha, so so much for that joke. They were really nice and the man told us to forget everything this drunken Irishman said before they left the pub.

 

When we got to the rope bridge, the man who didn't let us through was this younger fat guy with long flowing curly hair who then wanted to just talk to us for a while since we were there and I guess he was bored. He was actually moving to Vancouver in a week to find work and wanted to know what Texas was like and seemed to want to inquire more about Canada, but I couldn't really help him besides my dorky Upper Michigan relatives who are only SORT of Canadian, and not near Vancouver anyway. He was a really nice guy and it was great to chat with him. I hope he finds fortune in Vancouver.

 

Let's see, off on a tangent... before that we had stayed in Derry and unforunately didn't have time for anything around or near Donegal like we hoped because the Aran Islands took up the whole day. Derry was a great city, it felt very much like what I'd think a German city is like, but in Ireland. Definitely had a history of conflict but it was pretty with rich history in the way I like my cities. The owner of the hostel was a wonderful guy and spent like 30 minutes just telling us about every pub on a map even though we weren't interested. It was nice just to hear him talk about some of the sites to see. We ended up walking around the city wall around midnight, besides the part that was closed off due to the protestant church conflict. There was a humongous bonfire going on in a part of the city part of a tradition that night, we just happened to luck out and be there for the night. We got a great view from the wall on where it was and it was a site to see, they weren't kidding about a big bonfire. There were a lot of cops around and my first instinct is that they are going to hassle us and berate us for something, but I guess that's more of a United States problem. We checked out the bars and then in the morning the marketplace (which turned out to not be that cool unfortunately). We didn't really schedule anything in Derry because it was just a stop, but if I could go back I would want to spend a couple more days there because it ended up being really nice and I would have liked to see more in the city.

 

So after that, right before the rope bridge was Giant's Causeway and Dunluce castle, both very cool. Dunluce was probably the most unique castle I had seen on my trip as it was very old and built in a stupid yet beautiful spot. Giant's Causeway, all has probably been said and it was incredibly touristy but when we got out of the awful gift shop/visitor area it was still one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. People were just climbing all over the stones and no one cared, it was slightly stormy and rainy and it was best in this kind of weather. We didn't have it in us to hike all the way to the chimney part so we settled on just the regular honeycombs and climbed around there, snapping pictures in various areas. They gave us some useless audio guide out there that I attempted at first but the speaker was so bad and scratchy and you couldn't hear any fucking thing plus it took forever for the guy to explain anything, he talked so slow. But yeah just so awesome.

 

So everything is smooth about the trip so far, but then we get to Belfast. What a putrid city. I figured it would be calm and sweet like the Orbital song, which was my only frame of reference. Instead it was a hipster breeding ground and everything looked and smelled disgusting up close. When we got there everyone in the hostel seemed way too cool for us, they had a bunch of garbage graffiti all over their walls and stupid quotes. They had bus or car seats in a hallway for people to sit, I hate that fucking kind of quirk, get a good god damn seat no one is impressed with your found object styles. If anything Belfast made me think of a larger version of the shithole city I currently reside in, Austin Texas. If there's one thing I will miss about Irish pubs is just the overall quality, because while Austin does have a nice selection of craft brews and odder beers at many bars here as a plus, most all of the bars (and coffee) are just someone's ramshackle place put together rental with tons of shitty seats much like the carseats. Brought me back home seeing those to the complete shit Spider House Cafe. Maybe some people like when bars and public places don't try and do things like look presentable like in Austin, TX, but to me it just shows you are being cheap and you don't give a fuck and the staff will often reflect this. In Ireland so many pubs come with nice seating, pool tables well kept, interesting (if not sometimes tacky) wall hangings, sometimes a little fireplace fire, as well as general better color and lighting.

