Dublin and Newgrange, Ireland

 

Alright, here is Ireland part deux, as my sister and I headed East to Dublin and then on to Newgrange.  However, the above pic is from the island of Inishmore which I forgot to post last time.  I don’t even want to think about how much blood, sweat and tears it took to build all those stone walls, probably only to have them blown down every other year by a massive storm.    I feel pretty privileged that I get to think about radar rather than piling stones day in and day out.  

I had actually already been to Dublin the year before (see previous post here: http://bavarianbuzz.blogspot.com/2008/11/dublin-ireland.html), and Kiran had spent some there as well, so we sadly didn’t take any gratuitous shots of our perfect Guinness pints and had already done many of the attractions.  We did however go on the Jameson Whiskey Distillery tour.   Jameson is the best selling Irish whiskey in the world, although I prefer smokier, peatier Scottish whisky (note the spelling difference, with an extra “e” in the Irish adult beverage).  Still, the tour was interesting enough and the tasting at the end was well, tasty.  

Some of the older oak casks filled with the delicious amber-coloured good stuff:

The highlight of the tour was actually before it started when Kiran and I had a minor brush with celebrity.  We saw the rock singer Pink!  While waiting for our tour to start, a short woman came up to the entrance proclaiming “ Hi I’m Alecia and here is my boy”, introducing her muscled, tattooed companion.  We got further confirmation seeing a poster advertising her concert happening the next day.  I tried to be discreet and got this shot of her.   Her and “her boy” got a private tour, but we did see them buying up a huge amount of booze in the gift shop afterwards.

More evidence, although kind of a crazy shot since it looks like her hands are on fire.

Ireland is interesting since it really is a bilingual country: English and Gaelic (or “Irish” as it’s called there).  Sometimes though, I get the feeling that it takes a lot more syllables to get the same message across....

 And another funny sign just outside our hostel:

Another Dublin sight we took in was Kilmainham Gaol (isn’t English a funny language!). I actually found an Australian website debating how Aussies should spell jail/gaol, and there were plenty of interesting responses including “I personally like the slammer or the big house...”,  as well as this gem from one poster: “I dont beleive in either Jail nor Gaol.  Its Prison or Correctional Centre. [sic]”   And probably the one most reflecting my view: “I remember it as jail. I remember reading a Yankee book (Stainless Steel Rat?) when I was about ten and it was spelled gaol in there and I thought wtf?”.  

OK, enough of that tangent, Kilmainham Gaol is a former prison in use from 1787 until 1923.   Particularly during the potato famine, it was terribly overcrowded with up to 5 people (men, women and children, no segregation) in one cell of ~300 square feet (28 m² for the metric users out there).

Our final tourist attraction in Ireland was a trip to Newgrange, which is the site of a vast Neolithic (i.e. stone age) necropolis.  We visited two out of the three tombs which are a World UNESCO Heritage site.  And rightly so: they were constructed ~3200 B.C., placing them 500 years before the pyramids of Egypt and 1000 years older than Stonehenge.   No one is sure of the tombs’ original purpose: burial place for kings, centre for ritual or something else entirely.  They must have had some pretty sweet engineers though, since the sites have withstood 5000 years of Irish rain using a complex drainage system to avoid even a drop of water penetrating the tomb itself.  Not to mention great geologists, artists and astronomers to get the tomb alignments perfect so that they are lit only on special occasions (vernal and autumnal equinoxes and winter solstice).

 

Below are the restored passage tombs at Knowth, although you can be forgiven for thinking that the aliens had landed and disguised their mother and baby ships as giant mounds of grass. 

 

Each passage tomb consists of a burial chamber reached by a long straight passageway lined with stones and within a large mound known as a cairn. 

 

 

The enormous kerbstones lining the outsides of the tomb weigh 1-10 tons each (don’t ask me whether these are imperial or metric tons though), and are carved with various symbols whose meaning we can only guess.  Below is the entrance to the Newgrange passage, which is precisely aligned such that it is only illuminated once a year on the morning of the Winter solstice, when -  for 17 minutes - a golden light creeps in through a roofbox and lights up the chamber.   The tour guides do a demo with a light bulb that hardly compares, but in order to be one of the lucky few to witness Winter solstice at Newgrange you have to literally win a lottery.  

 

The Newgrange tomb is decorated on the outside with striking white quartz; I’d highly recommend a visit if you ever find yourself on the Emerald Isle.

And extra pics of this gorgeous country:

 

 

 

Next post will be more current stuff about Vancouver, I promise!

Galway and Western Ireland

This is one of my back-log travel entries that I have been meaning to write for a long time.   Right after submitting my doctoral thesis to the big-wigs at the university, I took off for a week to Ireland to meet up with my sister. We had a blast exploring wind-swept islands, going hiking, and drinking perfectly poured pints of Guinness.  It was fun travelling with my sister; we both seem to like the same food, same hostels and same tourist destinations, plus we walk at the exact same speed, which is helpful when you are walking for a few hours each day.   Many people suspected that we were sisters and some people asked us if we were twins, one guy even asking if we were “Mediterranean twins”.  Ooh la la.

On our first full day in Galway, we took a bus tour to the Cliffs of Moher (which also featured as the “Cliffs of Insanity” in the Princess Bride, one of the best movies of all time) rising 120 metres above the Atlantic Ocean. 

