Nice is Nice!

Ok, I'm sure every American who's ever been here has made that joke, but it's true. It's been a busy couple of days, so I have some catching up to do! Let's see, where was I?

I left Dublin on Monday morning after a very relaxing last day there. I did some shopping in the morning and cooked dinner again with Allison (I'll spare you the photos this time but rest assured, it was delicious.) I asked her what she'd do if it were her last night in Dublin, and she said she'd go on a long walk. So, that's what we did. We got gelato in Temple Bar and watched some crazy street performers doing acrobatics and flaming limbo, which was pretty intense/ridiculous. I got a cool video of it, maybe I'll post it later when I have the chance. Anyway, it was nice to just see the city one last time and say goodbye to everything. The gelato didn't suck, either... Oh my goodness, I'm so excited to see how many gelati I'll be able to eat in a year!

When we got back to the flat, Julien and Mattheu managed to suck us into a game of "Rock Band" on their Xbox. With Mattheu on the drums, Julien on guitar and Allison and myself on vocals, we delivered an incredible performance of "Dani California." We stayed up playing the game until midnight, at which point figured I might as well just stay awake until it was time to leave for the airport at 3:00AM. Ack, it seemed like a good idea at the time...

Of course, by the time I arrived in Nice at 11:00AM, I was regretting my earlier decision. I checked into my hostel and groggily spent the day in town and at the beach. The water here is the bluest I've ever seen, it almost doesn't look real. The beach isn't sandy, either - it's made up of millions and millions of smooth rocks and pebbles, most small enough that you can sink into them. There were thousands of people there, but it was still one of the most beautiful beaches I've seen. I was exhausted so I just sat on the rocks taking it all in, and reading a book.

That night I ended up meeting a group of really cool people at the hostel. There was a group of guys from England, two guys from Australia and two girls from Scotland. It was so crazy hearing all of our different versions of the same language - let's just say that I learned some *ahem* interesting new slang, and leave it at that!

I hung out with that group all day yesterday, and we went to Monaco, home of the famous Monte Carlo casino! All in all, I didn't really like the town - it's really expensive, filled with Ferraris and Louis Vuitton. Blech. I'm actually not going to say much else about Monaco but I'll share this cool picture that I took outside of the casino.


Today, today was amazing. I teamed up with another lone traveler - Daniel from Ecuador. First, we made a trip to the Nice fruit and flower market. Oh, it was amazing. Blocks and blocks of fresh fruit, vegetables, olives, cheese, bread, flowers, honey, pastries, mmmmm. I wanted to buy everything, but I settled for peaches, some enormous figs, a baguette, and a tiny little pot of Miel de Lavande, lavender honey. Then we decided to get lost for a little while, exploring the tiny crowded streets of Nice and all of their hidden treasures. There's something about this place - I'm definitely coming back.

We left Nice (with some hesitation) and went to the port town of Villefranche, which I immediately fell in love with.


We spent most of the day on the beach, swimming and soaking up the sun (by soaking up, I mean deflecting with about ten pounds of spf 50) then went to explore the Fort of Mont Alban. I guess Villefranche used to be an important military and naval base pre-18th century. Now, the fort is just a tourist attraction, although we were literally the only two people in there. There was an amazing hidden garden and a lot of really interesting art. It was a really cool place, made even cooler by the fact that it was completely deserted. There was also an outdoor stage - I guess they have concerts there now! Most recently, there was a breath-taking performance of "Crazy American Attempts Ballet."

It got rave reviews... :)

We got back to Nice about an hour before sunset and still had some time to kill before Daniel needed to leave. He's about to return home to Ecuador after studying in Wales for a year - he had a lot of advice to give me and it was really cool to see how excited he is about going home, knowing that I'll feel that way too! Anyway, we spent his last few hours here at the beach in Nice (the pebbly one) and swam in the perfect blue water. It was so beautiful, I was really tempted to extend my stay here. I think I could have stayed on that beach forever.