 

So yeah, looking around for somewhere to eat in Belfast after 8:30pm was useless. Every place open was extremely expensive or some sort of shitty night club where douchey guys and girls with skirts to their crotch hang out. We walked around so much and I just hated the city more and more. People were littering left and right. In the middle of making a comment about littering this tall ugly college type walked by, took a final drink, and dropped a plastic cup on the ground next to me. Everything was just gross and people were loud. When we got back to the hostel at about midnight with our shitty Domino's everyone was hanging out and being loud and talking loudly in the hall all night. I could not sleep. There were signs everywhere saying to not be loud after 11 but I guess no one gave a shit and the hostel staff was probably drunk or high so they didn't care. Yeah I don't want to visit Austin anywhere else. I wish we had the foresight and skipped Belfast for another night in Derry. Maybe Belfast has it's strong points, but we didn't have anything on our list to do there and we were there on a Saturday night, so I don't know, maybe there's a great museum or something. So sorry if I offended anyone who lives in Belfast from our brief impression.

 

Next day was New Grange and Knowth, both touristy but also one of my favorite parts. These old tombs were just great to look at just to see that kind of ancient structure and art up so close. I don't know if I have ever been that close to something so old and man made outside of a museum setting. Many places in Ireland had that feel. Even going inside New Grange and having the guide show us vandalism from the 18th and 19th centuries before the state owned it was a trip. Just incredible stuff. We went to Trim after that to try to go inside, but they were closed. We walked around the outside and the other old walls and towers nearby but when you get up close you start to notice all the grafitti and trash and it's not that great. I guess Trim Castle is just kind of ravaged from Braveheart tourism. Wasn't all that impressed and I wondered for a bit if I would have been more impressed if I had seen the inside, but after a few more castles I started realising the inside was usually not the interesting part. Definitely the older pre-Norman and pre-Christian places were more memorable. We walked around Trim looking for food and no luck. One guy told us Fanzini's was great but we were trying to avoid that as Italian food seemed like a horrible idea in a small city (town?) like that in Ireland. We gave in because that was the only affordable place that was open and I think the staff gave us dirty looks because we weren't well dressed, sun burned, just ordered water, and shared a pizza. No one wanted to serve us and it took forever to get the check. Thinking about that awful pizza right now also makes me want to vomit.

 

We stayed the night in Drogheda where the hostel workers were also very nice and he even paid our two euro for overnight parking, but we were too tired and didn't go out to the "real" Irish pub he recommended, so unfortunately we had to skip what was going on in that city, which I sort of regret.

 

So next morning we headed to Dublin. Dublin hates cars it turns out. Trying to park anywhere near our hostel was impossible because it was all one or two hours max. We had never had a serious issue with parking until this. We we had a rental car and didn't really forsee this so it had to go somewhere. We called the hostel and they told us to go park it at Arnott's parking garage 'cause it's only 15 euros a night. We were there two nights so fucking 30 euros for two nights to park anywhere remotely close to our hostel and take our luggage seemed like the best we were going to get. Well I'm going to fast forward here a bit to get the worst part of Dublin out of the way and end the parking story. When we check out of the incredibly commercial and busy hostel with the rotating staff, we go back tot he parking garage and see we are going to be charged 90 euros for less than two days. Apparently it's 15 euro a night plus 2.80 for every hour you are there when open. That is so fucked up. Luckily after berating us for a while on how we should have asked and how it was our fault, the parking attendent took pity on us and lowered it to 50 euro. That's still almost $70 for two god damn days of parking. Christ.

 

Really we should have done more research than to get a hostel right near the spire.

 

Anyway, Dublin was great, I like big city trips. It was touristy, but I'll trade that any day for the grossness of Belfast. We used the tour guide bus to get around, the one with live commentary, and as dorky as it was, the drivers were always a lot of fun. One was particularly wreckless on one trip and swerved for fun, while one was a humble old man who kept saying "Heh" after his little jokes. We laughed so much at that guy even though I guess no one else found it funny. We went to the Gaol and started learning some things about Republic history, also Dublin Castle was great with it's nice sand sculptures. We stopped at little churchs, places to eat and the weather was so nice while we were there. My wife got us tickets to a musical pub crawl starting at Oliver St. John Gogarty and then two other places. The first place was expensive and in the Temple Bar area so we didn't order anything. Later we went to smaller pubs while the guys place music and bought too much alcohol there. At the last pub we were hungry and realized we didn't eat so we walked all the way back to the Temple Bar area for Oliver St. John because it looked like it had good food. Everything was overpriced but we were super drunk and there was still live music and it all tasted good. Totally splurged that night but it was well worth it.

