Kallory Euro Trip 09

Day 18 &19

2009-08-25T04:37:00.000-07:00

This morning we packed all our stuff and left it in the luggage room at the hostel while we went out for one last walk around town. We had to make sure we knew how to get to the train station (back to the airport...St. Pancras Station) and then went to the British Museum for a while. It was cool to see the actual artifacts from the Pyramids and the Parthenon, can't believe how preserved they are! It was too hot in that building, so unfortunately we had to cut that short and find a park to take a nap in for a while. When we woke up, it was time for lunch...on the hunt for fish and chips. Gotta have fish and chips in England, right? They are definitely better here for some reason...even if the cod does still have the skin on one side. Time to go pick up our stuff and head back to the airport. It really is amazing how poor the customer service is...makes us appreciate the states a little bit more. We waited in line for Ryanair to check our visa's (since we weren't about to make the same mistake as last time!) for what felt like forever. The line was getting longer and there was no sign of a Ryanair employee anywhere. Kelly went to ask the service desk about it, and the man told her that we could have our passports checked at any desk. Soooo, we believed him and got out of the front of the line to go to another desk only to find that, in fact, we do have to get it from Ryanair specifically. We went and sat down in a corner for a while, till someone arrived to start checking visa's. Back to the end of the line! Good thing we allowed ourselves more than enough time for something like this to happen.

Back in Dublin for one last night. Matt went out for that pint of Guinness he had so anxiously awaited...and we sorted out our bags for the flight home. Kelly went to shower while Mallory hung out with some kid from California downstairs...talking about their art majors and stuff. We had every intention of staying up all night so we'd be able to sleep on the plane...and almost made it. Went in search for one last ice cream and the only place we found it was McDonalds. Who would have known McDonalds would be so busy at 2 in the morning...on a Tuesday!? A bunch of drunk 18 year olds (none of them could have been more than 20, I swear!) getting out of clubs, needing that greasy food for the hangover prevention. Most of them were annoying, some of them entertaining...and a few girls that were just hilarious. They were so happy and singing Wham! "Wake me up before you go go..." we all know the song...and taking pictures of the security guard that they say looks like Barack Obama. If we learned one thing from this all, it's that the Irish LOVE Spongebob...all of them commented on Kelly's pajamas as we walked past, and some of them even wanted a hug, or to give the pants a tug! Uh oh! We found Matt back outside the hostel, and people-watched some more till the streets were empty.

Day 17

2009-08-23T22:30:00.000-07:00

Well...all we can say is...it sure is a good thing we left at noon on our walk to church (that started at 2:30pm)!!! We were walking nonstop the entire 2 1/2 hours, barely got there on time. It was nice, though, we were able to see a lot of the city that we wouldn't have otherwise! Church was pretty much the exact same as it is in Utah, really...there were probably more Americans than there were English! The first guy that spoke to us was from Highland Utah and Kelly went to school with his little brother, ha what are the chances?!

After church, we walked over to Hyde Park to meet Katie and Matt. Kelly also had emailed a couple friends in the area and told them to meet us by the Albert Memorial if they were able to, and a couple of them actually came. Mathias is actually from Austria but just so happened to be in London the same weekend as us, and Tod lives nearby and surprisingly showed up as well! It was good to see them, and spend some time in the infamous Hyde Park (HUGE, by the way).

We weren't about to walk all the way back to Russell Square, so we paid the 2 pounds to take the bus back...and parted ways with Katie at the bus station, she had to catch the last train back to Bristol.

Day 16

2009-08-23T10:01:00.000-07:00

Today Kelly's friend Katie came to London from Bristol to hang out and show us around town. We bought an all day train ticket so we could hop from one place to another with our guide (who doesn't like walking apparently). First, she took us to Buckingham Palace, where the Queen is presently (the flag on top of the palace is at half-mast if she is away). It was really cool to see the guards so stiff, marching back and forth every now and then so as to not pass out! It was a pretty hot day, don't know how they can stand there so still in a stuffy uniform holding a heavy rifle, and not die. We walked through St. James Park to get there, and that was just beautiful! There are so many cool parks just chillin in the middle of this big city, a nice place to sit and relax and get away from the hustle and bustle every now and then. After Buckingham, we went to the Tower of London, and Tower Bridge. Passed by the London Bridge as well. We got talking about Fergie and how in her video for "London Bridge" she actually has Tower Bridge in the background. Shocking, right? Especially with her reputation of being an educated scholar...who spells "Tasty" wrong in a song just so that it will rhyme better. Oh to be stupid and get paid for it! Haha.

