18.06.2004 
'T'as been a disgracefully long time since my last update, so this will be yet another hideously long spiel from B as she attempts to cover a little of the past few months...
So....after a wonderfully long soujourn in Oz and SE-Asia, I arrived back in Ireland mid-March to a city revved up for St Patrick's Day - the centre of Dublin was absolutely mad....never before have I seen so many viking hats, green t-shirts, and wannabe leprechauns in my life! Nor have I ever seen so many ludicrously langered (heavily inebriated) teenagers before 10 in the morning, staggering about the town, engaging in reverse-peristaltis while their good mates tried to prevent them from passing out into/falling asleep in the deposits they left behind.....And goodness gracious me, if you ever need a fix of American marching bands (gotta love a bit of baton-twirling once in a while), St Patrick's Day in Dublin, is the place to be. Nah, Paddy's was great craic, a little on the hectic side, but a whole lot of fun and a great experience.
Who exactly was St Patrick anyway.... I was a tad disappointed to hear that my childhood visions of a holy most-excellently bearded bloke, wielding a wooden staff to ward off the snakes, was a little off the mark. Turned out that St Paddy arrived in Ireland in AD432. He was apparently born in Scotland (though the Welsh, of course, dispute this claim), and arrived in Ireland after being kidnapped by Irish pirates (Arrrr!). He became a slave and was resigned to a life of tending sheep. He then became a Christian, returned to Blighty for a stint, and then hoofed on back to Ireland, after a prophetic vision instructed him to convert everyone in Ireland to Christianity....
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Now skipping forward a few weeks to the Easter long weekend (a good opportunity to avoid the weekendly influx of hen/stag nights from La Terre de Pomme!!)...so my buddy Dean (yet another deserter from the Dublin fold) and I decided to head off to the West. So off it was to Killarney town, the base for exploration of the Iveragh Peninsula (i.e. the Ring of Kerry). Upon arrival in Killarney, we went in search of some tucker....only to find that the only thing we could get anywhere was fish!!! Apparently it's a Good Friday thing.....no beef, chicken, turkey, pork etc.....just fish!!!!! Very strange indeed. And would you believe that all the pubs were closed! Wow......really crazy. After a good feast on very boney fish, we hired some bikes (a slight improvement on the dodgy gearless Chinese bicycles I was cruising round rice paddies on in Laos) and headed for the nearby Killarney National Park. The park is a vast, resplendent, glacially carved out area, with large lakes, monastic sites, the impressive Ross Castle (the last in Munster to fall to Oliver Cromwell's army), ginormous trees covered in lichen, and mad-cyclists hooning around on their ten-speeders. There are also magnificient views of Ireland's highest mountain range - the Macgillycuddy's Reeks - of course we would have climbed up them all, if not for the dire dire weather.
The next day was spent on a bus tour (cringe!!) around the Iveragh Peninsula (aka the Ring of Kerry). Our bus driver, lets call him Seamus (as I can't recall his name), was as mad as a tellytubby overdosed on RedBull, and his driving reflected this. To be fair, the roads around the Ring of Kerry are rather hammered from the frequent flow of tour-buses all day long plying the road, but when you're whizzing around a hair-pin curve at 100miles/hr on a pock-marked, narrow road, one must question the sanity of the driver. The Ring of Kerry was all that one would expect though - beautiful, green, rainy and loaded with sheep and Kerry cows. From the ROK, I bussed up to delightful Dingle peninsula where I cycled out to the most Westerly point in Ireland all around the western part of Dingle - full of yellow flowers, bleeting mad sheep, hair-pin curves, and cottages set in the midst of limestone fenced green fields.