I've been feeling a little bit guilty being in a country where I don't speak the language at all. After my adventures today, though, I'm determined to come back here to live for a while. I find myself speaking combining the 10 words of french that I know into ridiculous sentences, just because I love the way the words roll off my tongue. "Merci, bonjour, je suis le baguette s'il vous plait, je ne sais pas et je ne sais qua? Soixante euro et bonsoir madmoiselle!!" I can't wait until I can actually speak french. It's ridiculous, I'm a hopeless language fanatic. I guess it's a good thing I'm a linguistics major and world traveler!

Bonsoir!

Temple Bar bar

I returned to Allison's flat in Dublin last night after my Galway adventures came to a close. She took me out for a night on the town in the neighborhood called Temple Bar, which I mentioned in my previous post. If anyone back home isn't sure whether or not the drunken Irish stereotypes are true, let me assure you: in this neighborhood, they are. The streets were crowded with groups of drunk people singing traditional drinking songs and less traditional drinking songs, i.e. Oasis' "Wonderwall."

Oasis is big here. Really, really big. Almost scary big.


*Allison, Italian friend Edoardo, Irish friend Dara, and me in front of Temple Bar bar in Temple Bar neighborhood. Yeah, people actually say "Temple Bar bar." Allison and I were sober - Edoardo and Dara were definitely not. I have a great video of them singing a very drunken duet (Oasis, of course).

This morning, we went to Dun Laoghaire ("Dun Leery"), which is a town not too far from Dublin. The "Festival of World Cultures" is going on there this weekend, which turned out to be really awesome. The highlight for me was a bagpipe group which played alongside a rambunctious Spanish percussion group and an Irish punk band. The result was a musical blend unlike anything I'd ever heard before. I really don't know how to describe it!


The worst (and by worst I mean most traumatizing) part of the festival was an event in People's Park. It was a kid's event, and a giant man on stilts and his tiny ghoulish comrade practically assaulted me, screeching and grabbing at my sweater like a couple of screeching, sweater-grabbing demons. I cried out "I don't like you at ALL!" and they continued their attack shouting "why you no like, why you no like" until I managed to escape. I took this photo of the giant later, without getting too close. I don't know why they think small children would enjoy that kind of terror.


I guess he doesn't look too bad here, but remember that he was screeching. Absolutely terrifying. Also, I may have been a little jittery... Irish tea is apparently quite caffeinated - something I didn't realize until I had finished an entire pot.

Since it was pouring rain, we returned to Dublin before the festival ended. We decided to cook dinner, which turned out to be the best meal I've had since arriving in Ireland. Vegetables with curry and rice. Mmmm. I literally haven't eaten a single vegetable since arriving here, (unless you count potato?) so my poor tummy was begging for some rabbit food. There isn't a lot of produce on most restaurant menus here. In fact, there's no produce on most restaurant menus.

Oh, which reminds me. Mini rant time: all of the produce in Irish grocery stores is individually wrapped. Plastic-wrapped tomatoes on styrofoam trays, plastic-wrapped zucchini. Each eggplant comes in its own individual plastic bag. I can't believe the amount of waste that this creates! The grocery stores encourage the use of reusable bags, but wrap each eggplant in loads of plastic. I can't believe it. Also, there are no recycling bins which actually caused me physical pain. Berkeley should teach Ireland a thing or two about being eco-friendly!

Rant over, back to the point: the meal. Words can't do it justice, but how about this:


Can you taste the curry goodness? I didn't realize how much I missed my veggies until the post-meal food coma ensued. What a beautiful feeling.

Galway Hooker

Yesterday, I took a train all the way across Ireland! It took 2 hours! Ha, I arrived in Galway in the afternoon, a smallish town on the west coast of Ireland. I can't post pictures from this computer but they'll come eventually. Galway is really beautiful, right on the Atlantic Ocean. When I first arrived, I was pretty tired so I dropped off my things at a hostel and went for a walk through the town. The main street was filled with cool sights - street musicians, people selling art and jewelry, shops and pubs. So many pubs (I'm thinking that most of the streets in Ireland are pub-filled)! I came to a river which was crowded with people, all drinking, eating, playing music - just having a good time. I was taking pictures of the scene when an older gentleman named Daithi (Gaelic equivalent of David) offered to take a picture with me in it. David, a Galway local, was showing his friend Lee around, who was visiting him from England. I joined the two of them for a walk down the coast - it was absolutely beautiful. They joked that I must have brought the sun with me from California! I guess it's been raining so much this summer that there have been flash floods all over Ireland.