We walked around Oxford Street (the shopping area) for a bit, had a nice lunch in a small cafe, and then we were off to find Kelly's one souvenir desire: Urban Decay makeup. The first department store we came to didn't have it, and Katie just wanted to keep looking...but Mallory said she'd go ask the girl at the Chanel counter. Katie, being the posh epitomy of a British snob that she is (and we love her for it!), was completely embarrassed by the fact that she would even THINK to go ask the "Chanel girl" let alone actually do it! So she was out of there in a flash, and we met her outside. Silly Americans that we are, wouldn't know that such an act is forbidden...but we got what we wanted and knew where to find the makeup counter we were looking for. Debenhams. Kelly was ecstatic about the makeup, and we were all ecstatic about getting ice cream after!

London is not as dirty as we had expected, but it's still not as clean as we're used to. We discovered that trash bins are very few and far between in this city...thus why people just throw their garbage in the street...they probably get sick of holding it, not knowing when they will find a bin! So we asked Katie why there are no bins and she said that it's because people would put bombs in them. Hmmm, hadn't thought of that. But makes sense...and I guess they've just settled for dirty streets rather than getting blown up!

We got back to the hostel and had a short nap before getting up to play with makeup and go down to the bar/club they have in the hostel. We went to find food while Katie and Matt went to get their drink on. Funny thing is, when we got back...sober as we were...it seemed we were having more fun dancing and being crazy than the drunkies were, just sittin in the corner taking pictures! Go figure! After that got boring, we went to play a game of pool (someone had told Matt that there was only one cue stick...and that other people were already using it, so we had to wait for a while just to start...then later that night, come to find 3 other cue sticks lying around! Ha! Someone just must hate us or something). The teams were Mallory and Kelly against Katie and Matt...and...WE WON!!!

Katie went to bed pretty early, and Matt disappeared, so we just went in to the lounge area to people-watch and get our giggle on. We were talking about parenting and breastfeeding for some odd reason, and even more oddly...it attracted the attention of this Aussie named Wayne, whom, quite frankly, we couldn't figure out if he was gay or straight. He was a character nonetheless and invited himself over for a chat. I was actually convinced he was gay until this cute Welsh boy came over to join the conversation, and Wayne got all sorts of jealous. Hahaha did he really think he had game while talking about breastfeeding? Hahaha. Gareth, the Welshman, was cute but an annoying drunk...one of those that knows everything about everything and has to constantly be talking...yeah. So we got bored and went to bed (at 5am). Good thing church isn't till 2:30pm!!!

Day 15

2009-08-22T15:09:00.000-07:00

We barely made it to the Victoria bus station after our hour walk from the hostel to catch our tour bus for Stonehenge, Windsor and Oxford. We were almost certain we were going to miss it. No big deal if we had though, you know it's our new thing to blow money on tickets we don't actually use. The first stop was Windsor castle and it was a lot bigger than we thought. Matt paid to go inside but we figured we'd rather save £15 and just take pictures from the outside. Then our next stop was Stonehenge which was slightly smaller than we thought. Still incredibly fascinating. Pretty sure we'd love to know how that freaking got there. Betting on the alien theory, only one that makes sense. After we may or may not have left a couple people from our group at Stonehenge, we headed to our last stop of the day: Oxford. It's a really old college town that was way more interesting than we expected. Once we arrived back in London we spent the rest of the night wandering around Westminster Abbey and took tons of pictures, then consulted the map a few times, like true tourists, on our route home. Matt went to bed and we went in search of soft serve ice cream that is not be found after 6pm apparently. We settled for chips and chocolate and an incredibly disgusting pomegranate juice (didn't know you could really mess up that flavor so bad) and settled in for some people-watching in the lounge at the hostel. Other than the disheveled recently divorced mid life crisis suffering Canadian man, the Italian "rock stars" that wouldn't leave us alone for about an hour were definitely the most entertaining. The only thing we could really understand through their broken english was "1. dance 2. walk 3. love 4. dance 5. love 6. love" Apparently that was to be our agenda for the evening until they finally got the hint and left us alone.

