Dan on Four Continents: Ireland!

I'm bringing back the blog, and Dan on Five Continents, because, my travel bug unsatiated, I've traveled to Ireland for spring break, to visit a friend, travel around with a few others, and generally take advantage of an empty two week block in my schedule to see a new part of the world. (I'm learning most of one's life, one isn't given such two-week empty blocks of time, and I want to make the most of it.) I've been in Ireland four days now, in Dublin and Galway, and am having a lovely time. We--myself, and my friends Alix and Ben, fellow Wesleyanites--left with an amazingly open itinerary, and have been planning as we go. It seems to be working really well.

We began in Dublin, which is a lovely little city, though it had a bit of, in Ben's phrase, a 'generic European capital' feel to it. It's sort of strange that that is really a thing, but the combination of cobblestones, cathedrals, bridges over an old shipping channel, lots of tourists and lots of designer stores somewhat conspired against the city's individuality. We certainly enjoyed out time in the city, a lovely place. But, particularly coming from living and studying in some cities which look really different (Ben in Katmandu, Alix in Nairobi, and myself everywhere else described in this blog) last semester, Dublin was surprising. I was looking for the austerity and inward-focus of Dubliners, and found it only tucked between tourist bars, and bright boutiques. It is there, though. It should be noted that the city is putting on some bright, European, extra-developed face for tourists (like, say, Cape Town). Rather (in my somewhat uninformed conclusion), this is just what a city looks like after spending a decade or so as the capital of Europe's fastest growing economy.

Anyway, we headed out from Dublin yesterday, to Galway, a smaller city on the west coast. The trip across was itself lovely, passing through a smattering of little villages and lots of sheep fields. Galway is a cute town, with a packed downtown, with a few blocks of touristy stores and a ton of students, who, yesterday, were all around us in the central square hanging out, as we did rather the same.

Today we went on a tour around the countryside, through a somewhat geologically unique area (I'm told), a landsacep of cows, stonewalls, and the ruins of castles and abbeys, many of them leftover from the 17th century English attack on Ireland. We ended at some spectacular cliffs, which looked dropped down hundres of feet from the pastures above to the Atlantic below.