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Another couple weeks passed.....same old same....( work, shopping, eating out, rock-climbing, movies, etc....) before yet another bank holiday weekend in May, where four of us chicks (3 Aussies and Pommie!) headed down to The People's Republic of Cork! Cork is the biggest county in Ireland, and home to lots of pretty green (and sometimes rocky) wide-open spaces, sheep, locals withsome of the most lovely lilting accents in the world (though at times ya need to listen really hard to understand them hey) and tourists who fancy themselves as being exceedingly eloquent after having kissed the Blarney stone! Funnily enough, there doesn't seem to be any cork anywhere in sight! We were in Cork during the accession of 10 countries (namely Cyprus, Malta, Slovenia, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) to the EU, so were lucky to miss the madness going on back in Dublin's fair city (anti-globalisation protests run by groups such as the funnily named/dressed Wombles of Wimbledon). Whilst in Cork, we caught a cab out to see Blarney Castle. The Blarney stone is a chip of the Scottish stone of Scone that was presented to the King of Munster in thanks for his support during a 14th century rebellion. Apparently the hygiene of the stone is questionable (all the locals will tell you this), so my attempt at bending over (held by the ankles and dangling down a little gap) was a little half-hearted. We also meandered round the University College of Cork grounds, drove out to Cobh (pronounced "Cove", the last port of call for the Titanic before it sunk), and cruised around West Cork for the day. According to my guidebook, West Cork was once the "badlands" of Ireland; its ruggedness and isolation rendered it lawless and largely uninhabitible. It's now home to loads of farms, holiday cottages and lovely beaches. It's very pretty and a nice (mostly) chilled out place to spend a few days.
On my second last weekend in Ireland (another bank holiday weekend, you see the bankers work really hard in Ireland so they need loads of holidays), I finally made it across to the splendid Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland, with my long-time dear friend, Katherine, yet another antipodean who has relocated to the Northern Hemisphere. We stopped overnight in Galway, "the fastest growing city in Europe" (apparently!), where we visited The Crane (a good trad pub), and got romanced by the 82 year old Sean, the most famous locksmith in town, and a man who fancies himself as quite the Tangoist, when he's not doing a little Samba on the side. From here we caught a ferry out to Inish more, the largest and most heavily populated of the Aran Islands (a grand total of 700 people live here, and about 50,000 sheep!) and spent the day cycling all around the place. The Aran islands were absolutely delightful, full of green fields, sheer limestone cliff faces tumbling into the rough Atlantic below, ancient forts, monastic sites where early Irish Christians settled to attain spiritual seclusion, old fellas giving tourists rides around the island in wagons towed by ponies, quaint little cottages, and a few quite nice beaches.
And then finally my last weekend in Dublin.....not too shabby, though exhausting! After starting to pack up my gear last week, I realized that I had accumulated a disgraceful amount of gear.....so much so that I had to leave 2 big bag fulls of gear in Dublin, and still pay an excess on my luggage allowance...grrrr. Went to the RHCP/T(h)rills/Pixies concert on the Sat night with everyone else in the country........a little hectic being sandwiched in with 100,000 other people but good fun nonetheless.
For now I've moved on to the wonderfully grand city of Edinburgh. Who knows how long I'll be here. At the moment I'm looking for a new job, not to mention a home. I'm also heading off to Norway in 4 days for a quick holiday. Apparently Norway is more expensive than Ireland - could this possibly be so?!?!?!
To finish up, I'd like to say thanks to all who were part of my Dublin experience - I miss you guys!!! Especially thanks to Dean, Ken, Jo, Julie, Regina, and the rest of the Abbey gang, the Saffas, and of course all you chicks from the South Western Area Health Board! 'T'as been grand sharing the experience with you all...I'll be back soon enough I'm sure.
Anyway, must finish up, the chick at the library is evil-eyeing me, which means I have to get off the free internet service.....Hope this email finds all of you happy and well. Again, sorry for the disgraceful lag between emails.....ah well. Let me know if any of you are going to be up/over this way soon. Would be delighted to put any (? ok so most) of you up for a few nights....when I get a place that is!
Slainte
Love Belinda xox
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