June 27th? Silly Americans!

First, a quick story that Frank- our simply delightful Irish bus driver- told us about some mountains we passed along the way. He pointed out the three hills in the distance and told us they were called the three sisters: one is round, one is medium round, and one is pointy and they are the boobs of three different aged sisters! Do you see it? But the really great part is that there are three girls who like to stick together in the study abroad group and we now refer to them as the three sisters. Only I don’t think they know we do that.

This morning when I went to take a shower, I was shocked to find that the stalls were almost completely see through. While brushing my teeth the night before I had been slightly aware of this fact, but there was some sort of film over the glass, and at least there were three stalls instead of a few heads coming out of a single post, right? With the main bathroom door closed, I was sure it would be no big deal. But upon entering the stall and pulling the curtain closed, I made the unfortunate mistake of looking over to the stall two away from me (as the middle one was empty) and now will be scarred for life. I can only imagine how much worse it would have been had the girl been in the stall immediately adjacent to my own. Although I am glad you couldn’t see every detail of the other person’s body, it was still kind of an awkward shower. I stared at a single spot on the wall the entire time and I can confidently say that that was one of the fastest showers I had ever taken in my entire life.

Blarney Castle

After getting ready, we got back on the bus and headed out toward Blarney. When riding in the bus, it is a common thing to fall asleep and become completely disoriented when you wake up. For instance, Rebecca woke up when we got to the Muckross house and immediately asked “Where are we?” in her groggy voice only to be answered with laughter. None of us knew where we were except the faculty and bus driver. For me, I usually experience a fright because we are about to turn left and I see a car coming on the right side and Frank just plows forward anyway and I think “Oh my gosh we are going to die!” and then I realize that we are driving in the left lane and we’re really okay after all. Also, when walking along the road, I often look inside the cars and find that there is no one in the driver’s seat. Who is driving these cars? Is it a ghost? And then I remember that the driver’s seat is on the right side here. I’ll get used to it eventually, perhaps. It’s still hard to remember which way to look when crossing the street.

Crossing the street is dangerous even if you know which was to look, though. These Europeans with all their fancy schmancy sports cars come barreling down these narrow, windy roads without a care in the world and it’s terrifying! And driving up in the mountains in a ginormous bus on the narrow, super twisty mountain roads not only freaks me out, but also makes me car sick and during much of the bus rides through my whole trip I was and will be carsick. Oh whale! I knew this was part of the deal.

Weather was something else I knew was part of the deal, but it has surprisingly been good so far. It was cloudy this morning, but quickly turned back to sunny, albeit a little humid, and it only rained when we came into Dublin in the late evening.

Faerie Glade

Sometimes I’m not sure why the faculty has to stick so close to their schedules. We had nothing really of importance to do when we came into Dublin and it makes me sad that we couldn’t have spent more time at Blarney. Blarney was the first super touristy place we went to, and the line to the stone was about an hour and a half long. We booked it straight there and that was all we really had time to do. And old man helped people get on the ground laying down on their backs and then pushed them quickly so their faces ran into the stone for a split second and then came away again. Which I guess you could call a kiss. The surface was rough so I wasn’t quite as worried about germs or how many people had kissed the stone before me- it wasn’t too worn down, right? Also, they had some cleaner and I think they clean the stone every so often. There were also awful rumors going around beforehand that some people like to pee on the stone, but I can’t see that being possible with all the security they had there. So now, I am supposedly blessed with the gift of gab!

Blarney castle was by far the coolest castle so far. There was a lot to do on the grounds. So, even though we were supposed to wait by the castle for the rest of the group who was about a half hour behind us to go kiss the stone, our group of girls ran off to soak in as much as we could. Sarah, Kyra and I went to the Faerie Glade where we saw a cute little house carved into a stump for the faeries and we left coins inside of it. We saw the witch’s rock and walked next to the river which had plants with the largest leaves I’d ever seen. On our way back to the bus, we walked past the caves and went inside for a moment. I hadn’t realized how hot it’d gotten until I went into the nice cool caves. It was wet inside, too, but I was stupid and sat down to have my picture taken. I came out with a brown bum…

Then we rushed back to the bus only to find that they were being lenientish about our return anyway. We went to a café to eat where I just had one of my granola bars and tried a piece of someone’s currant bread and someone else’s rhubarb pie. Aren’t we healthy- a lot of the time people just eat breads or desserts instead of buying a full meal. I limit myself to only buying one meal a day, to save money.

Then we bussed to Rock of Cashel, which was a cathedral (“St. Peter’s Rock” in Cashel) It was huge and it was pretty, but there wasn’t very much inside. There were a few stone tables thought I thought might be gravesites. I asked Katie “Is this a tomb?” She responded that she wasn’t sure but it could be. I said “We can make it a tomb,” thinking that if someone laid on top with their arms crossed it would look like a tomb. For some reason, I’m really into posed pictures right now. But she laughed and said, “Who do you hate on this trip?”

The Tomb

Then, we took a bus to Dublin. We were pretty tired, so most of us slept or read books the whole time instead of trying to play games like we sometimes did. It rained a little while we drove there but it stopped by the time we parked and went inside the hostel. This hostel was much more lively and tailored toward young people. There were teenagers from all countries there and an especially large group from Germany. We went to a bar down the street to eat. (We being the boys, Katie, Nicole, Liz and I.) While looking at the menu, I noticed a section was labeled “bar bites” and wondered aloud if it was something you could only eat at the bar. When the waitress came to take our order, Matt asked her about the bar bites and she gave him the weirdest look. Then, the rest of the night she kept joking with him, pretending to take his food to the bar for him so he could eat it and such. He was officially the silly American. And now that he already has that label, if there is ever a stupid question we need answered, we have Matthew ask it.

After eating, we walked around for a bit. There are lots of drinkers and smokers in this city, but at least they don’t smoke inside the buildings. At one point, an old man saw us and said “hey ladies” trying to be flirty. His voice was raspy and I’m pretty sure he was missing a few teeth. I know it was rude, but it made me crack up. The streets were dirty, and the river was even dirtier. A man who was walking his dog just let it poop in middle of the sidewalk and didn’t do anything about it. It makes me miss the countryside. Also, since there are more buildings there are less plants. We came back and were thinking about partying on the rooftop, but upon going up there, we saw it was taken by a bunch of drunks so we came back downstairs to play cards. We were soon joined by Markus, a German boy who was 16 and drunk. He played with us and flirted with Liz a lot. (Now they Skype a lot and he is already talking about marriage…)We made a pretty big clump in middle of the hallway and were being a bit noisy, so eventually we got kicked out of the hallway. We went to bed pretty late that night. I am trying not to miss a single opportunity, no matter how tired I am.