Post 16- St Patties & Portsmouth Exc.

St Patties and Portsmouth Excursion

 

Tuesday March 17 was St Patties day. I had gotten up very early in London after the concert and took a train to Bath and straight to class. We missed our train AGAIN (IN 2 DAYS), but this time we had anytime tickets, not specific time tickets. So we had to take the next train. Thank goodness (*My Goodness, My Guinness*) (ß my new favorite phrase) we didn’t have to pay again, but we were 20 mins late to class instead.

 

After school, I went home. I got some work done and got ready to leave to celebrate St Patties. I was wearing green, DUH, and when I saw my 11yr old host brother, I asked him “Do I look ready for St. Patties?”. He didn’t understand. I said, “I’m wearing green.. I’m ready for St. Patties, right?” He turns to his mom and asks, “It’s St. Patrick’s today?” She goes, “Yea, I guess it is” … They don’t celebrate it here!! I guess they aren’t particularly fond of the Irish? I don’t know. But it’s just funny to me because we celebrate it in elementary school, and all through out schooling. Every one wears green, we decorate, etc.

 

Anyway. We didn’t care that they don’t really celebrate, we wanted to anyway. We had a potluck at our professor and his wife, Andy and Barbara’s place. They have a very cute little flat and most of our group came over. I brought my Russian cookies! But everyone did an EXCELLENT job at bringing something to the table, literally.

 

We had an amazing dinner. Chris made Irish stew, Lauren made cooked cabbage, Jen made Muddy Buddies (not quite Irish, but I love them!), Katie H. brought the CIDER!! (good girl!) and more.

(Just part) of the feast:

Muddy Buddies!

 

We ate, drank, and chatted. Then played a game of charades. That is always fun.  (I had to do R2-D2 .. and my team got it :)

 

 

After, we all walked to a pub nearby called The Weston. We drank more beer/cider and took silly pictures all night. T’was a good time J

 

  

 

Lastly, Andy and Barbara

 

St Patties was a good time J

 

 

Then 2 days later, was our Thursday excursion to Portsmouth.

 

Portsmouth is a huge Naval city for England. (For you slow ones, Naval meaning Navy, not the belly button of England, although I hope there is a city somewhere taking pride in being the belly button of England.)

 

The tour of Portsmouth was very cool, because I decided that I like these water/sea towns. When I went to Ireland last weekend, I went to visit a little fishing village called Howth, and it was very pretty. Portsmouth was not necessarily similar to Howth because it is not a small town, but it had the same feel in some ways. In other ways, it is very different, because unlike a cute small town, Portsmouth is instead a big naval city. We took a boat ride that showed how big the harbor is.

 

Me on the boat ride

 

Portsmouth is the home to many navy war ships including the now retired HMS Victory.

 

 

Our tour of the ship was very interesting. The conditions of living on a ship for long periods at a time were pretty terrible. They had rotten food, and biscuits that were so often infested with maggots.  They slept in hammocks that would essentially be their coffins if they were to die, which would probably be pretty haunting. I bet it would mess with the men’s minds to have to sleep in there every night, especially Lord Nelson, who had an actual coffin, not a hammock.

Speaking of Lord Nelson, he is the big hero of this city. We learned about his last victory at the Battle of Trafalgar. We were told about the details of his life and death on this ship.

            A really cool piece of history we also got to see in front of our eyes (behind thick glass) was the Mary Rose ship. This is the oldest ship that still exists today (though not a working ship by any means). Mary Rose was built in Portsmouth in 1510, and sank in 1545. It was pulled from the sea floor only 30 years ago and is being restored by being constantly washed by wax water. The Mary Rose was King Henry’s favorite war ship. This was very fitting to our studies because I am now very interested in the Tudors (King Henry, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth) specifically from my Elizabeth class. It was exciting to see something real from his time that he cared about.

 

Mary Rose behind thick glass and kept in dull light for preservation

 

That is all.

Post 15- Snow Patrol!!

Monday March 16^th is a day I’ve been waiting for since BEFORE I left for this trip. I had bought my tickets to see Snow Patrol in London in advance.

 

This is Snow Patrol for those of you who don’t listen to them:

 

This is one of my favorite songs (one of their new ones)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=942tk_Y1bUE

 

Or this one was their biggest one. If you know one Snow Patrol song, its this one

 

After a well needed good sleep after a crazy Ireland weekend, I got ready for the show and went to meet Rickie, a girl also on this trip.