After I parted ways with David and Lee, I went back to the hostel to eat dinner and tried to mingle. For some reason though, my fellow hostellers weren't interested in mingling. Maybe I had something in my teeth. Finally I managed to strike up a conversation with an American named Kane, who has spent practically his entire life traveling the world. He's been all over Europe, is currently living in Ireland and will soon be going to college in Australia. He's traveled so much, in fact, that he has this crazy pseudo-Irish/Australian accent. Since he's lived here for quite a while, he showed me around to his favorite pubs, told me which beers to get (I highly recommend the Galway Hooker) and told me one of his favorite games to play while traveling - getting drunk tourists to believe outlandish stories. By the end of the night, most of Galway's tourist population knew us as Kalen and Kane, siamese twins from Arkansas. We were joined at the shoulder at birth, but are finally enjoying our independence from one another after a very extensive surgery. Ha! Needless to say, it was a very fun night.

Today, however, things got a little tricky. I had been planning to go to the Aran Islands, which are known for being incredibly beautiful. There are ruins and cathedrals and all that - I figured it would be a great photo op. Unfortunately, the only option for visiting the islands required returning to Galway at 7PM, and I had already booked a train ticket at 6PM. I decided to roll with the punches, and caught a bus heading toward the Cliffs of Moher instead (huge cliffs towering 277 meters over the ocean). Here's where the going got tough. Or, more accurately, the going got nauseating.

First of all, the bus driver was a lunatic. Second, we were driving down narrow, bumpy, winding roads through the hills of the Irish countryside. Third, the speed limit on these narrow, bumpy, winding roads through the hills of the Irish countryside was 100 km/hr. Now, maybe something gets lost in the conversion there, but I'm pretty sure that's just a ridiculous speed for roads like these. Oh, and did I mention the round-a-bouts? Irish people love their round-a-bouts! This trip was like tilt-o-whirl meets roller coaster meets tumble cycle on my dryer. Anyone who knows me knows that most the kiddie rides at the fair will make me puke, so they'll understand that I couldn't deal with this situation. It was awful. Ok, granted, the couple of pints of I drank last night definitely weren't helping the situation.

I thought it would be really cool to vomit off the Cliffs of Moher, so I really tried to make it through the insanity of the ride. I ended up feeling too nauseous to continue, though, and decided to get off the bus in a town called Burren to take a breather and wait for the next bus, which was scheduled to arrive an hour later. What I didn't know is that apparently "schedule" is a very loose term here. I waited for three hours, but the bus never came. It was actually fun- the weather was beautiful and I met a bunch of really interesting people at the bus stop. I met one man who drives a bank! There are all these tiny little towns that don't have banks, so he drives a mobile bank from town to town. He also has relatives all over the world, in the U.S., in France, England, South America; he even has a nephew who's a general in the army of India!

Anyway, just when I was on the verge of almost not enjoying myself any more (due to the worries about missing my train), I saw a group of french students around my age that I recognized from my hostel! We started talking and they told me that they'd just come from the Cliffs. When I told them I wouldn't be able to make it, they gave me a souvenir keychain that they'd bought there! They ended up giving me a ride back to the hostel, with plenty of time to spare before my train leaves. (Just enough time to write this entry, isn't that perfect?)

So I didn't really get to see anything that I planned on seeing, and I didn't get to puke off of 277 meter high cliffs (that's honestly what I'm most disappointed about, haha) but I had a lot of great conversations and got to be a siamese twin for a night. Totally worth the trip.

Don't let the bedbugs bite!

Ha! To all those who doubted me, I'd like to say "I told you so!" Hehe, everything is working out perfectly here. Allison (the aforementioned friend I'm staying with) is fantastic, she took me around the city yesterday and bought me my first pint of Guinness. Her flat is gorgeous, with amazing views of Dublin from all sides and an awesome rooftop patio area. Her roommates Julien and Mattheu are awesome too. I'm parting ways with them for the next few days, to travel over to the west coast of Ireland but hopefully we'll meet up again this weekend.