Day 14

2009-08-22T14:49:00.000-07:00

The past few days we have spent way too much time in the Dublin airport. Wednesday morning we got there after our sweet early morning bus ride from Galway at about 9:15 and didn't get out of there with my brother Matt until about noon. Slight confusion on where he was too meet us is to blame. It worked out fine and we made it back into Dublin in time to spend the rest of the day walking all around the city.

The next morning we made a quick stop at Schuh to get some shoes for Matt then it was back to the airport. We arrived with plenty of time to spare before our flight to London. Thinking everything was great we just relaxed and waited for our flight to start boarding. When we got to the part where they scan our tickets and we get on the plane apparently two of us were missing a stamp on our ticket thus preventing from actually getting on the plane. Too bad we hadn't figured that out earlier when we had plenty of time to fix the problem instead of sitting there and eating candy and soda like everything was awesome. Oh well, what can you do. $140 each later we were on a different flight to London and well prepared to not eat for the next few days considering the amount we just blew on the freaking changing tickets. I totally blame the airport, OK it was totally our fault. Whatever.

We got into London and found our sweet hostel then set out to find the cheapest food for Matt's birthday dinner. We figured we had to at least eat out for that then we can proceed to starve ourselves until we return home. After the last supper we wandered around town and totally didn't get lost or anything for a few hours. When we finally did get back to the hostel we went to bed while Matt went to go party it up in the bar for his 25th...by himself. Apparently a couple of dudes bought him some birthday drinks though so we didn't feel bad that he came back at 3am when we all need to be up at 6:45.

Day 11-13

2009-08-19T05:40:00.000-07:00

Our last three days in Galway were spent mostly doing, well nothing. Sunday we made it safely to church without being stalked by any creepy people in small cars or drunks. It was funny but not really surprising at how small the Galway branch is. We kind of laughed to ourselves when the Relief Society teacher commented on how it was so nice to have such a big group, because there was literally 9 of us, including the teacher. The rest of sunday was pretty typical: read, sleep, eat, go on a walk, you know.

On Monday we went to all the CD shops to check prices and decide which CD's we actually thought were worth buying. We have a long list of bands that Ireland has introduced to us and we pretty much want to get all of them. We really couldn't decide so we thought it would be a good idea to go home and look up more songs from each of those artists to therefore make an educated decision. So all the bands ended up being totally worth buying all their albums which was expected but also sort of sucked because that would cost a lot of money. We trekked back to the CD store and finally made our decisions. Mallory got Jape and Temper Trap and Kelly got The Frames and Guggenheim Grotto. All amazing bands, check them out for sure. The rest of the day we pretty much walked around, got ice cream as usual, watched a ton of music videos whilst hanging out with Niall.

Tuesday we walked all around town for the last time and took some video of the streets and street performers. We went and hung out at this spot by the bay where people were fishing until one guy almost hooked us with his fishing pole. We were pretty hungry by this point so we went and bought stuff to make ourselves chicken curry for dinner. It was amazing. The rest of the day was spent watching more music videos and funny videos on you tube. We stayed up most of the night maybe sleeping 3 hours at best then it was off to catch the 6am bus in the pouring rain. Who doesn't love a nice morning walk in the rain with 40lbs of luggage, I'm pretty sure everyone does.

