London Calling

So this weekend we took our "BIG" trip to London, sponsored by API. Without a doubt, this was my favorite weekend here. London is a gorgeous city, full of history and promise. They're in the process of remodeling the city for the Olympics this summer so there are crazy amounts of construction going on but it still was the most amazing weekend. I'll give you the highlights.

Day 1: Well, really it was just a night. We got there around five and immediately went on a walking tour to get acquainted with city. API got us tickets to go on the London Eye that night and it was amazing. You could see the entire city lit up and it barely felt like we were moving. It was beautiful, and when we were getting off we saw a proposal, so I guess it's a popular place for that too. By that point it was late, none of us had eaten and we all know how pleasant I am without eating all day. So we stumbled into the pub nearest our hotel. It just happened to be the Sherlock Holmes Pub! Maybe it's cause I was starving, but the beef and potato pie I had was the best food in the world.

Day 2: So very late on Friday night, Brendan randomly popped the question "Would you be interested in seeing Wicked tomorrow night?". My answer was anything but casual, and involved lots of jumping up and down. So Colleen and I looked it up, and found out that if you got to the box office the morning of a show, you could get rush tickets (front row tickets for dirt cheap). Saturday morning Brendan, Sarah, Colleen and I woke up bright and early and walked across the very quiet and still city and stood in line to get us some Wicked tickets. Sarah captured the morning perfectly in this picture. It wasn't a bad walk and the fresh air and sunshine was really nice. End of story, we got center stage front row tickets for 40$. AHHHHHHHHH!

The rest of the day was spent doing typical tourist stuff. I spent a good chunk of the day in the Tower of London, which I loved. It was really cool to see all of the history there and how well it's been preserved. I remember when I was in like fifth grade I got into this reading phase where I read a TON of books centering around people escaping from the tower, or plotting against the king. 

Then I walked across the top of the Tower Bridge with my buddy for the day Brendan. It was something he had always wanted to do and I thought it was actually really cool to see the city from that level as well.

After catching the hop-on-hop-off bus that API had given us tickets to, we rode through the city and saw the outside of Westminster Abbey...sadly it was closed on weekends to tourists so we couldn't go in. But it was a beautiful piece of architecture and I'm not exactly bummed I didn't go in. Since we didn't stop there we had more time in Hyde Park/ Kensington Gardens. It was a beautiful day and Brendan and I had a great time together.

That night we went to Wicked, and it was amazing. Literally, the best thing ever. I saw it in highschool with my family but we were far back and I didn't have my glasses. This time, I was front and center and did have my glasses (even though I didn't need them). I cried multiple times, and the woman who played Elphaba was without a doubt the best I've heard her. Possibly better than Idina Menzel, which is hard to beat. But the funniest thing I found was that I had forgotten about the fact that they would have British accents. So some of the lines were off, but it was nothing less than phenomenal.

Day 3: We were leaving at 11 on Sunday so once again we made it an early morning, this time to venture into Harry Potter. I told myself I would refuse to leave if I didn't get to go to Platform 9 3/4 so I made it happen.  That was the highlight of Sunday. Because we spent the rest of the day in the airport watching our flight get more and more delayed. We got there at 12:00 and didn't fly out til 7:40. Luckily I brought my homework so I wasn't too down about the delay, it just ended up being a long day.

Overall, I loved London. It was a city I felt like I could go back to a million times and still find something new to do. In fact, I decided that I was going to go back in a couple of weeks and do the Shakespeare side of it, as well as visiting Stonehenge. 

Joyfully Yours,

K

Wanted: Someone with skills in time travel

If you ever want to know how to make my entire world flip upside down and send me into a complete emotional breakdown, schedule two of the classes I need to graduate at the same time and watch me try to make my schedule. Not a happy girl tonight.

 Just to let you envision:


step 1: realizing two classes, both essential to different majors, are scheduled at the same time. ( i know, it's not really their fault, i'm just a special exception but it's still world rocking)

how dare they?!

step 2: thinking of all the different ways I can trick my way into both classes, without having to push back my graduation date. 

I'm not going to be able to do this!!!

step 3: having it finally sink in that there really isn't another option. (if you haven't heard, i don't particularly enjoy college, and have been working my butt off so i can graduate on time even though i transfered AND went abroad)

i'm not going to be able to do this.

stay tuned...

k

Relaxation, here I come!

