You expect me to pay half?!?!

3-ish weeks ago my roommate Ally and Maggie and I made a trip to London. It was Maggie's idea that was inspired by our trip to Dublin to go and see the Walk the Moon concert. Her all time favorite band, The Avett Brothers, was playing in London on a Thursday night and she figured that if I could get people to go to Dublin for a concert, she could get people to go to London for a concert. Well, I wasn't a hard one to convince since she suggested we make a weekend of it and it was Ally's birthday weekend. I also figured that even though I have plans to go with da schwester during the summer, London is like New York City in the sense that you could spend a very very vey long time and butt loads of money and still not have seen everything it has to offer.

So we bought all our tickets and were all excited until someone realized...crap..our flights booked for home don't come in until 9 pm on March 17th...St Patrick's Day. Scrambling to fix our mistake since there was NO WAY we were missing all of St Paddy's in Ireland, we shelled out the extra cash to switch our flights earlier.

We decided to leave early Thursday morning since we all had class Wednesday (I had some on Thursday as well but I figured it was an acceptable excuse to skip class). And by early, I'm not being a whiney college student who thinks getting up at 8 is early (although it is). We were up at 4:30 in the morning to get a 5 o'clock cab to the airport for a 7AM flight. We knew we'd be miserable about it, but we wanted to squeeze as much into the weekend as possible.

Our first mission upon arriving in London was figuring out the Tube/bus system and getting to our hostel. It's actually quite an easy system once you get settled into it, but getting started is the problem. When trying to figure out how to buy tickets, we were looking at the machines like the moneys looked at the rock in 2001 A Space Odyssey. We finally gave up and went to a ticket booth in a train station and asked for and Oyster card, which is what we though we needed. It's a reusable, reload-able card that seemed pretty easy to use. The guy helping us got very upset at that "No no no! That is not what you want!"...um ok? After his long rant about how awful the Oyster card is and how badly it rips people off, he set us up with 3 day passes. They were not only infinitely cheaper and gave us unlimited travel each day, but also got us 2 for 1 ticket prices at big attractions. So for everyone who doesn't like to ask for help, you go ahead! I'll sit back and watch happily with my full wallet.

We decided to split the cost of the discounted tickets, but since there were 3 of us, it got kinda confusing at times. It reminded me of a hilarious story involving my parents and Uncle Steve splitting costs 3-ways while in Austria many eons ago when my dad was studying abroad in Graz. One particular night, it appeared as if Stevie boy, a notorious miser among a family of penny pinchers (myself included), was having a bad dream in which he exclaimed "You expect me to pay half?!?!" clearly not happy with whatever monetary arrangements were being made in his dream. Oh Uncle Steve. Your ridiculousness is bringing laughter clear across oceans.

We finally found our way to the hostel, which was in a very pretty area of London:

And it was right next to Kensington Gardens and super close to a Tube stop. The place had a "free bread" policy which was basically, they always had too much bread and so we were allowed to help ourselves to as much of it as we wanted at any time of day. Truly, the only downfall of the place was that our room was on the 5th floor and there were no elevators. At least it kept us in shape (somewhat).

We figured we had time to do some sightseeing before needing to head off to the concert so we set right off. Our first stop was the London Eye:

Yes it is just a big ferris wheel, but you get some AWESOME views of the city. We also had some really great weather this first day so that definitely made it worth it.

The Jubilee Bridge (creatively) in honor of da Queen's Jubilee.

Hmmm...I don't think rivers are really supposed to be that...brown...

Love me some panorama!

We actually got better picture of Parliament when we got off and walked across the bridge:

And the ever present selfie:

And of course I (and Maggie apparently) couldn't pass up the ridiculous photo opportunities either:

The next Mumble Happy Feet ladies and gents.

London EYE Geddit? Geddit? Oh, I'm so clever.