Day 10

2009-08-15T17:38:00.001-07:00

Got up this morning just in time to catch the bus to Dublin. Long 3 1/2 hour bus ride to town, but lovin the scenery. Apparently Dublin's a big deal...or maybe it was just today...but we got off the bus into a sea of extremely inconsiderate tourists. It's amazing how many people just stop abruptly in the middle of the road, right in front of you, and a bunch of other people walking at full speed...just to check out another statue that looks just like the last one. For being a big industrial city, we actually quite liked Dublin. The architecture and street performers are a lot of fun, not to mention the many gorgeous bridges along the Liffey River.

We wandered around town for a bit trying to find the Gaiety Theatre where we bought our tickets for Riverdance! Grabbed some ice cream before the show (shocking) and settled in for some entertainment. A-freaking-mazing performance!!! Well done! Seriously don't know how they get their legs moving that fast, without moving their upper body hardly at all...it's ridiculous. After the show, we grabbed some Thai food that we've been craving since we arrived...and caught the bus back to Galway. Another "long" ride back, but this time mostly just because of the obnoxious teenage girls that chose to sit right in front of us, instead of in any of the other empty seats throughout the rest of the bus.

Once we got back, around 11, we thought it'd be "smart" to go hunt down the building that our church will be meeting at in the morning. Good thing it's 20 minutes away in an industrial park, that is probably a whole lot less dodgy in daylight...but considering it's empty, and we had passed some slightly sketchy characters and a huge creepy cemetery on the way there...we were in a less than comfortable state. The little silver car that followed us around the whole time didn't help the situation. At first we figured he wouldn't possibly be thinking about killing us and stuffing us in the trunk because there was clearly no way he'd be able to fit us in there...even in bits. haha it was smaller than a Geo Metro...I mean...really!?!? Then he started circling the block and stopping when we'd turn to look and see if we were being followed...and that just sent us over the edge. We clutched each others arms and literally ran back to the main highway where we thought we'd be safe. Of course we had to be followed by two more creepy drunks on our way to Supermacs for some comfort fries. Shut up, we deserved them. We felt the need to walk off those fries, so we cruised on down to Quay street for some people watching. Oh my gosh! Some little short drunk guy (by himself, mind you) stops dead in the street...points at Kelly and yells, "Mary...? Is that you?" ...more than once. He came over, and took it upon himself to "entertain" us with his "kindness" for the next 15 minutes. His non-stop jabbering consisted mostly of "Are you guys sisters? Or lovers? ...Just friends?" and he mentioned our "permed" hair and "pearly whites" several times as well...ending in "I love America." It was great how he seriously felt inferior to Mallory's "death glare" and stopped between each sentence to comment about her facial expressions and fear for his life. Apparently she is going to "kill him." Ha, so great. We love Ireland.

Day 9

2009-08-14T16:44:00.001-07:00

Waking up in the morning giggling after going to sleep giggling has to be the best thing ever. Hey Grainne..."Wanna play Barbies?" That is sooo funny.

Today has successfully been the wettest day of our Ireland experience. We left on a mission to get Grainne's pastry, fruit, and chocolate milk...got distracted with a couple other stops that turned out to be a terrible mistake. It poured rain the entire walk back...we were thoroughly drenched. To make things worse, we had a bus to catch in less than an hour...and there's almost no such thing as a dryer in this country. Considering how damp it is here, even on a sunny day or indoors, that is hard to believe. So we basically had no chance at getting dry again...said our goodbye's to Grainne :( ...and spent the next 3-4 hours sitting in wet clothes on a bus. Comfortable. The scenery was really beautiful, though, and we had our Ipod's to keep us sane. And...chocolate, of course. Kelly even saw some red deer, big antlers...pretty uncommon to see in Sligo apparently.

We were super happy to see Katie at the door when we arrived like two drown cats. Hot showers and to curl up on the couch in our pajamas with bowls of oatmeal (which we like to call porridge now) is really all we wanted.

Day 8

2009-08-13T21:21:00.000-07:00

Last night, we hung out with Grainne at Claire and Laura's with some of their friends...ordered Chinese take out and watched Bride Wars. The girls offered to let us stay there and a slumber party ensued.