 

She had taken care of the train stuff. We went to the train station and got up to the platform JUST as the train was pulling away. We tried to exchange our train tickets, but they said NO. Our only option was to buy new ones. They had originally cost us (with our discount card) about $10 each. The new ones were about $50 each, yea, that sucks. Rickie paid for this because she felt it was her fault we were late. That was nice of her.

 

After this damper, we were off. We had been pushed back a ½ hour, so we did not get into London until about 6.

 

On the way to the hostel, something interesting happened. We were walking through a business area that had really nice looking buildings. I stopped to take a picture. This cop waves his arm, (you can see him doing that in the one picture I got). I thought he was waving to a car or something, but he was waving to me. He came up to me and told me I was not allowed to take pictures. He was smiling as he said it so I thought he was joking. I kept trying to take a picture, but he kept putting his hand up, covering my lens. It was so weird. It might sound like I should have understood sooner about him being serious, but his face was smiling the whole time, as if he was joking. I guess I kept pushing it for a while, trying over and over again to take a picture. He finally grabbed his radio and was about to call backup when I finally realized he was serious. Do we have anything like that in the US? I also couldn’t believe him because I didn’t think anything like that exists. I understand if I am in a museum, or inside an airport or something, where it is private. But I was in a place where it is public to walk around.. but not public to take pictures.. I was BAFLED by this.

Does anyone know? Do we have a place like that in the US?

So that’s my story of almost getting into trouble in London.  

 

 

By the time we got to our hostel, and got to the venue, it was already 7:30 or 8.

 

The venue Snow Patrol was playing at was the O2. (O2 is one of the huge cell phone providers here, like Cingular in the US.) This venue was HUGE. Before we came, we assumed that it must have been pretty big because another person from our group was seeing a different band the same night there, but exceeded our expectations in size. The O2 was full of restaurants inside, a mini theme park with bumper cars and a couple other rides, and it even had a museum with a History of Music exhibit. How cool is that!?

 

  

 

When we got into our stage that was almost the size of the HP Pavilion. It was an enormous standing area, surrounded by a huge amount of seating.

 

  

 

            Rickie and I made our way as far forward as possible, but having missed the first band, it was already crowded and we couldn’t get very far forward.

 

The second (to us, first) band played. They were called Fanfarlo. They were pretty good. They had a violinist, and the violin was really fitting for them. It worked well in their songs.

 

 

When they were done.. it was time for SNOW PATROL.

 

 

The opened up with “If There’s a Rocket Tie Me to It”, which is the opening song of their new CD. They played all my favorite songs through out the night. I recorded them all pretty much, because I couldn’t see L so my way of watching the stage was through my camera that I held high above my head.

Being small, like me, is usually great at concerts, because I usually arrive early, and while its not too crowded yet, I sneak my way to the front. But arriving late, being small sucks!! Especially when the singer encouraged people to raise their arms up, and then I couldn’t see anything at all.. L

My recording would have been better if I knew my camera better, but it was only until the very end of the show that I realized why my camera would only let me record a minute max at a time. It was on some setting, that I just had to change, but didn’t realize it. So for my favorite songs, I went in and put in the pieces together in a computer program.. so that is why, you might notice, the songs skip a few seconds in the middle L

 

The background of the stage was very cool. Their lights and video shows were great. It was different for every song they played. Sometimes it would just be a live video of the show, sometimes the TVs would change their positions, (straight lines of tvs, to ziz zag..) and sometimes they had a big sheet in the background and would play premade videos behind them playing. It was very entertaining to have this variety. You will see some of this in my videos below.

 

So, overall, the music was amazing. Snow Patrol put on a good show. It really sucked that I couldn’t see anything a lot of the time, and when I could, the stage was still pretty far away. The money.. well.. if I had known ahead of time how much all of this was going to cost, I never would have bought the tickets. (tickets themselves, train there, train back, hostel, Rickie had to pay the really expensive train tickets again for the train we missed..)  So, I know I would not have done this knowing all that .. but having done it, I don’t take it back.

 

Pictures:

 

     

 

 

Videos:

These are all terrible recordings with my little Canon Powershot, but I love them anyway, so enjoy if you’d like

 

Snow Patrol live - Crack the Shutters

Snow Patrol live - Take Back the City

Snow Patrol Live Chocolate

Snow Patrol Live - You Could Be Happy

Snow Patrol Live - Chasing Cars

Snow Patrol live - Open Your Eyes

Snow Patrol live - You're All I Have

 

 

 

I LOVE this picture. It is my desktop picture right now J

 

How would you like to be clean up crew after the show?