After one last gander:

We decided to head back to the hostel to get ready for the concert. Apprently they were hot tickets to get since Maggie could only get the upper level tickets where there were seats (more like benches) instead of in the standing area below. It actually worked out well since our feet were killing us from all the walking earlier. And ya know, the whole being up since 4:30 in the morning thing too. It was a great concert too! 

The Avett Brothers are a bit like the US equivalent of Mumford and Sons with a bit more country vibe if anyone's interested. 

Finally, after a long day and experiencing the truly terrifying joy of being thrown into a new city, we made it back to the hostel in one piece. More or less. I've also realized that my entire summer will be perpetually spent in that terrifyingly joyful state of mind as not only will I be in a new city every other week, but most of them won't even speak the same language as me! Looks like I'm going to be a charades MASTER when I finally get home. 

Gimme MOHER! Gimme Gimme MOHER!

A few weekends ago (4 to be exact) we made a trip to Galway. Generally heralded as the quintessential Ireland experience, we couldn't live here for 5 months and not stop by. It's a city on the west coast of Ireland that's not quite as big as Cork, but still just as fun.

We arrived on Friday morning-ish and quickly realized that we, the wonderfully prepared travelers that we are, did not in fact have a good idea for what there was to do or what we wanted to do. We had gotten a few ideas beforehand, but as for planning it all out, nope. That didn't happen. So upon arrival we decided checking into our hostel and walking around for a bit was as good as it was going to get for the rest of the day. It saved us money on the bright side.

They have some interesting paintings on their storefronts, along the main pedestrian area:

with this one winning in the weird category:

 Also, since it's a sea/ocean/bay city, they have lots of waterfront, but sometimes not much stopping people from going over the edge into said waterfront. Luckily, they have handy signs like these to help out:

God forbid you car falls into a sea of bacon strips. Cuz THAT would be awful.

It really is a very pretty town just walking around and along the shore:

 I want to paint my house ALL THE COLORS!

Go home boat! You're too tipsy! (hardy har har I'm so funny)

We decided to walk out to the lighthouse:

which was actually miles away, but since we had nothing better to do, we figured it would kill time. We even decided to walk along the beach for a bit of it:

aaaaand there's Maggie off by herself again...yup.

Later that night, we finally decided that the next day, we wanted to go and visit the Cliffs of Moher (pronounced more). We saw a bunch of pamphlets in the hostels about bus tours going there everyday so we decided that would be easiest considering it takes about an hour to get there.

Well, thanks to many misunderstandings and a stroke of good luck on our part, we ended up getting our tour for free! We booked our tickets at the hostels and the guy said we should give the slip of paper to the tour people and pay before we got on the bus. When we got there bright and early the next morning and handed them the slip, they just ushered us right onto the bus without asking for any kind of payment. We of course weren't going to bring up the fact that we owed them about €20 as they seemed to be doing just fine business-wise without it. We honestly would've paid, but there was also the problem of not knowing who the hell to give money to since there were lots of people directing everyone about.

The tour ended up being awesome and we had phenomenal weather the entire day. The first part of the tour was just driving out to the area but our bus driver kept a running commentary. He kept asking the bus questions and we were the only ones to actually answer him. He was probably thankful while everyone else probably thought we were the "obnoxious Americans". Whatever, we were having a good time. And Kate was obviously having a good time being creepy in photos:

Our first stop was at the Burren which is this area near the coast that's basically all rocks and whatever can grow on rocks. We had a hiking tour, which compared to previous hikes was really more of a walk, but our guides were HILARIOUS. This is one of them:

They were a pair of cousins with absolutely no filter and no mercy when it comes to making jokes...kinda how I'd imagine a tour would go if me and my cousins were to run tours. This one informed us that his name, Darragh, meant "tall, strong, oak tree" while his cousin's name, Bert, probably meant something which, while hilarious, I will not repeat to keep this blog PG. Anyways, it may sound really boring with just rocks and flowers, but it was beautiful and once we were at the top of one of the hills we could see all the way to the water.