The (suspected) Cliffs of Insanity!

We saw O’Brien’s Tower, a round stone tower at approximately the midpoint of the cliffs.  According to Wikipedia, it was built by Sir Cornelius O’Brien in order to impress his lady visitors.    To be honest the tower didn’t do too much for me, but along with the very cool cliffs, I was seriously impressed by the delicious honeycomb ice cream at the visitor centre.

Other impressive sights on the tour included the burial mound Poulnabrone Dolmen, dating back to 4000 B.C., the high crosses at Kilfenora, and the incredibly rocky landscape of the Burren.

Portal tomb Poulnabrone, ~2000 years older than Stonehenge

Other fun times:

Free Trad (traditional) music and meeting mostly French tourists (French sailors one night, who were there to board illegal fishing vessels) in the pubs.

Aran Islands.  We just checked out one (Inish Mór, the largest at ~4x20 km and 800 scattered inhabitants).  There are no trees and pretty hilly terrain, but it’s small enough to be explored by bike including chapel ruins, sheer cliffs and a mysterious structure called Dún Aonghasa, a prehistoric fort from ~ 800 B.C built on a high cliff some one hundred metres above the sea and consisting of a series of four concentric walls.  In one way it’s amazingly authentic since there is no guard rail or warning signs as you stand mere feet away from the sheer cliff, but on the other hand I couldn’t help but thinking how one gust of wind and you could plunge to your doom (it was pretty windy). The exact purpose is unknown although archaeologists suspect its use was religious and ceremonial rather than military.   

Kiran looking fabulous on her rental bike:

I was in charge of navigation and not doing so well with the windy conditions and trying to read my map.

Chapel ruins

A few wrong turns led us to these amazing cliffs with no other tourists to ruin it!

One wrong move and you can get swept off to sea at the prehistoric for of Dún Aonghasa.

Galway was our home base for a few days where we enjoyed walking around the very picturesque harbour:

We also liked just wandering around in general and making fun of their stylish maternity wear and cheesy storefront advertisements. 

Their liquor stores are literally hole-in-the-walls the size of two telephone booths:

After the Aran Islands and Galway, we moved on to the beautiful Connemara district in the north-west.  We walked the long (~16 km) Sky Road (and not the “Air Walk” as Kiran mistakenly called it) which offered glimpses of the coast and mountains.  The best part was an abandoned, derelict castle.  

Olympic Anniversary, Vancouver

So I have to admit that I was a little disappointed to have landed in Vancouver almost a year AFTER the Winter Olympics had come and gone. If I’m ever stuck trying to make conversation with a Vancouverite, all I have to do is ask “how was it here, last February?” and they erupt in a wide grin and start talking up a storm. Most mention where they were for the men’s gold medal hockey game, and the sonic boom (well OK…but “loud noise” probably just doesn’t cut it) created by over a million people simultaneously cheering in the Greater Vancouver area the moment Sidney Crosby scored the “golden goal” on Feb. 28^th, 2010. Here is an overly lengthy (but so darned heart-warming) mash-up video of people celebrating the win (9 minutes, but who can deny them their unbridled joy?).

(props for this picture go to the CBC website)

Interestingly, aside from that goal, a lot of people mentioned how amazing it was to have seen the Paralympics. Most are just regular people who could never afford to go to many of the Olympic events, but the Paralympic tickets were much more reasonably priced. Some said that for the first five minutes it was hard to see beyond the person’s disability, but after that they got so caught up in the athleticism of what they were watching (be it wheelchair hockey or blind biathlon where athletes hurtle themselves down hills and curves they can’t see) that they forgot about any of the athletes’ limitations.

Anyways, I digress. Thanks to the one-year anniversary of the Olympic Games, I was able to witness and experience some of that Olympic spirit myself. On the one year anniversary of the opening ceremonies I headed downtown to see the relighting of the Olympic Flame (no uncomfortable-looking Wayne Gretzky this time folks). My spot in the crowd was so poor all I could see were a group of people huddling under umbrellas (it was raining…are you surprised?) and a giant Canadian flag.

While waiting around for stuff to get started some people spontaneously started singing Oh Canada, which was heartening. And then voilá, after another 20 minute wait and a 10 minute speech, the flame was lit!

There are actually two Mounties and a ton of former-volunteers in Olympic blue jackets in the crowd. My favourite is probably the guy in the foreground in the Canada jersey with a flag, about to topple backwards into the pool in 2 degree weather.

Cool orca statue by Douglas Coupland in the vicinity. Captures the symbol of Vancouver and our digital lifestyle:

The obligatory non-photoshoped picture to prove I was at the scene:

And half-an-hour later “holding” (well, touching with the supervision of two other adults) an Olympic torch.

There were plenty of other activities going on along Granville St. and Robson St. including street hockey, couples dancing, and free ice skating. I also witnessed a flash mob of hip-hop dancers which happened so suddenly and was over so quickly I didn’t manage to capture them on camera. It was neat how as soon as their choreographed dance was over everyone just melted into the crowd.

Lots o’ fun and lots of happy people out and about. I’ll leave you with a few more shots of a quieter part of Vancouver near Jericho Beach. I ventured out a little further than usual though and almost came across a nudist beach. Probably no one out in February, but I turned back before I could disturb anyone ;)