So, I went to England and Ireland. I did a lot of stuff and took a lot of pictures. Here’s a rough chronological summary of what I did, along with some of the photos I took (whole set available here):
3/11:
I packed extremely light for this trip. One pair of jeans, one hoodie, a long sleeve shirt, some t-shirts/underclothes/socks, and a jacket. I managed to fit everything I needed for the week in a backpack and a shoulder bag, which at the beginning of the trip felt light as a feather. Anyway, off to the airport.
I had a flight that was supposed to leave Boston at 8:45pm. I got to the airport way too early, and then they told me that the flight had been delayed. So I got to spend an extra 5 hours at the airport. I read about 400 pages of my book between 7pm and takeoff–1:00am. A bit of an ignominious start, but whatever. I didn’t get much sleep on the six hour flight, and then landed around 11am on…
3/12:
London Heathrow’s customs is a mess. I spent half an hour waiting in what should have been a very short line, because a) there’s a complete lack of line management–it’s chaos; and b) they stop every brown person for extensive questioning. Literally. But anyway, I eventually got through security and made my way to London’s historic Underground. It took me a couple of hours to get through the three trains I had to take to get to East London, but I did it.
Okay, I just read that last paragraph, and from now on I think I’ll just skip over the lengthy description of my transportation woes from here on out. Suffice it to say, getting everywhere took forever.
Once I got to my friend Jamie’s place, I took a quick nap, since I hadn’t slept in a day and a half. Bizarrely, my undergrad school happened to be holding an alumni get-together in London that night, so I jumped on the “tube” and went to a cheesy fake-spanish bar, La Perla, near Charing Cross in downtown London. The first thing I noticed was that drinks were super expensive (another theme I would be exploring in detail throughout the trip). The second thing I noticed was that I spent the entire evening talking to other Americans. Kinda weird (sad?), but it was pretty cool that there were so many of us converging 6,000 miles away from the place that we all had in common. Anyway, it was a somewhat awkward night (since I didn’t know anybody else there), but I had a good time anyway.
In other news, just about everybody in London works in finance. So the evening was pretty much just like visiting my friends in New York.
3/13:
Sightseeing day! Jamie and I walked all over town, starting at Parliament and continuing past Westminster Abbey, the Horse Guards (I dunno… it was a pretty nice looking building), the War Department (guess what they do there!), St. James’s Park, Buckingham Palace, the Wellington Arch, Hyde Park, and finally the Victoria and Albert Museum. The big news is that I remembered I had a camera. Here are a couple representative pictures:
This is “Big Ben.” It’s a clock.
This is Westminster Abbey. It has flying buttresses.
We also stopped into Harrod’s, looking (hilariously) for a book. For those of you who don’t know it, Harrod’s is an enormous, garish, repulsively-expensive department store. Probably the only thing you need to know about it is that they offer a 185,000 pound (about $400,000) cell phone. It’s basically a Nokia, covered in diamonds (including a very tasteful gemstone-based snake). Harrod’s also has a lot of expensive food, including a sushi bar, a gelato stand, and an American diner. We didn’t buy anything.
Next we had some lunch ($16 for a falafel wrap and a soda–cheap!), then continued our aimless walk until the rain forced us into the first touristy place we encountered–the Victoria and Albert Museum. We had very low expectations–as long as the roof didn’t leak, we would have been satisfied–but V&A is actually pretty neat. It’s an art museum with an emphasis on architecture, sculpture, and craftwork (at least, that’s what we looked at), and they have a bunch of really cool stuff. Naturally, this is the only picture I thought to take. Nice work, me.
At any rate, my favorite thing in the museum was probably the Cast Collection, which is an enormous set of plaster casts of really awesome art. I didn’t read this essay, but on that page there are a bunch of images of some of the really cool stuff. Trajan’s Column was the highlight for me–pictures can’t really capture the scale and intricacy of that thing. And the fact that all of these pieces were cast in plaster and shipped across the world to be reassembled in England makes it all the more impressive.
There was a lot of other stuff, too, including housewares and clothing dating back centuries. It was very interesting to see how people (the richest .05%) lived in the old days.
After the museum, Jamie and I went to a restaurant near Waterloo. Cubana is basically the Hard Rock Cafe of the Cuban resistance movement. There are old guns and communist propaganda all over the walls (like a T.G.I. Fridays, but social justicier). The food was pretty good, though I think it was about as authentic as Del Taco, and the happy hour drinks were pretty cheap, though watered down to the point of absurdity. But after dinner, a couple of Jamie’s friends showed up, and we had a pretty fun time hanging out at the bar downstairs. The best part for me was drinking a Cuban beer.