This morning, we took off the the bus stop to check times to Donegal town...rumor had it there is a castle there, and we've been looking for one, so that sounded like a plan. The second we got the bus stop, the bus arrived...talk about good timing ;) It took about 1/2 hour to get there, and the castle is literally in the center of town, in plain sight. Not hard to find at all...but super cool. We spent a fair amount of time there, pretending we were princesses of medieval times waiting for our prince to come find us (who would have known he'd be waiting at the Ballyshannon bus depot instead?). These crazed fanatics decided ice cream would suffice, so we searched for one of the big plastic ice cream cone sculptures that are scattered across the country, and seem to be much easier to find when you're not looking for them. After being distracted by a few more of those tacky gift shops, we finally found heaven in a cone. It's funny because it actually tasted like real ice cream...like whipped cream, but frozen...like, ya know...ice CREAM...makes sense, right?

The bus was a little late, but in bus world that means right on time. It was fate, really. If the bus had been on time, I mean..."early"...then we may not have found the man of any girl in her right mind's dreams. We all know he wasn't real. He can't possibly have been. NO ONE is that beautiful in real life. Hmmm, maybe he was a total jerk or something...he has to have some flaw. Thanks to Mallory, we have documentation that there is a physical being who appears to be perfect. And no...she wasn't creepy about it, quite tactful, in fact. We needed proof, or no one would have believed "Pierre" exists. He does, ladies, and he's wandering around Bundoran. We think he might even call Spain his home. Go get 'em...we missed our chance.When we got back to the house, we laid down with Grainne and Nollie, giggled a bit, and fell asleep. We woke up, watched Notting Hill and ate the most insanely delicious frozen pizza known to man (I know "frozen pizza" and "insanely delicious" normally don't even come close to squeezing into the same sentence without the words ARE NOT in the middle...but trust us on this one. Incredible). The girls needed to clean up since they're heading out of town for the weekend, so we packed up and went back to "The Shack" with Grainne.

Day 6 & 7

2009-08-12T17:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the first day we've had with just complete garbage for weather. Pouring rain all flippin day! But did that keep us indoors all day? No...no, it didn't. We still walked 75 miles all around town soaked to the bone. And when we got sick of walking in the rain, we went into a pizza joint for lunch and waited an hour for the waitress to give us water and take our order. I'm sure she was just being considerate, thinking we needed time to dry off, and could just drink the water dripping off our sleeves or something. We did have empty glasses on the table at least...we could have just rung out our jackets into them, and come to think of it, we probably should have...that's a brilliant idea and we're just thinking of it now. Shoot. After the pizza, that did turn out to be delicious...but that we still didn't tip for...we headed back to Katie's.

Oh, before that we had made another stop at Aoife's that led to more ridiculous conversations...that should really be sent in as script for Family Guy. Ya know...one thing led to another...I guess you just had to have been there. Really, what's the point in even beginning a story if you're gonna end it in "I guess you just had to be there" or the main plot consists of "One thing led to another..." Anyone with that social capacity should not engage in story-telling or even speaking, for that matter. Just sayin...

Soooo...you can just skip that last paragraph in your memory, since it really meant nothing to anyone...we're back on track with the Kallory experience. Once we got to Katie's, we got our bags sorted while we waited for them to get back. Then Patrick so kindly let us hitch a ride with him to Bundoran (Donegal County). We got the privilege of staying at "The Shack" last night...rad little "house" with no kitchen and a moss-covered GIGANTIC weed whacker on the bathroom floor. I think it was placed there to distract from the curtainless shower and door that only closes with the help of your ENTIRE body weight. I do love the purple bedroom with matching purple sheets that Nollie had prepared for us. It's even better that it's actually his bedroom and it's always purple. Sweeeeeet. Oh, and the biggest wolf spider I've ever seen in my life:
This morning we decided to just take a cruise to see if we could find the house Grainne was staying in, but our attempt was unsuccessful, so we went in search of food instead. The Ceylon Cafe was delicious...and then we promptly visited every gift shop every other door all the way to the end of town...Simply to realize that we don't wanna get anyone anything because, quite frankly, we wouldn't want any of this $h!# either. Who wants a stuffed leprechaun with an embroidered shamrock on his tophat that says "Souvenir from Ireland" on it? Because we wouldn't have known otherwise, right? Gosh, we American's aren't THAT stupid, are we?! Actually, on second thought...we probably are...the other American's we've seen here have stuck out like sore thumbs with their khaki's, baseball caps, Disneyland or I <3>out 20 minutes down the road we decided she was a liar and it wasn't worth it to continue. Before turning back to head to town we saw a cemetery off the road and up a hill a bit that needed to be explored. After doings so for a few minutes and taking some pictures we started to feel a little creeped out and left.

