Our trip to Ireland

Well, we made it back unscathed. Back to balmy, humid London. The weather in Ireland was a lot nicer, between 20-24 degrees and sunny most days. It rained just as we were flying out of Dublin, heading back home. Well it wouldn't have been Ireland without rain, would it?

Day 1

We go straight from work to Heathrow to fly to Dublin. A young bloke sits down next to us and sees our passports. In a strong Irish accent (which at times we struggled to understand as he mumbled and talked fast) he told us that he had been living in Brisbane for 18 months and that he was off home for a week to surprise his Mum. It was a last minute decision and the flights cost him $3K AUD. He was a great laugh and made the trip go fast (it was under an hour anyway). His advice was to get out of Dublin as soon as we could and see the rest of the country, as 'Dublin is too feckin expensive'. Another piece of advice was to never ask anyone in Ireland to say 'to be sure, to be sure' or 'thirty three and a third'. Apparently in all the time he has spent in Australia, everyone thinks they are hilarious by asking him to say these things. We promised him we wouldn't and said that Aussies couldn't really talk, as we have a funny enough accent as it is. He responded in a broad Aussie accent with 'Fair dinkum! F**kin' oath!' that had us in stitches. I love Irish people.

It was late when we got into Dublin, so it was straight to the hotel and bed for a big day planned tomorrow.

Day 2

Was spent exploring Dublin and a tour of the Guinness storehouse (NB is now addicted to the black stuff - apparently it makes you strong). One of my Irish workmates had told me that Riverdance was on when we were in Dublin, so I bought tickets just before we left. The show was fantastic, those dancers are just amazing.

Day 3

Our last day in Dublin was definitely one of the best days of the whole trip. It included a tour of Kilmainham Gaol and then a pint at O'Donohues, the oldest pub in Dublin. We were told that in this pub they get all different traditional Irish musicians come along with their instruments at any time of the afternoon and they basically just have jam sessions together. The musicians may not know each other and they don't get paid. They just get all their drinks provided while they play. There were no musicians when we got there, but as soon as the pints were poured and we got a seat, a fiddle player and a guitarist showed up. The guitarist had the most fantastic voice and we just soaked up the atmosphere for the afternoon. It was the same Irish friend from work who told us about this place and fortunately it did not seem to be in any guidebooks like Lonely Planet, so it was just us and a few locals and not overrun with tourists. It was a beautiful sunny Sunday afternoon, so we made sure we still got out and enjoyed the sunshine as well.

Day 4

A 5am start with a crazy cabbie to get to the airport for our flight to Kerry, in south west Ireland. We could have caught a train, but it would have meant changing trains halfway through and the connecting trains are not reliable and only have about 3 or 4 run per day. The train tickets were also double the price of an airline fare. So, not very carbon conscious of us, but oh well. When I saw the plane we were going on, I certainly wished for that train. The thing had propellers! We were going in a cessna! I was freaking out. NB just scoffed at me and told me it was a fokker, not a cessna. I didn't care what the fokk it was, I was freaked out. I was ready the kiss the ground when we landed an hour later. We picked up our hire car at Kerry Airport (A Peugeot 308 with only 1500kms on the clock, so it still smelt brand new) and were on our way to tour the 'Ring of Kerry'. We stayed in a little town called Killarney on our first night and did about 12-15kms of walking through the national park.

Day 5

We left our little B&B in Killarney and then headed to a town called Dingle. We took the sat nav with us and as per usual ended up in farmers yards and in people's driveways because of that bloody thing. The thing was, we noticed that none of the signs for Dingle were in English, they were all in Gaelic, along with other towns. As we didn't know what the Gaelic for Dingle was, we weren't really sure where we were going. It turns out that Dingle is one of the towns that only displays the Gaelic form of the name in signs etc. After not too long, we made the connection that we were headed for 'An Daingean'. Along with every other tourist in the whole of Irish Republic it seemed. It was a nice little seaside town, reminded us of Lakes Entrance, with 10 times more tourists. We also toured the entire Dingle Peninsula. We got to see stone forts and stone beehive huts along the coast.

Day 6

We had a massive drive ahead of us today, heading to Kenmare. The winding roads were quite scary at times and we couldn't believe that the speed limit on these roads was 100km/h. One great thing about Ireland is that they have their road signs in k's rather than miles like the English. We saw a pretty nasty accident on our way to Kenmare, though fortunately nobody was hurt. We stopped at the beach at 'Inch' and saw people having surfing lessons. Not something we expected to see in Ireland! We also toured Valencia Island, which was just gorgeous. We were going to be staying at a farm in Kenmare and were looking forward to that. However, when we arrived at the farm, we were told by the owner that she had to arrange for all of the guests to stay somewhere else, as she was having all of her family stay due to a family tragedy (2 deaths in her husband's family in the space of a week). She had arranged for us to stay at her sister's. This got us a little worried. Were we just going to be staying in some woman's spare room? The owner said she would direct us there, we just needed to follow her in her car. We drove for about 5 kms and I jokingly said to NB that we should be dropping breadcrumbs like Hansel & Gretel. We needn't have worried. Her sister ran a B&B on the other side of town and it was lovely. We had been told that Kenmare was a beautiful town. It was so overrun with tourists though, it could barely function. All the shops were mostly run by Eastern Europeans rather than Irish people, which meant much of the service was pretty rude. I know that is a gross generalisation, but that's how it was.