 

 

Lastly, leaving the show into the London Tube, was a massive crowd:

 

 

 

Hope I made a new fan from this blog!

Post 14- Dublin, Ireland

March 12

On our way back to Bath from our Wales excursion, the 8 of us going to Ireland (Bailee, Lindsey, Katie H., Julian, Justin, Sarah M., Victoria and myself) got dropped off in Bristol because that is where our flight was out of. We spent a couple hours relaxing in a restaurant and headed to the airport. This was my first time flying RyanAir. Ryan Air is a suuupperrr cheap airline, and well, yes it was. Checking a bag does not come with your flight. You have to pay an extra 20 pounds (about $30) to check a bag. So when we got there, a few of us had to toss stuff that we could not bring on the airplane. I’ve never had to worry about that before. Going to a flight, last minute, I always remember things that I can’t bring on, and switch them to my checked baggage. But not here. Here, I had to throw away my little nail scissors (that I loved!) and my Cetaphil face cleanser and lotion. (I miss the lotion, my face is so dry now! And they don’t sell it here.. Dad, you’re bringing me some when you come.. by the way).

 

 

Anyway, the flight was super fast and we were soon in Ireland. We finally got into town at midnight, and after searching for our hostel for forever, it was 1 am, and too late to go out, especially after such a long day. Even on this first night of walking around the streets looking for our hostel, I noticed that there was an INSANE amount of tourists. Through out the weekend, I decided that there were more tourists in Dublin than Irish people!!

 

Friday the 13^th (*Insert Halloween music here*) we got up and had breakfast at a bakery. It was a simple breakfast but I enjoyed it. The dessert I had with it was delicious!!

Next stop, we went to the Guinness Factory.

 

On the way, stopped for candy, of course..

 

 

Guinness Factory.

 

        

 

This place was huge! It was 7 stories. The ground floor had the gift shop, which was biggg. The second couple floors had information on how Guinness is made.

 

  

 

Guinness is made of 4 ingredients: Barley, Hops, Yeast and Water. This is barley:

 

 

A cool little fact about the yeast.. Yeast grows on its own. So the supply of yeast at the Guinness factory keeps multiplying, and they never have to buy more. They are using the SAME yeast since Arhtur Guinness started the company in 1759. Crazy huh! How’s that for a no-cost ingredient!

 

The next 1 or 2 floors had other Guinness info, like info on alcohol, history on the Guinness book of world records.. (Which I don’t know why, but I never put together before that it was made by the beer.) I guess the reason it started was to solve arguments and disputes in bars.

 

 

They also had the history of Guinness advertizing, which I love!! Their old advertisements were so awesome! One of the slogans was “My Goodness My Guinness!” and each ad that had that slogan would have a man running after his Guinness that was somehow getting away, like in an alligator’s mouth, or being stolen by a seal, or in the neck of an ostrich. I loved their ads so much; I bought a poster later of 9 different ads on the one poster.

 

        

 

This is some of their characters of the ads. (They had the same artist for all their ads. This guy was offered a job by Disney, or something, and turned it down to stay and do the Guinness ads.)

 

 

Back in the day, Guinness used to be recommended by doctors, so this ad worked well for them.

 

 

The last few stories were a restaurant, a bar area where people learn to pour their own Guinness, and the Gravity Bar on the 7^th floor which was a full circle view of Dublin from the tallest place in the city.

I decided to have my one Guinness (that comes with the entry ticket) at the pour your own place. It was fun, although I’ve done it at Pete’s at home before. There is an art form to pouring Guinness!!

 

           

 

And here are some pics of the 7^th floor Gravity Bar, with Dublin behind me:

 

  

 

After the self tour, (although I wish it was a guided tour, because I totally didn’t understand the brewing process by trying to read it myself, and skipping parts and going out of order.. ) I next spent a good amount of time (and money!) in the store! I figure, this is THE AUTHENTIC Guinness stuff, so I wanted it all! I got a shirt for me, a couple presents, that poster I mentioned earlier, a book on Guinness history, a Guinness chocolate bar (with Guinness in it!) and a present for my work at home, a Guinness bar mat.

 

Man, we spent 4 or 5 hours at the factory! Like I said, the place is quite huge. The shape of the whole thing is supposed to be a GIANT pint glass that if it were filled up, would hold14.3 million pints of Guinness.