Back in town, we decided to try one more time to find the house Grainne was staying at...we had visited last night for a second, but couldn't possibly have found our way back without Ryan (the hippie) and his ridiculous excuse for directions. After almost getting lost a second time, Cillain and Claire were driving by and spotted us so they gave us a ride to the house. Thank goodness, we were so happy to finally see Grainne again :)

Day 5

2009-08-11T11:05:00.000-07:00

The day began when we met Grainne and her mother for lunch at a little American restaurant called Rodeo. Kelly got "American Style" pancakes which, ironically ended up tasting a lot better than actual American pancakes. Then we met up with the group of people Grainne's going to be housing with next semester and did some shopping...another stop at Penney's and an almost equally fabulous store called New Look. Why don't we have these stores in the states? Life is less than perfect without them. They took off to look at a house they want to rent, so we went back to Katie's and relaxed till Patrick got back so we could go to Tesco's for food and make fajitas for dinner...pretty much awesome.

After dinner, we went for a walk over to Salt Hill to visit Aoife for a bit and met some more of their friends and proceeded to discuss all the differences in our every-day speech and slang, for example...cupboard and press...same thing, hmmm...make sense??? Nope. Didn't think so. And really...what IS the crack?!?! After some fun and laughs there, we walked along the road on the coast (in the dark...pitch black ocean, I'm sure it would have been beautiful with night vision goggles). Even though we couldn't really see the bay or anything, we did see some sweet B&B's...one with an awesome old Bentley in the drive. Good to see that the Irish don't flaunt their money like the Americans do ;)

Day 3,4 (Sat/Sun)

2009-08-10T03:14:00.000-07:00

After spending the day in with Grainne and attempting to get fresh vegetables from the farm down the road (they were closed) we caught a ride to Galway with Fionnala's friend that had come up to visit. She dropped us off in front of the St. Nicholas Church to wait for Katie. We then walked back through town to her apartment to put our bags down then head over to Tesco's (grocery store) to get some chicken for dinner. Katie made this amazing chicken curry dish for us and we couldn't have been more pleased. It was no warm water and frozen bananas, but it was pretty good.This morning Katie woke us up bright and early at 10 so we could walk down to Church lane and she could show us the market before she had to go to work. It was just setting up as we got there so we didn't see too much. While she was working we wandered around town for hours soaking up the street life and falling in love with every other guy we saw. We also did a little bit of shopping. There is this beyond amazing store called Penney's where they have the cutest clothes for like 3 euro!! Ya we spent a lot of time there. And of course Mallory had to stop in any and every CD store we saw. After Katie got off work we took her out to dinner at this cute Italian place down Quay St. for being so awesome and letting us crash on her couch for a few days.Towards the end of the day it started raining quite a bit, but that didn't stop us from experiencing some Galway nightlife. We borrowed some umbrellas from Katie's boyfriend Patrick and walked down to the Spanish Arches bar around 11:30. Alale, a traditional Irish band, was finishing up their set. It was pretty fun music so we both bought a copy of their CD. Our walk home was quite the fun one seeing as we hardly walked two blocks before two drunk guys had an arm around each of us. We got rid of them just in time to be hit on by some creepy 40 year old. Not to worry though, we made it home safely and read ourselves to sleep.

Day Two

2009-08-07T17:17:00.000-07:00

We still haven't recovered from the jetlag, since we didn't wake up till noon again today and could have slept even longer. The fact that we stayed up till after 1:00 AM playing Balderdash last night may not have helped. Kelly's first time playing and she won...even after Grainne was making a spectacle of the whole thing..."let's see how the American's are"...guess we showed her! haha did anyone know that it's a Utah law that all birds have the right-of-way on all highways? Hmmm...who would have thought!?!