This weekend Colleen, Molly, Sarah and I travelled into the mountains of Wicklow to have a relaxing stay at the Pinewood Lodge Bed and Breakfast. It was without a doubt, the most relaxing, silly and fun weekend I have had in this country. We saw castles, and towers, and churches, and sheep, and fields and finally molly sarah and I got our irish sweaters! The town we stayed in was Glendalough, and within the town (in the national park) there is a tower that the Book of Kells was kept in during the monastic times. The monks would stay up in their tower and pour hot oil down on the vikings as they were attacking. And Braveheart was filmed in the town. So our middle of nowhere-picked randomly small town was actually a secret tourist spot. Just our luck! But it was a really nice and quiet weekend none the less.

happy campers

 There isn't a long blog post to go with this, cause I don't think I really could explain a relaxing weekend in the country with my words. So I thought I'd just share some of the pictures from this weekend, so you'd get a sense of my life. Also, after this Thursday, I am officially halfway through my semester, with only six more weeks of classes. Crazy right? Before I know it I'll be flying back into the snow. I can't wait.

it only makes me miss home more

look! marshmellows are black here

cool view by sarah from inside the church

rapunzel rapunzel let down your long hair

just some local peaceful monks in the monastic city

yet another great shot by miss sarah

my bed and breakfast crew

sunshine makes me happy

a river runs through it. literally, through
the park

a haunting view of glendalough

what!? sheep in ireland!

molly's joke was hilarious apparently

wonderful sculpture in the woods, reminds me of you dad

pretty waterfalls

shamrocks- just for you grandpa

a fairy house, hidden in the woods

sweet depth perception, don't cha think?

just pretend molly's in the air

i love the grave markers here

what's the main color in ireland again?

you have NO idea how hard it was getting us all up
in that tree.

sarah is just so artsy fartsy. i had to steal a bunch of her pictures

intense conversations while we walked

did i mention it was pouring?

we travel around ireland by sitting on the sides of roads and
wishing we were somewhere else. you should try it
sometime

That's about all for now folks, next weekend there are no plans as of yet, but i'm sure I'll find some. For now I'll just wear my new sweater and be a happy camper...well, as happy as you can be in a country full of fields and rain.

Always thinking of my green mountains,

K

i swear, one of these days i'm just gonna put a picture of vt on here.
colleen took this lovely panoramic

Floozies in Jacuzzi's

Okay, so the tittle is really misleading (joining the one about the costello's...i forgot to mention the relevance in that blog). I failed to obtain a picture of the famous statue "Floozie in the Jacuzzi", but I am a girl of modern technology so for those of you who don't know of her, to your left is the famous statue of a woman sitting in a fountain (thank you google). Located in Dublin, Ireland this statue is a representation of Anna Livia- who is the female embodiment of the River Liffey (which runs through downtown Dublin). Wow, I'm just loving parentheses.

Anywho! If you couldn't tell from the wonderful hook I gave you in that last paragraph- we went to Dublin last weekend! It took me a good three days to put my pictures on my computer and snag a few (like 50) from the lovely Colleen. Alas, I wasn't a big fan of Dublin and therefore didn't feel the pull to blog about it. But I think I'm gonna look back years from now and love how I've blogged about every weekend so I guess I'll tell you about Dublin.

I felt you deserved a picture after so much text:
Sarah, Colleen, Molly and I at Whelans

It was DISGUSTING. Honestly, I am no city girl, Burlington is too big for me. But Dublin was filled with rubbish and homeless people and run down buildings. The river was a nasty brown color and the trash actually floated on top of the water...ew. I'm glad I went, if only to learn that I'll never go again. But API had sponsored this trip and I actually really liked how they did it. We were provided with hop-on/hop-off bus passes for a tour bus that went to the major tourist locations. Thats how, in about 24 hours, I got to see: The Guinness Storehouse (and do the tour), the President's House, Phoenix Park, Kilmainham Gaol, The Irish Writer's Museum, Remembrance Park, The James Joyce House, and the Book of Kells. We also went to Whelan's Pub, which if you've ever seen P.S. I Love You is the pub where Holly and Gerry first meet. It was a packed weekend, and I feel like I saw everything I would ever need to see in Dublin...except for the Wax Museum, the Zoo and the National Leprechaun Museum, but I think I'll live.

Let's start with Guinness shall we? Cause that's where we went first.

This is the Guinness Factory from the outside. It shows just how nasty Dublin is, and makes me feel kinda bad for enjoying the tour and factory so much. But hey, I got a pint and a half out of it for free, Arthur Guinness was actually a great man who did a lot for the city, and Dublin would still be shitty without the added smoke. So let's move on to the cooler side of it.

The Guinness tour took us about 2 hours to wander through and feel like we had seen all there was to see. It was fantastic. We learned how the beer is brewed, how to pour the perfect pint, what advertising has looked like over the years, and many other things that I'm sure I won't find any use for later in life. But at the ripe old age of 20, I find the production of beer really cool. And you could tell that everyone I was with thought it was pretty sweet as well. I can now honestly say that I enjoy a pint of Guinness, but I know it'll change the minute I hit the states and it's not freshly brewed and on tap. Spoiled Irish.

Here are some pictures from the tour that I especially enjoyed.

there's poetry in a pint of guinness

i like to pretend everyone celebrates
my birthday with me

so mature :) touring a beer factory

these are re-usable. cool

there's beer and there is guinness.

I really enjoyed my tour, and I think it was the people I went with that helped. Colleen and Megan were really interested in the process too and walked slowly through the museum with me.



That was all we did for one day.






