Dublin, Ireland & London, England

October 3^rd continued…

St. Stephens Green

• ·      A beautiful park in the middle of Dublin filled with tons of grassy areas, bronze busts of people no one remembers, duck ponds inhabited by angry swans and local teenagers making out EVERYWHERE. Beautiful nonetheless.

October 4^th

Dun Laogahaire

• ·      A beautiful little coastal town just outside of Dublin where all the local old people insist on swimming at Fifty Foot Point every morning. They’re crazy! It was chilly the morning we were out there and they were all still out there in their bathing suits floundering around in the water.

Avoca

• ·      We stopped for rest break at a place called Avoca Handweavers, it’s a store in Ireland and I fell in love; there very first thing I saw was a teapot with a button print all over it. And there was cupcakes everywhere and floral print teapots and cute little aprons. Once I’m settled into my own place I’m going to buy a teapot and an apron fom there as a housewarming gift to myself.
  

Wicklow Mountains

• ·      A beautiful mountain range (although not actually mountains they’re 100 meters too short to technically be classified as mountains) north of Dublin.
  
• ·      This is also where the River Liffey that runs through the heart of Dublin originates.
  
• ·      Many of the beautiful landscape shots from P.S. I Love You were shot in Wicklow National Park including the scene were Gerard Butler (who is actually Scottish…) and Hilary Swank meet for the first time; and yes, mum and I did get our photos taken in that place….
  
• ·      We stopped at a place overlooking Guinness Lake which is a lake that was naturally shaped like a pint glass and had sand from the coast shipped in to created a beach at the top that looked like the head of the pint. After we all got back on the bus, as a group the entire bus did a shot of Jameson Irish Whiskey, mum even finished hers before I finished mine.

Glendalough (Pronounced glen-da-lock)

• ·      An old mountain monastery of St. Kevin, it was believed that St. Kevin fled to the isolated region to escape having to make any weighty decisions regarding battles and could concentrate on devoting himself to the lord. It is believed that before choosing the life of a hermit Kevin was madly in love with a woman named Kathleen and when Kevin vowed a life of celibacy Kathleen didn’t take him seriously and would attempt to seduce him on a daily basis. When Kathleen left Kevin would throw himself naked into a bush of thorns and roll around to punish himself for his impure thoughts. Talk about a buzz kill…
  
• ·      Mum and I hiked around the monastery it was a 22 km hike.
  

Traditional Irish Music Pub Crawl

• ·      After our day in the mountains mum and I embarked on another journey it was a pub crawl through some of Dublin City Centers best music pubs with two local musicians playing tunes and songs and talking about the history and importance of Irish music in the past and present.
  
• ·      Mum had TWO WHOLE DRINKS!
  

October 5^th

First day in London!

• ·      Well our flight was twenty minutes late departing because of terrible weather… in London.
  
• ·      We arrived into London under rainstorm and after finally getting into the city center after an hour and a half train ride from Gatwick Airport we couldn’t find our hostel. We had originally booked into the Generator but there was a mix up in bookings and they had supposedly given our room to someone else so they forwarded our booking onto another place in the area, the St. Athans Hotel. The place was clean and quiet and sterile; it felt like the Seniors home I used to work at where people dumped their relatives to die. So mum went back to the Generator and with complaining that only a mother could manage, got us rooms at the generator.
  
• ·      To cheer me up after finding out we’d be spending the night in a retirement home mum and I went out for Indian food, AND SHE ACTUALLY ATE IT. I have to give mum lots of credit she tired a lot of things on this trip that I never thought she would; Traditional Irish Stew, Guinness, Irish Whiskey, a Pub Crawl, Indian Food…
  

October 6^th

Mum and I hopped on the tube and did some sight seeing;

• ·      We saw Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, The London Eye – which is like a gigantic Ferris wheel that reaches 135m tall at the highest point and gives you a 360-degree view of London. I even convinced mum to do it, heres photographic proof!
  

One of the things mum and I agreed that we both wanted to do while in London was see a show.

• ·      Thanks to Jane, one of the ladies my mum works with, we found a place to get fairly cheap tickets to the West End shows. For £20 less we got AMAZING seats to see Les Miserables and it was simply breath taking, mum pretty much bawled her eyes out the whole time.
  

October 7^th

We did a sight seeing tour today, which was pretty much terrible. It was a hop on hop off service like the one we did in Dublin only these buses never came when they were supposed to so we got stuck standing in the rain waiting for 25 minutes for the next bus. Today we saw:

• ·      London Bridge, Millennium Bridge and pretty much every other bridge in London
  
• ·      Tower of London
  
• ·      Thames River Cruise
  
• ·      Shakespeare’s Globe Theater – we were going to go see As You Like It but it was pouring rain and seeing as it was an open theatre we didn’t think that was such a great idea.
  

We had super yummy Chinese food for dinner and I’ll probably eat the leftovers for breakfast tomorrow.