Before that victorious game, we went for a walk with the two "white" dogs called Charlie and Willow. Considering that we both hate dogs, it was quite the highlight of the evening. Stinky breath is all I have to say about dogs. We did walk to an adorable cottage down the road...thatch roof and red door...amazing. Then took the pathway down to the river where some boats were docked. The dogs almost attacked a guy and his golden retriever on the way down haha.

Yesterday, Fionnuala had gotten us tickets for the Wassa Wassa drumming workshop at The Dock, a venue in Carrick, for this afternoon. The teacher was an Irish man who had spent 13 years studying the different instruments and music/dance art forms in Africa and was very charismatic. The class was filled with a random assortment of people...from small children, to musicians, to eccentric old German women who get really into drumming...even closed her eyes to feel the beat a bit better during her "solo." During this class, we both decided that it's better to watch drummers than to attempt the art ourselves...let's be honest, we all know the drummer's the hottest band member 90% of the time anyway.

Day One

2009-08-06T21:31:00.000-07:00

We are sitting on a short stone wall waiting for Grainne and Fionnuala to come back and retrieve us from what remains of Boyle Abbey. An old ruins from the 1100's, which is currently being partially restored. Though not much of it is left, it's amazing what is still in tact, and was incredible to see. Prior to this educational experience, we went to the farmers market in Carrick to pick up some fresh fish and veggies (one of which looked like some kind of sea urchin but tasted like cauliflower) and went for a walk along the River Shannon. The whole getting used to cars driving on the other side of the road is gonna take Kelly a while longer...as she almost killed herself (with a giant truck) for only looking one way...the "American" way...before crossing the street. A street where jaywalking doesn't exist. Cross wherever you like...Love it!

We like to consider today our "first day" in Ireland, although we arrived yesterday to the welcoming arms of Grainne and her mother (Fionnuala). Grainne was standing there with crutches, clutching a sign her mother's students had made for our arrival. After our long trip to the car (since Grainne's basically a cripple, ha poor thing) we started for home, making a quick stop at Liffey Valley Shopping Center in Dublin for some Starbucks (Irish, right?) and some new shoes for Grainne...all her shoes were stolen by her crazy French roommates during her last semester in Toulouse. When we got to their cute little house way out in the countryside of County Roscommon, in a small town called Roosky, Fionnuala cooked us a traditional Irish breakfast of eggs, sausage, soda bread, rashers, and black and white pudding...aka pigs blood and guts. No wonder they wouldn't tell us what it consisted of until after complete consumption. haha. Then...we promptly slept till noon today...just in time for the market and other previously mentioned events.

Start of Journey

2009-08-05T06:30:00.000-07:00

It's 6:30 in the morning, Ireland time, (which is 7 hours ahead of Salt Lake City and, therefore, 8 hours ahead of Seattle). We have just finished our feast of cold banana's and warm water, 1.75 oz 166 calorie "blueberry muffin" with a side of 3 oz of orange juice. We simply couldn't be more satisfied. Really, Delta really should consider finding a better meal planner. We are about an hour away from landing in Dublin, and have successfully irritated everyone within earshot with non-stop laughter and the best card game ever...speed (ok, we really did attempt to stifle our outbursts...but we all know that actually makes it worse).

The snotty 7 1/2 year old, perfectly matching (with Gucci bags), New Yorker twins and their gorgeous and extremely stuck up mother were quite the entertainment in the Salt Lake airport. As they sat there, perfectly coiffed and reading the latest In Style and Makeover magazines, a man 4 seats down sneezed...and their mother promptly flipped out and hurriedly "protected" her children from the cancerous flesh eating disease spreading quickly from the mans mouth and nose (mind you, those public airport seats are sanitized on a very regular basis...in which, you need not worry about germs AT ALL until you see them spraying. Otherwise, they're non-existant...or so they're led to believe in the Big Apple). Seriously!?!