Near the top of the hill (they called it a mountain, pffft they wish) there was a fairy fort. Thanks to our folklore class, all of us knew what it was when we came across it and why random bits of stuff was tied all over the branches of the tree:

It was thought that if you tied something to the tree, you would be tying your "problem" to the tree and be leaving it behind once you left. It was pretty cool seeing one outside of a power point slide during lecture and to know that, oh hey, these things actually exist. They're not as common nowadays, but obviously still around.

It was also a great point for pictures so we asked our tour guide to take some for us. For reasons I still don't really understand, he insisted we take a "sad" picture:

to compare with our happy picture:

After that we made the trek back with beautiful views the whole time. Darragh said that the weather can be so crappy year round that they only get days like the one we had a few times a year and that we were lucky.

Considering the spectacular views we had and experiencing some of the said crappy weather, I'd agree with that.

We were then invited to "Granny Cottage":

to have some home baked goods (for a price of course). We honestly didn't mind paying because a) it was basically our lunch, and b) we hadn't paid for anything else that day. Along the way, we all noticed this house:

which, at first glance, we thought was thatched but turned out to have a roof of grass. Like actual live growing grass. Talk about living in the shire.

We eventually parted ways and after some confusion with the buses, we finally made our way to the Cliffs of Moher. It doesn't look like much when you pull up, you can't actually even see the ocean well from the parking lot. But once you walk along the path, OH MAH GAWD it is an INCREDIBLE view:

You can't even really see the people on top in these pictures, that's how ginormous these cliffs are. Also fun fact, the cliffs were used for filming the cave scenes for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. My not-so-inner Harry Potter nerd was overly excited. 

At certain points along the path, some parts are blocked from the edge:

and others are not. Regardless, there are tons of signs that I find hilarious warning to not get too close to the edge:

 So course what to I do:

We eventually did get to the part that's just open so we had to take the obligatory "oops. i fell off the cliff" picture:

Many a Facebook profile pictures were taken that day. At this point, we also had to do our customary jumping picture. After many failed attempts, we finally got it:

Thankfully, we did not try for a jumping off the cliffs picture. We did try to get someone to take a group picture of all of us, instead of making Trevor take all the pictures and not be in any, but we make the mistake of asking a little old lady who I don't think spoke English, and was awful at working a digital camera let alone taking pictures. I'm not even putting them up since they were so bad but she gets an A for effort and friendliness. 

We left to go and get our actual lunch at some random pub, but once we started winding our way back to Galway along the coast, the weather turned sour. This actually was a good thing since we saw the most amazing rainbows ever since getting there:

 This one was so incredible, we could see both ends of the arc and it was a double. It also spanned the road so it looked like we were constantly driving through it:

We made a quick stopping point at Dunguaire Castle on the way back which was a cool place just to walk around for a few minutes:

After that, we truly were headed home. We did tip the bus driver at the end since he was funny and informative and had put up with our obnoxious selves. We also figured we should since we hadn't actually paid for the tour. 

We decided the next day, our last day, to walk around the other parts of Galway we hadn't seen on Friday. We figured most thing would be closed since it was a Sunday, but it was still pretty bustling in places. We stumbled across more weird sign things:

I don't exactly know what it is but apparently Granny is not pleased with it.

We stopped by the big cathedral of the city:

but I forget the name of it. Churches are not my strong point.

We also decided to take a gander at the National University of Ireland, Galway. I actually have met a few people that go there since that's where API sends people who want to study in Galway.

 They have some impressive building that rival our own even:

 And a quad to rival our own as well:

Once we had our fill, we decided to head back to the bus station so we could catch the bus back to Cork and still get back at a reasonable time (Galway is 4 hours away).

So there ye have it! Galway! I know I'm terribly behind on posts (considering this happened a month ago...whoops) so I'll be catching up on them this week. To prevent an information overload, I'll try and only post one a day so you're not bombarded with 10 gigantic post all at once and can read them at a more leisurely pace. I'll also try and make them not as gigantic as this one. Good on ya for sticking through it all.