That reminds me, though, of a peculiarity of London. It’s a huge, cosmopolitan city, filled with people from all over the world. It has great restaurants, great bars, all the trappings of a sophisticated, lively town. But almost all the bars close at 11pm! There are, as you might expect, after-hours clubs and a handful of bars that stay open later, but it’s tough to find a quiet pub to have a drink at after 10:30 or so. And although this used to be by law, apparently it’s now perfectly easy to get a liquor license that goes later. But the drinking culture in the city is such that it’s hard to make money staying open that late, anyway. It’s very strange to me. Digression over.
3/14:
Goodbye London, hello Cork. We spent a couple of hours getting to Stansted (another London airport), then another couple of hours flying to Cork. We met our friend Sarah at the hostel, and headed out on the town for dinner. Our original plan was to have pub food, but after a lot of wandering we had failed to find any pubs that served food. That’s not to say that there weren’t any, but we didn’t see any menus up and eventually just gave up. So we stopped into a restaurant with African decor, generic “world music,” and a truly miserable menu. It wasn’t bad so much as it was dreary. Every dish seemed to combine potatoes, cheese, tomato sauce, and ham (or no ham if you’re a vegetarian). I guess this is what eating out used to be like everywhere in the British Isles, before they discovered haute cuisine.
After dinner we wandered around some more, looking (again) for an authentic Irish pub to have a drink. There didn’t seem to be too many of them around, although, as I pointed out then, any place in Ireland that serves alcohol is an Irish pub. Nonetheless, we did eventually find a hole in the wall filled with townies, and sat down to drink some $6 beers. We had a lively talk with some locals about Obama’s chances (the betting odds are well in his favor, they said), and then went home to sleep in a room with ten strangers who like spending the night clomping around in hobnail boots and latching/unlatching suitcases.
No pictures from this day.
3/15:
We started the day with all-you-can-eat toast and tea at the hostel, then tromped off in the freezing rain to see the Cork City Gaol. It was incredibly cold in there, but we did a hilarious audio tour (in which you walk around wearing a fifteen year old cassette walkman, listening to descriptions of the miserable conditions the gaol’s inmates endured. And at the end there was a video!
Then we walked back to the hostel and waited for our friend, Sara (not to be confused with Sarah) to arrive. She eventually got there, and we all went to have lunch at the official cafe for the Cork Butter Museum. Sadly, I didn’t get to see the museum itself (“It really is worth a visit” – AA Essential Ireland), but the cafe was pretty great.
After that, and after a brief but excellent stop in a pub filled with old men watching rugby, we headed to the Jameson Distillery. It was awesome:
We took the bus back to Cork and had dinner and drinks til the wee hours (we found a pub, the Slate, open til 2am–this was critical in the next couple of days).
3/16:
Tried to take a shower, but the water was far too hot to actually stand under. Had to huddle in the corner and carefully cup my hands, then pour the water on my body. After I recovered, we had toast and tea.
We wanted to drive around County Cork a bit, so we rented a car, which was thrilling and terrifying. First of all, as you may have heard, people drive on the left there. Second of all, drivers sit on the right side of the car (which makes sense). Third of all, all rental cars are manual transmission (not really, but the only one they had available to rent was a manual). Fourth of all, we couldn’t buy additional insurance on the car, so in the likely event of a catastrophic accident we were liable for any damage up to 600 Euros (about $1000).
Oh, right, did I mention that although England uses Pounds Sterling, the Republic of Ireland uses Euros? Yeah. That was annoying.
Anyway, despite my comically-intense reservations about the many ways it could go badly, we rented the car. The first place we drove was Blarney Castle, which was awesome:
The Castle.
The Blarney Castle is, of course, home to the Blarney Stone. If you kiss it, you’re supposed to gain in eloquence. So here I am, newly eloquent:
It’s just too bad kissing the stone doesn’t make one a better driver. Ah well. At any rate, after we all kissed the stupid rock and none of us fell off the castle, we got back in the car and drove to Kinsale for lunch.