The next day was the day I did everything else. Crazy right?

K, so Kilmainham Gaol was my absolute favorite thing to tour, and I think I got some of my dads "history buff"-ness in my genes because the story behind this place really moves me. If you know anything about Irish History, you know about the 1916 Easter Rising. Basically, England was in control of Ireland, and some men got the idea in their heads that they wanted to run their own country...crazy right? So they formed a rebellion and kinda a guerilla army and tried to fight for their country. Didn't go so well. The seven leaders were put in Kilmainham Gaol and executed. The British Government didn't really think through the impact that executing seven influencial men in Ireland would have, and the people actually united against the English and that sparked Irelands Civil war and blah blah blah from there you can look it up. We went to Kilmainham and took a tour and learned the stories of these men, and at the end I felt as if I had been given enough information to take a college final on the subject and actually be able to pass it. Here are some pictures from that:

No Surrender.

"Darling Grace, You will marry me and nobody else.
I have been a damned fool and a blind imbecile
but thank god i see. I love you and you only and will
never love anyone else. Your lover, Joe"

One of the stories that we were told was of Joseph Plunkett and Grace Gifford. Joseph was one of the leaders in the Easter rising and Grace was the girl he loved. When he was put in jail, and sentenced to be executed, he wrote to Grace and asked her to marry him. She bought her own ring, raced to cell and they were married on May 3. The next morning, Joseph was brought out to the stone breakers yard and executed by firing squad. Grace was widowed within 24 hours of her marriage.  Their story was heartbreaking, and yet their love was inspiring. Above is the letter Joseph wrote to Grace expressing his love. I wish romance like that was still alive today. I love you danny, but I have yet to hear you express you love in such a powerful way.

After Kilmainham Gaol we went on a bit of a literary binge, and visited the National Writer's Museum and the James Joyce Centre. The Writer's Museum was a HUGE let down, if only in the aspect that I had just been on two fantastic tours and this was more of a "individual audio led tour" through rooms with fantastically old architecture and old books... Nana I think you would have loved it. I however, was not enthralled...until  I found the children's room!

Next we visited the James Joyce Center, and that was more of along the lines of the tours I went on previously. It was colorful and engaging and meant for inquiring young minds like ours. Unfortunately, we couldn't spend as much time as I would have liked there because the bus left at four and we still had to see the Book of Kells!

james joyce

So Colleen and I hurried over to Trinity, got stuck staring at the beauty of the quad, remembered why we were there and waltzed in to see the infamous book. It was, without a doubt, the most anticlimactic moment of all. Sure there was a cool museum, telling you the history of the book and how it was made and interesting facts, but then you just walked up a short ramp and BAM here's a darkened room with a glass table in the middle with a million other tourists around it.
You are not allowed to take pictures of the book of Kells or of the Long Room, so the following pictures only exist because of magic.

I can understand not taking pictures of the book due to the fact that it's so old and the flash can damage the pages, but I'm not quite sure why you're not allowed to take pictures in the library. I loved being in the library but it also made me truly sad to see all of those books just sitting on a shelf. My professor in Stories of Medival Wales (fav class by the way) made a really good point when he was explaining to us why only parts of the stories and certain ones have made it down to us today.

He said that "The stories that we do not know of, those that have been destroyed by time, are most likely the best. They were lost by the optimum means possible. Stories that do not make it down to us are most likely ruined because of use. Because people read them. That's the best way to ruin a book- by reading the stories within." The books in the ancient library at Trinity will likely be with us for a while, yet there are very few- if any- people who know what the stories are. It was sad to me to walk through a large library such as this one and see dust on every book.                 Books are written to be read.


One other place we got the privilege to view was St. Patrick's Cathedral. I'm not a particularly religious person, yet being inside this cathedral was one of the most spiritual events I have ever experienced. Maybe it's something about the architecture, or the serene silence but this was a church I could worship in.


Jonathan Swift is also buried within this cathedral, and as a favor to Danny (but I loved it as well) I went and visited/posed with his bust right next to his plot. There was a lot of history in this cathedral, and there were lots of ancient crosses on raw stone that had been discovered underneath the foundations. I'm really glad that I got to go see this beautiful cathedral and maybe it has something to do with st. patrick being special to me, but I really connected inside. It was ironic to me that we could take pictures inside this place of worship yet not in the library. I tried to be respectful with my pictures, but I've gotten used to the fact that I will always be a tourist.

some very dead, sad flowers

cool stone cross

kegs are used for everything

beautiful marble statues lined the hall

Danny- meet Jonathan Swift.

apparently he was bald.

Thus ends my adventure to Dublin. Like I said- no zoo, or wax museum or national leprechaun museum, but I feel accomplished and have no desire to return. This weekend I venture off to the Wicklow Mountains (another place mentioned in P.S. I Love You) to a quaint B&B for some pure relaxation time. I'm sure that blog will come sooner than this one did.

Forever yours,
K


P.S.- Did I forget to mention I found the Disney store?