I never thought about travelling outside of the UK while I was here. I realize now that this is something a lot of people planned on doing when they were thinking of places to study abroad. After all, Europe’s only a hop, skip, and three-to-five hour plane ride away. Classes still matter but the homework load is roughly ten times lighter than I’m personally used to, and for a lot of people on this program their grades don’t affect their GPA. That’s a pretty sweet deal if you decide you want to pop over to Italy for the weekend.
I decided to travel to the beach this weekend. Baby steps.
Actually, I went to two beaches this weekend. I went to Dun Laoghaire (“Dun Leery”) and Howth (rhymes with “oath”), villages respectively to the south and to the north of Dublin city.
Dun Laoghaire was really easy to get to! I’m figuring out the bus system here and there’s a city bus that goes there directly.
It looked like it was sunset all the time there, which was kind of strange because we got to Dun Laoghaire around noon. We wandered out to the lighthouse, one of the two that Dun Laoghaire has. They said there’d be ice cream there but they lied.
All in all, it was nice to get out of the city, smell salt, and feel the wind. It started raining just as we left, too, so it was good timing on our part!
The next day, I had a full Irish breakfast before I took the DART (a train for short distances north or south of Dublin city) to Howth. This is what it looks like (at least at the restaurant where we went):
This consists of two slices of toast, a poached egg, a sausage, a mushroom, a tomato, two slices of Irish bacon (somewhere between Amurikan bacon and Canadian bacon, so it’s tolerable), black pudding (don’t look at that link if you’re vegetarian or disgusted by animal products), white pudding, and you can’t see it but there’s something I think was called Irish soda bread but I kept calling Lambis bread because I like LotR and I think I’m hilarious. Guess what?
I ate it all. It got difficult towards the end but I did it. So long as I didn’t think about it, the black pudding was delicious. It was a heavy start to the day but I’m glad I tried it at least once.
Howth has an outdoor farmer’s market on Sundays and oh my goodness, the goodies they had to offer. They had something called chimney cake that was amazing–a long loop of pastry with cinnamon sugar on it. Delicious! This is one of my flatmates eating hers (with apple cider that was lava-hot):
We barely made it out of Howth alive, though. We were walking down the street when it started pouring. The wind was actually screaming, it was so strong! I was laughing my head off because I love storms. This is the only picture of Howth itself that I managed to get before we were attacked by the weather:
It has the same weird sunset kind of lighting. I wonder if that’s normal in Ireland. I’m definitely going back, though. There’s a ferry you can take to a castle on an island and I still have yet to touch the sea here. I love the beach so it was delightful to experience an Irish coast. Two excellent day trips, one after the other! And next weekend, I’m going to London! I don’t plan to make travel a habit here but I want to see this country (and the one just over there, to the right, the big one with all the actors and authors in it).