This is about as good a place as any to emphasize how truly frightening it was to drive around Ireland’s country roads. Aside from the largest highways, everything was single lane (at most–the smallest roads were really just one shared lane for cars going in both directions). Yet the speed limits were up as high as 100km/hr (a little under 65mph). And these speed limits might as well have been minimums, the way the natives were driving. Although I value my life, I do tend to be a pretty aggressive driver, so even though I was scared out of my wits half the time I still ended up trying to keep up with the other drivers on the road. But, as you can see, I didn’t kill myself (or anyone else), so I guess all’s well that ends well! Okay, back to the trip:
Kinsale is a town on the water on the southern coast of Ireland. It used to be a military port, but now it’s more of a yachting community. We were told that it’s the “gourmet capital of Ireland.” I don’t know about that, but we did have a really good and absurdly large lunch there. I would have liked to have spent more time there (and it would have been nice if it had been a little warmer, so we could walk around the water a little more), but it was well worth stopping there.
After lunch we got back in the car and drove through Bandon, Clonakilty, and Skibbereen (and lots of smaller towns). At one point we were speeding crazily along one of the tiny roads, when over the bend we came upon first a handful, and then a mob, of people, trudging quietly down the road. The crowd filled the entire street, from hedges on the left to hedges on the right, and I didn’t know what to do. It looked like zombies, out to harvest human brains for supper. As they saw me approaching, though, they gestured to me to just go on through. Reluctantly, I settled into first gear and tried to make my way. At first it seemed like the people weren’t moving out of the way at all, but gradually it became clear that they were simply edging around the slowly-advancing car, the mob melting around us like the T-1000 around prison bars. And, almost as fast as the crowd had appeared, we were through it, and back up to 100km/hr. I still don’t know where they came from or what they were doing, but crawling through that pack of zombies was certainly memorable.
We pretty much just drove aimlessly, making our way along the coast. We stopped here to sit on a bench and look out over the water. It was pretty nice. Come late afternoon, we decided to start heading back to Cork, so we headed north, then east, going through Dunmanway, Shantaragh, Cappeen, and Crookstown, before finally getting back on a big highway to get us back to the hostel.
After a really good meal at a restaurant downtown, we went back to the Slate (the pub open til 2am). But it was much more crowded this time (probably because nobody had work the next day), and much less fun for yours truly. But after it closed, things got much more entertaining.
First, we met Michael, a nice guy from Bandon who gave us a bunch of suggestions on where we should go for St. Patrick’s Day. We talked with him (and his creepy, old, severely drunk friend) for a while, until some very friendly Italian dudes came over and started square dancing with us. It was pretty weird. Also, their English was mediocre, and none of us spoke Italian, so we ended up having a truly ridiculous conversation in English, Spanish, and French. I’m pretty sure nobody successfully communicated anything at all. But they seemed like nice enough guys, and after a while we all got bored and went hometo McDonald’s.
Yes, McDonald’s. Some members of our party (I’m not going to name names, but they were female) had to use the bathroom, and McDonald’s is the only place in Cork open at 3am. So off we went. This is what things looked like outside, where I was waiting for the bathroom crew to return:
Ah, American culture sure does bring class and sophistication wherever it goes.
Also, Jamie decided to get a Big Mac.
We finally went home and woke up all of our roommates trying to get ready for bed. Then we slept.
3/17:
ST. PATTIE’S DAY! GREEN BEER AND PUBLIC VOMITING!#$@!
Oh, wait, that’s what happens in America. In Ireland, there’s a street festival with good food, then a bunch of people have a relaxing, fun time drinking moderately.
We woke up early, forewent our tea and toast, and had a traditional Irish breakfast. Then we went back to the hostel to relax before heading out again for the festivities. First we stopped by this street food area, where Sarah and Sara got some lunch and left me and Jamie standing around waiting for them for an hour (not that I’m still mad about it).
Then we found a quiet pub and did this for six or seven hours. After we got tired of that place, we went to the Washington Inn around the corner, drinking there until they kicked everyone out at midnight. That’s where things got just a little messy. So anyway, like I said before, most pubs close early. But it was St. Patrick’s Day, and we were not ready to call it a night, so we headed back (for, yes, the third night in a row), to the Slate. There we made numerous friends (and one of us, I’m not saying who, made more than a friend) and drank Irish beer and Irish whiskey until closing time.
Then we went home (managing, this time, not to stop at McDonald’s).
3/18 (putting the date change here is somewhat arbitrary):
Sara went straight to the airport for her early flight, and the rest of us got a quick two hours of sleep before heading off ourselves.
Jamie and I said goodbye to Sarah, who had a different flight, and then we got on our plane to head back to London. We slept from takeoff to landing, which was awesome. Then I said goodbye to Jamie and took a $40 shuttle bus from Stansted to Heathrow. Then I waited around for a bunch of hours before finally flying back to Boston.
The end.
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