Before meeting up with her, I took a day trip to a nearby town called Howth. I was planning on doing all that other stuff I mentioned, but I made a last minute change of plans. (I think from now on I'll only write about stuff after I do it, considering I have a tendency to change my mind.)

Back to the point - Howth is a tiny little fishing town at the end of the DART line (Dublin Area Rapid Transit! I kept accidentely calling it "BART" which resulted in lots of funny looks....) Haha, I spent the morning walking around the piers, laughing at the cooky sea lions while enjoying the smell of the salty air and the sight of the fishing boats (and of course the crazy irishmen driving them).




I stumbled into a small cafe which turned out to be owned by two italian guys, and frequented by dozens of italian regulars. They all thought I was pretty cool - an American girl, traveling alone in Ireland, speaking Italian. Anyway, I stayed there for several hours and made a lot of friends. They bought me lunch and a glass of wine, and gave me tons of advice about what to do/see/eat once I arrive in Italy. I felt really comfortable talking with everyone, which makes me feel less nervous about the next year.

One particularly crazy old italian man named Daniele offered to give me a ride back to Dublin in his unmarked white van and didn't seem to understand why I thought that was a bad idea. He finally gave in and settled for walking me back to the DART station, haha. Crazy italians. I'm sure he was nice enough but if he didn't kill me, my mom would for accepting a ride from him, so I decided to play it safe!

Oh, the craziest part of my trip so far, not to mention the grossest: I stayed in the cheapest hostel I could find on my first night in Dublin, and it wasn't exactly a picture of cleanliness. The next day I had all these little bug bites all over my feet and legs, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me how I'd gotten them, since I was under the covers. I figured they were just mosquito bites (but smaller and itchier) until Allison informed me that she knows several people who have been attacked by bedbugs in Dublin hostels.

Bedbugs. I didn't even think they existed! Warn your children! It's not just a myth!

Anyway, I bought some anti-itch cream and I'll be sleeping in my sleeping bag from now on. Lesson learned.

When in Dublin

First things first: this is my blog! Welcome, please show yourselves around, get comfortable and what not.

So, I'm not in Bologna. Is it considered cheating to write a "when in Bologna" blog when not in Bologna? I hope not... I'm actually in Dublin, which to the great surprise of my sister, is the capital of Ireland. (Actual email excerpt: "Why does everyone in Dublin speak in an Irish accent? I thought you were in Italy!") Hehe, sorry Ave.

I spent yesterday wandering around in a daze, not really knowing where I was most of the time. (Jet-lag will do that to a girl...) I saw Trinity College and Library, lots of monuments and bridges, and a cool bohemian neighborhood called Temple Bar. Temple Bar is probably my favorite part of the city so far, probably because it reminds me a little of Berkeley. It was pretty cool, filled with hippie shops and thrift stores and what I consider to be an excessive amount of tattoo parlors, not to mention dozens of coffee shops and cafes.

A small miracle: yesterday I received an e-mail from a friend of a friend, who'd seen on Facebook that I'd arrived in Dublin. She said that she recently moved here, and that I'm welcome to stay at her flat for a couple of days. I'm meeting up with her this afternoon, and will stay with her and her roommates until I decide to leave Dublin for another town. I can't imagine staying here too much longer though, it's not really my kind of scene. While I can appreciate the bustling city atmosphere, the double-decker busses, the millions of tourists and the all-around craziness, I'm finding myself completely overwhelmed by it all and am excited to see the more rural parts of Ireland where the pace is a little slower.

Today I'm headed to the outskirts of the city, first to check out a cool lighthouse that I read about, then (time-permitting) a historic cemetary and the botanical gardens. Pictures to follow. Yesterday I took exactly one photo, and that was of the fruit stand where I bought lunch. I guess I didn't have much energy for picture-taking, and I was really hungry, which made the fruit stand the most exciting thing I'd seen all day. I'd post the picture, but I'm sure you can all imagine what a fruit stand looks like!

Ah! Well, it's about time to check out of my hostel, so I'll finish up for today. So far though, I'm alive and happy, and (almost) over my jet-lag already! I was wide awake at 5AM this morning, but I'm feeling awake and refreshed now, and ready to go exploring.

I love and miss you all!

Kalen