 

Oh yeah went to see the Book of Kells earlier in the second day and the line was preposterous. Erin found out that you could just go online and use Ticketmaster (Yuck) to buy a ticket and just go right in. So we did that. The exhibit was interesting enough but there was very little to see in terms of the actual Book. They only had one page open and there were tons of people crowding around. Upstairs in the old library with art by Cartoon Saloon for the Brain Boru stuff ended up being more interesting. Speaking of Cartoon Saloon, I never actually have seen the Secret of Kells. I know, I am a terrible animator. I was always interested but I sort of forgot about it. I tried to watch it in preparation but it was taken off of Netflix at some point. So I ended up being a stupid tourist and buying the Blu-ray in the gift shop.

 

So after Dublin everything starts to run together because it's 5 days of Southern Ireland where everything is beautiful but sort of runs together. Lots of abandoned castles/manors you can kind of just stop at and many beautiful views. I hate to say it's not memorable but it's all so samey I can't really pick apart little things. That's not a bad thing at all though when you are just constantly going for a scenic drive days straight. We saw a stone circle that was pretty dinky after the New Grange and Knowth tombs, many other forts and beehive huts along the way, and many ruined parts of old castles. Unfortunately it looks like we didn't do the Chuch in Kilkenny like you recommended Super Biased Man and instead did the castle. The outside of the castle was nice but the inside was kind of guady and not very interesting. I think we went to the wrong thing. I also drove by the offices of Cartoon Saloon and considered ringing them up and asking for a tour, but I hadn't had a change to watch Kells yet, so I would have felt really stupid. Their office is really tiny and unassuming though.

 

The Rock of Cashel was pretty awesome because of the combination of celtic art and sculpture and Christian merging together. This kind of amazing art by early Irish monks never ceased to astound me when we saw it. You're whole life your so used to plain Roman depictions of sculpture, art, and Christ and the Irish people put their own spin on it, adding remnants of the animals they farmed, lots of stylized sculpture often haunting, echoes of the old river gods, and also the zig zags and swirls found in the ancient tombs and stones. It was very unique and I am not sure any art history class I took ever really went over art in Ireland. The church in Cork was also very pretty.

 

Let's see, out of the last few places we stayed, Cork was the best and I wish we had given it two nights and maybe even visited Dibs. We only stayed one night and some of the evening before and half the next day. It's kind of a weird city, it's like an ouside mall put up against a river and has sort of an old feel. The hostel we stayed at seemed like a creepy abandoned apartment complex on the other side of the river. It was pretty nice and roomy though as far as hostels go and it had an elevator, so no taking our luggage up four flights of stairs. We were a bit creeped out because in that area was tons of graffitti and it seemed kind of suspect. But most of the graffiti was just names of a bunch of girls or I continously saw "Get High," with one having the response, "Ok." On our way back from eating and getting our luggage from the car there were some people from the UK nearby us trying to get home from a bar. One guy said, "Well I'm not going down that creepy alley way there" and they sort of stood around. But that was where our hostel was so we had to go. I guess they eventually followed as we made it seem safer I suppose?

 

We ate at The Oliver Plunkett and it was great, well worth it with alright music playing (not Irish music but not a cover band, so good enough). Food was great, more beers, and awesome atmosphere and lighting with very friendly staff. Yum. We almost went to some place called Scoozi, 'cause it was almost 9 PM and some guy on the street said that was good for cheap, but it looked kind of bad when we arrived so that's why we stumbled upon Plunkett. Also, Dibs, what is up with your backwards parking system in Cork? It was the place we paid the second most to park at as it was two euro an hour after 8:30am, but it had some silly scratch off ticket system where we had to go to a corner store to get them and them lay them on the dash. Who even checks that stuff? It seems like printing and distributing those as well as having officers check is more trouble than it's worth. Why not just install a ticket dispenser on the streets, surely that costs less right?

 

Anyway, went to that great meat/cheese/food market in the morning in Cork. That is where we bought most of our cheese and had a great breakfast and tea at one of the stands. Very cozy, I loved it. Maybe one day we can spend more time in Cork as I think there was much more to see.