Day 7

We decided to play it by ear with what we were going to do and where we were going to stay. We decided that we liked Killarney quite a bit, so we went back there. Also because it was close to the airport for our flight the next day. We thought we might head out to Cork if we had the time, but we never got a chance to. I also wanted to get a photo of a sign to Tipperary, but that would have involved going to Cork. Oh well, there's always next time.

Day 8

Our last day in Ireland. NB's guts is telling him to lay off the bacon and eggs which he has eaten every morning since we have stayed in the B&B's. We headed back to Kerry Airport. Fortunately this time, the plane was bigger. It was then a 3 hour stopover in Dublin Airport before heading back to London. Ronald McDonald was entertaining kids at the Maccas at Dublin Airport. It was quite funny to hear him with an Irish accent!

What a fantastic country with such lovely people. Definitely recommend it!

A different kind of holiday

I am going on hiatus for a while.

The one sided-ness gets to me more than it should and by me continuing I am just encouraging it.

Borough Market

We have been meaning to go here for ages and we made sure we woke up nice and early* to make it there today.

What a travesty that it took this long! The smells were just amazing. We started off with fresh apple juice which was really nice.

We were amazed to then see these:We stopped for a bit to eat for lunch. NB had the chorizo roll that heaps of people have raved to us about. Though the lamb burger I had won hands down. We ended up buying the cheese from the butcher that had been served on the burger, it was that nice.

*Fortunately this Saturday it was by choice. Last Saturday we were woken up by the little girl who lives behind us yelling 'Mum! He weed! Muuuuum! He weeeeeed! MUUUUM! He WEEEEED!' It turns out her and her little brother were playing outside and he didn't have a nappy on.

Did someone say holiday?

NB really wants a file server. Especially since he talked to UP last weekend. Though he denies this. He says he has wanted one for aaaaaaages. He has tried to convince me with this.

Hmmmm.

In other more exciting news, we have booked another holiday. This is for our 2nd wedding anniversary next month. We always wanted to go to Belgium and were disappointed we never got there when we did our big trip back in '06. Now is our chance though, cause we got a really good package deal going by Eurostar - well excited! Beer, waffles and chocolate. I'd say we will be rolling ourselves back on the train after that.

It's the weekend after we get back from Edinburgh for the comedy festival. The weekend after we get back from Belgium is a long one. I think we will need to book a holiday for that. It would have been far too long without one.

Come onnnnnnn!

I had some interesting feedback on this previous post.

By no means am I renouncing my nationality or pride in my country. You do things a bit backwards down there but hey - for the most part, that's fine by me.

However, I think we are a nation that can be quite full of ourselves. Especially when it comes to sport. I remember reading somewhere that Australia spends more per head on sport than any other nation. Hence such quips as 'the only culture Australia knows is in yoghurt...'

The other day I was reading 'The Age' about Hewitt getting knocked out of Wimbledon by Federer. This didn't make the news over here.* The only news about Hewitt in the papers here was that two of his fans were booted out of Wimbledon for being idiots (no comment). The Age article went on to say that Hewitt and Federer had '...six wimbledon wins between them...' By this, they meant Hewitt has won Wimbledon once. Go back to making babies, Ley Ley.

Back to Aussies being full of themselves though. It's all down to expectations. When you live in a country foreign to your own, your ears prick up at hearing an accent the same as your own. You are naturally friendly to your own kind - they get what you are on about, miss the same things about home that you do and you don't need to explain words or phrases you use. Maybe it's all about me putting fellow Aussies over here on a pedestal. Maybe when I meet them I expect them to be fair dinkum. Don't get me wrong, I have met about 7 Aussies over here who have been fantastic fun and generally great people.

I think I need to change my approach. Maybe I need to be more judgemental? If I think straight away - 'You my friend, are sure to be a dead set wanker' then 9 times out of 10, I won't be disappointed and nobobdy will have to hear me whinge on the topic again. You will just hear me crowing when I meet that one in a million Aussie who is a bloody legend.

It will be easy to judge too, because I can spot an Aussie over here from 10 paces. Sange used to say back home that she could do the same with Scots. She couldn't explain how she always knew if someone was Scottish (before hearing them speak), but she nearly always could. I can do exactly the same over here with Aussies. It's easier with blokes than girls though. Not sure why.

* The Wimbledon news dominating the papers is about the choker Andy Murray, who is surely set to get done like a dogs dinner by Nadal tonight, meaning that the Poms will have to barrack for people from other countries. They are used to it. They didn't make it into the Euro 2008 for the football either. Maybe they need to spend more per head on sport??