 

After Guinness, we headed back to the hostel, stopping to get a pizza and crepes lunch and doing some tourist shopping on the way.

 

 

We got ready at the hostel for our Friday night. We shared our hostel room with some boys who are from New York and are studying in London. So, maybe now I have a place to stay in London while I am still here and in New York when I go back home!

 

We started our night at an Irish pub called O’Brien’s. almost no one bought drinks because everything was so expensive.

Ireland, by the way, was CRAZYYY expensive!! When I was going to leave for this study abroad, everyone was telling me how expensive it was going to be for me to live in England, but I got here and its no different than the US. You do the conversion of the money, and a sandwich, a loaf of bread, a drink, etc, is about the same. Then I get to Ireland, and that’s when it hit! Everything was ridiculous there! I am glad I am not living there for 3 months!

We didn’t stay at O’Brien’s long. We moved on to a very popular club called Fitzsimmons. This place was really fun. There was a cover band playing, and some people wanted dance music, so we paid 10 euros to get into the real club atmosphere downstairs. It was fun. We danced until they closed at 3 am. I had a couple drinks, including 2 Coronas, which I actually enjoyed after squeezing a lot of lime in it.. We didn’t get to sleep until 4 am.

 

 

Saturday morning we woke up at 10 or so. We had had the hostel booked for Thu and Fri nights, and a hotel for Saturday. So we packed up all our stuff, and Bailee and I left it in a storage room in the hostel. They told us we have to pick it up by 6 or they would charge us for it.

 

A few of us went to see if there were any tours still going so late in the morning. There were not really any, so we bought a day pass at the train station and decided to visit a couple places.

We went to a little fishing village called Howth and to a castle in a city called Malahide.

I really enjoyed this little trip. I was mad that it was the ONE DAY that I did not wear leggings under my pants, because we ended up going to the coast! The city looked like a mini San Francisco from its little cold fishing vide, but not busy like SF. It was very quiet, and almost nothing was open. Restaurants were all closed until dinnertime. We got ice cream, and then a couple of us got seafood chowder from a stand. My goodness it was DELICIOUS!!! I love clam chowder, but this one had calamari, and salmon in it as well. It was very good. (I was happy because the whole time we were walking around this town, I wanted seafood so bad. You can’t visit a beautiful fishing village and not have seafood!)

 

           

 

We then went to a city called Malahide, where we walked around searching for a castle. Bailee and I only had an hour in this city, to leave at a safe time to get our stuff by six. We walked around for ever looking for this castle. You might think, Castle.. tall, easy to spot.. NOT THIS ONE!! The search was worth it though for the long walk through this park/woods. Can you find me?

 

 

There I am!

 

 

When we finally found the castle.

 

  

 

There was a baby changing station in the bathroom at the Castle called:

 

 

The castle was pretty from the outside, but Bailee and I had no time to look inside, because we had to head back.

After waiting at the train station for 40 minutes, we got back late and had to RUN to the hostel. Of course, after running through downtown Dublin, the lady at the hostel did not care about the time we came. Ha.

 

Bailee next needed to make our way to our Hotel. It was a 40-minute bus ride away. That was a bummer, because having to go there killed a lot of time off our Saturday night. We took our sweet time and got ready for our Saturday night of St Patties weekend in Dublin!

We went back into town via taxi and first went to a pub the taxi driver, (a local) recommended. We walked into one door, and kept walking right out the other door. This was because, as soon as we walked in, we saw that we were NOT welcome. The whole “dressing up” for St. Patties thing is very much a touristy thing. The place was full of locals who shut up and watched us walk through and out. So we went into the Temple Bar area (the main bar area) that was, of course, LOADED with tourists. For SURE, more than Irish people. We went to a place called Party Kitchen. That was fun. It was a club/bar with a few couple stories. We did not stay there long though.

We ended up at Fitzsimons again like last night. It was a lot of fun and we again danced all night until it closed at 3.

 

  

 

On Sunday, we had no time to visit the city for the last time. We went straight to the airport from our hotel and flew home to Bristol and then a bus back to Bath.

 

Overall, the trip was fun. I feel like I didn’t get to see Dublin at all, though, which is a big bummer. I am happy to have done the Guinness tour, but I also wanted to see the Jameson Whiskey tour, which had to be scratched. Seeing Howth was really nice. It is the only time I felt like I really got to SEE Ireland, but like I said, Dublin was the main place I wanted to see, and although having spent 2 days there, I saw nothing.