 

Oh yeah one of the last most spectacular things was the Skellig Islands. We took a small (still pricey) boat out there from Portmagee. The idea of going there was so out of my element on what was possible on a vacation. I guess they have staff that live out on the big Skellig in ten day shifts, no running water or electricity, so we hopped on a boat that goes back and forth for supplies for them plus to get staff there to do restoration work for the more private areas of the islands around the lighthouses and such. We got pretty seasick on the hour and a half ride there as the waves were turning pretty harshly. Other people in the boat were not feeling so well either. I was really hoping no one would barf because then I'd barf. After landing we had to kind of lay on the rock to get away from that sick feeling. I don't know if I have much to say about the smaller Skellig (or bird shit island as I call it) before we arrived other than it was neat I suppose to see so many birds and shit in one place. Good thing you don't land on that one. The main one with the old monastary was just insanely weird to me. Over 600 steps to get to this area at the top for a place of peace. I suppose in the end it was worth it for the monks, but sheesh. So glad we did that, I won't ever forgot how spectacular the island view, monstary ruins, and the ocean view were. Looks like J.J. Abrahams was there a few months previous to film parts of the newer Star Wars, so I'm sure the place will go from a quiet sort of tucked away tourist attraction to a big bag of sleaze.

 

I didn't get sea sick on the way back for some reason but Erin got it even worse and just kind of tucked her head down in the boat. We spoke a lot to a French man the whole time, he was very enthusaistic and loved to talk to everyone, as I noted earlier about the French. He was a blast to be around and told me a lot of little facts about the island in the boat, on our climb up, in the monastaries, and so on. He was taking a picture of my wife's backpack from Target because it had foxes on it and I guess he is in a band called Mystery Fox and he insisted there was no coincidences but that this trip was meant to be. He works as a guide at Mont Saint Michel which we went to in 2008 but we disappointed him a bit when we told him we didn't pay for the guided tour and went on our own, because we most surely would have gotten him. Still neat though.

 

Every other place we stayed after was touristy or the same kind of small town look since I guess the hostels were all around where tour buses stopped. We did get a nice little place on our second to last day that was incredibly roomy and had it's own private bathroom run by a nice guy. It was called a hostel, but it was more like getting a room in a large farm house. They also had a bunch of roosters hanging around. It was ain Annascaul. Also the Annascaul lake is a great site to see. Anyway just more driving around. Sometimes stopped and yelled at stray sheep for a while trying to get them to baa. Fucking tourists.

 

EDIT: Yayyyy my biggest god damn post ever.

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Dude, so glad you enjoyed it:) The burren is indeed weird! Very unique landscape. Also, it sounds like your GPS just brought you into somebody's farm...if there was a gate you probably should have stayed in the other side of it! That cow thing happens a lot out the country, just stay still, they know what to do.

 

Sorry about the food, haha. There was a reason I was so specific about where to eat:P Good choice on the fish and chips though! Nomnom. Also, really glad you saw some art stuff, i had totally forgotten to recommend any of that older Celtic stuff.

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I think it may have been public though, there wasn't a "no trespassing" sign and it was missing a lock. We did have to also later open a gate to get to Lake Annascaul so maybe it sometimes happens with public places? Either way it was cool and was definitely The Burren. THE BURREN.

 

I should say the food was great in many cases, especially at Plunkett's in Cork. Also in Cork I forgot to mention that I went to the hostel's common room and had to region unlock their DVD player for my Secret of Kells DVD/Blu-ray combo pack. Apparently Trinity College likes to sell Region 1/A Blus/DVDs. But the French man with 6 foot long dreads and girlfriend on our floor were asleep so we were able to watch it late at night without any interuption. That was a great end to the night, that movie is beautiful if not a little too short for it's own good. I think it was good to watch it way late and after a bulk of my trip was finished because then I was able to pick out so much stuff that I had visually seen all over the land and understood the back story and book without having to go on wikipedia. Maybe one day I can get a job with Cartoon Saloon and move to Kilkenny. This is what happens when I visit other countries, I start wanting to live there for the next few years. I don't think I'll ever understand how to pronounce Irish Gaelic though.

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Awesome! Glad you enjoyed the stay, it definitely sounds like you got a wide range of the Irish experience. Also don't worry about the Irish thing, most of us don't really know how to speak it, and the pronunciations are all over the place anyway.

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