No let's go back a little further, this is what I woke up to Wednesday morning in Edinburgh:
Full on snow day. We took a dreadfully early bus to the Edinburgh airport and waited for our delayed Ryan Air flight to Dublin. When we finally could sit down on the plane, we were the lucky seat winners who selected the spots in between a trifecta of crying- no, not crying, wailing, sobbing, miserable- little infants. There were actually 3 separate families with unhappy infants. What are the odds? It was impressive, actually, how they could keep it going from take-off through landing. The first thing we did when we got to Dublin was go get some really greasy, quintessential Dublin pub food and a pint of beer. Just kidding we absolutely did not, we went to a make-your-own salad place (Chopped! Like I ate every day in Charleston this summer...wonder if my frequent shopper card would have worked here, I might have been able to get a free salad by now...). Pricey but always something the 3 of us love. After lunch we walked through St. Stephen's Green- a beautiful park with swans swimming beneath the stone bridges that extend over the lake- and get this, as soon as we set foot inside snow flurries whipped up all around us so we could barely make out the pathway in front of us. It was fun to play around, catching the big snowflakes on our tongues for a while, and we even tried to keep walking through Dublin to find the old antique quarter (which we did find, after a brief walk through the ghetto, and when we finally did find it, it was nothing like what I'd hoped), and other parts of the map that seemed to be fun to check out, but yet again, I just can't be outside for that long without going into complainer-mode so we made our way to the Guinness factory for the inside tour.
What you're apparently supposed to do with this beer before you drink it
I followed their directions, and it still tasted like crap to me. I think someone told me once that men like beer more because they take bigger sips, and whatever is on the top of the drink is not as flavorful/tasty as what's right below, so women always drink the bitterness and don't taste any of the good aspects of the beer? Well I tried drinking like a man, too, and I still hated it. At least I tried.
The tour was actually really in-depth and informative. 1st floor all about how its made, all 4 processes in detail, the 2nd floor was taste testing, the 3rd was about advertising and PR for Guinness through the years, etc. etc. More than 7 floors in all.
C and I on the top floor, enjoying managing to sip our complimentary pints. I'm proud that I drank almost half of mine, but our free Guinness bread (I stole the recipe) was much more to my liking.
So I took notes in my phone of cool facts I learned. Arthur Guinness signed the lease for the factory in the 1700s for 9,000 years, with a mortgage of 45 pounds a year. It became the biggest employer in Ireland until the late 1900s. All the surrounding neighborhoods of houses were bought by the company and given to their employees, and workers used to be allowed to drink as much Guinness at work as they pleased, but since the laws for drinking and driving have become stricter, that amount has been deduced to just 2 pints a day. But employees may choose to save up their 2 pints on credit and take out all that they've saved at once if they were to, say, have a party one night.
After leaving the factory somewhat warm, we walked around the city for a while, and once we crossed over the bridge a smoothie and crepe place caught my eye. Plus I really had to go to the bathroom and restaurants around here have this really great way of keeping non-customers from using the bathroom by placing a lock on the door and the code on their receipts. So I bought an Oasis smoothie: orange juice, banana, yogurt and basil. It was awesome. All their choices had something unique about them, so I took a picture of the menu to make them all at home in either the blender, or turn them into juice with my birthday present juicer :).
All 3 of us badly wanted to see the Cliffs of Moher while were already this close but we couldn't decide the best way to go about doing it. Train there by ourselves? Try to rent a car? The simplest and cheapest option seemed to be take a guided tour bus, so at the last minute we stopped into a tourist office and asked if there were any seats available for the tour the next day. The first office's tour was full and we were beginning to feel frantic that we waited too long to make a decision, but just before closing time we found another office and rushed in to ask if we could join their tour. And we could! Just in the knick of time. Dinner was a vegetarian restaurant with so much food I could barely finish it all, but I still managed to want a piece of their homemade bread after I was done. So worth it. Then it was back to the hostel and to bed. I slept so well this whole trip, probably because I was eating dinner at a normal hour and going to bed early and waking up early, like I'm used to. That's something I definitely won't be sad to part from when I return home- regular hours for everything. Spain is so backwards.
Thursday morning was an early wake-up call to make it to the bus on time. Again, blizzarding outside. What's new. Our tour took us through 11 out of 30-something counties in Ireland so I got to see a lot of the beautiful countryside- much more my kind of scene than the city of Dublin. If I have to just say one thing about going to the Cliffs its that it was so incredibly worth it.
Heyyyy Princess Bride
I think we all kind of thought we were going to drive up and see them, get out and take some photos, and have to leave fairly soon. But they gave us a couple hours to climb around the cliffs, and these puppies aren't blocked off at all. You can go right up to the edge and hang your feet (or your head if you're another girl on our tour) off. Dad, you would flip out, I mean absolutely freak.
I left windburned and with chapped lips like I never thought could be experienced but it was just so worth it. The whole trip. Didn't have to drive. Could listen to cool facts from the tour guide along the way, or not, beautiful scenery, a warm bus (with wifi), a good seafood chowder for lunch, and one of nature's most beautiful creations I've ever seen.
The only thing that could have made an awesome day better, I think we can all agree, is Cookie Butter. And that's just what we found in the Dean and Deluca-esque grocery story/deli we chose to have dinner in when we got back into Dublin. It was right up by the register and Kelsey and I lost our cool when we saw Biscoff crunchy spread. So many emotions running through our brains, we barely had time to process. Somehow we came to the conclusion that since we were leaving in about 24 hours we shouldn't buy it since we can't take it with us, unless we go buy a stock pile of 3 oz travel containers and jam all the butter into individual packaging...(that actually was a thought that we had). But no, we decided to cut our losses and put the CB down. Except then, something amazing happened. All 3 of us were sitting, quietly enjoying our respective dinners, when a man and his teenage daughter walked up and plopped a brown bag down on the table in front of us. "If it's not the one you were looking at, the receipt's in the bag and you can exchange it," he said in a flawless Irish accent. And he just smiled and went on his merry way. At first I thought it was an order the kitchen got wrong and had just given them or something, but when we peered into the bag it was the crunchy goodness that we flipped out over in the check-out line. He saw our reactions and that was all it took, I guess. I just couldn't (and still can't) get over this random act of kindness. Was it because it was almost Easter? Did we happen to encounter the nicest man on earth at this random grocery in Dublin? Actually better question, why do I need to pinpoint a reason why he did it? Its so apparent to me in this moment that it doesn't take much at all to make someone's jaw drop. You can make someone's day any time you want if you just open your eyes and ears and engage with people. Phew. A trip through 1/3 of Ireland and an important life lesson all in one day. Time for bed!
Oh except for one minute detail. We couldn't take the Cookie Butter on the plane, we were well aware, but we were going to do right by this random act of kindness and so we vowed to finish it within a day, starting with a huge dessert for us Thursday night.
Friday morning Caroline had to leave at the crack of dawn to return to Florence, but Kelsey and I slept in. We woke up to the discovery that there was no water- no shower water, no toilet flushing nor teeth brushing water, no sink water to drink. Why? Oh because Dublin's pipes were damaged from inclement weather. Naturally. It's the last 2 days of March, snow, take a hike. We went out to explore unseen parts of Dublin showerless and filled with Cookie Butter/jelly toast. St. Patrick's Cathedral was our first stop. Then to Lush for chapstick and hand lotion. It was a trend during the entire break to stop into lotion shops for samples because the weather had made all our hands so dry and cracked and our lips so chapped. When lunch time rolled around we wanted to check out a food market K found online but stopped in front of KC Peaches, a restaurant with the most enticing cookies in the window that one ever laid eyes on. "Let's just, take a peak..." one of us said. I don't know who it was, but I'm so glad we went inside. It wasn't just a bakery (although their brownies looked like they might have been made for giants), but an entire restaurant with fresh sandwiches made to your liking, make-your-own salads, a hot bar, a yogurt parfait bar... All of our restaurants sound the same now that I put them into words but I swear they were all individually delicious. We went out to find the market, just to see what we thought of it, and there was no such one to be found- fine by us, made our decision of where to eat lunch easy. A sandwich and salad and it hit the spot. And a huge cookie to go.
Our next adventure: To find a yoga class I heard about. Hot. Vinyasa. Yoga. I Google-mapped the directions and it said 2.5 miles walking- doable. I went back to the hostel, got our rented towel, had a change of clothes in my bag, filled up my water bottle, I was ready to go. So we start walking, and walking, and walking, and then we've walked easily 3 miles and we're still walking, and then we're in front of 17 Malahide Road and it looks a lot more like a residential house than a yoga studio. I asked a woman walking if this was indeed Malahide Road, and it was, and then I asked if there was a yoga studio on this road, and she said that I must mean Malahide Village, a bus-ride away...not even technically in Dublin. Oy ve. I had walked us so far out into practically another county, with nothing but a useless yoga towel and some spandex. When will my need for yoga get some sense knocked into it?? Kelsey was such a good sport about it and we had a leisurely walk back, taking a side route through a park, joking the whole time that we'd seen the "real Dublin," and we didn't look like tourists since we were all the way out here carrying brown paper grocery bags. Except then mine broke so I just had to carry the towel around under my arm for the rest of the day.
When we got back into town we walked through Trinity College, and at this point it was sunny for the first time in an entire week so we took full advantage and sat down to have a Cookie Butter/pretzel snack (oh did I forget to mention we brought that with us and ate it all along our yoga excursion? Of course that happened).
Matching shoes we bought in Florence; tennis shoes that are "sensible and good for walking around, without having a huge Nike check on the side signifying that you are no doubt an American tourist" as I like to describe them
Then it was a quick stroll across the river again to see the shopping area and the Garden of Remembrance before watching the sunset alongside it.
It's like we fit a month's worth of stuff into 7 days, 10 for me since I had the whole Florence trip beforehand, but its also hard to believe that the trip that we'd been planning and planning for is already done! We had to hit the hay early because our flights back to Sevilla and Florence left early the next morning. I hated saying goodbye to Kels since I won't see her until school starts! Actually no scratch that, I am making it to Ohio for 4th of July this summer, she convinced me. But still, she's like my first best friend that I've met that lives somewhere other than North Carolina. Going to UNC and being from Charlotte, most of the people you meet are already from a town somewhat near you, which is sometimes nice because you never feel like you have to say goodbye to anyone, but at the same time I love saying I have a best friend from Ohio now. I know that we'll stay friends for a long time, and no matter where we live it will always be so awesome to visit each other because its just like old times when we get together! That's what was so great about this whole break for me, I think. Just a sense of normalcy and calmness. There's no way I would have had the same experience had I been with anyone else but these two girls. We get each other. We're on the same page, and we love the same things. There was never any pressure to do anything, but we were all up for trying whatever. I'm so thankful we could make it all work and that I have people like them in my life!
Love you mags :)
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