Saturday, August 30 - Day 1

10:50am London time
Arrived at Heathrow airport. From the window of the plane we could see castles and manors dotting the countryside.

In a few of my travels, I have been made very aware of my white-ness: in Thailand, among the hill tribes, with women surrounding us and pushing their handicrafts; in Mexico, walking down the street and being called "guera" (literally "white girl")--these were pretty blunt reminders.
But on the plane to London, surrounded by English-speakers with British accents, I suddenly became very self-conscious about my American-ness, which hasn't happened before. Considered that we were coming from Texas and traveling to a popular destination, I think this feeling was my own projection.
(Update: I mostly got over this during our time in the airport--and I was also made painfully aware that having a British accent does not mean you know what you're talking about in the slightest--more on this soon).

2pm-ish
I'm currently sitting on the plane to Dublin, waiting or take-off, recoving from a harrowing experience with airport security--namely someone telling Andrew that no, we can't go through to our gate because we're actually in the wrong terminal (they're separated by bus rides, by the way), resulting in us going al the way back to where we started in this terminal only to have our suspicions confirmed that actually we ARE in the correct terminal, the guard was wrong, and we were probably going to miss our flight because of it. SO we hurried back through passport control, biometric scans, security, and all of Terminal 1...and we made it all the way back to the errant guard who laughingly apologized, taking his time (when we had no time left) before trying to tell us that our flight was leaving from a different gate than what the TV monitors said.
Well, we had none of that and moved on, thinking the gate was just around the corner. To our dismay, it was several long hallways away--we took them at a despairing jog. We arrived at the gate finally, sweaty, panicked, and exhausted from our prior overnight flight from Houston, with no time to spare, only to discover that our plane has been delayed and has not even begun to board yet. My reaction is both relief and immense frustration, now that I finally have the time to get pissed about the guard's incompetance.

Our plane is taxiing, and I can barely keep my eyes open. We're going to spend the majority of this trip being tired and sweaty; I'd just asumed that would begin with the hike, not in the airport.

Evening
Our trip to the first hostel was made considerably easier thanks to Keller's old supervisor David who just moved to Dulkey (outside of Dublin) and drove us there. We stopped in Eniskerry for dinner (blandest Chinese take-away ever) and a pint--of Guiness, of course. Our hostel is new, entirely IKEA-furnished, and seems nice enough. The bathroom is all-in-one, with the sink and toilet basically in an oversized shower stall, but there is the unique addition of an emergency pull-cord that summons a nurse.

Dublin itself is unlike any other city I've been to, in that it seems to combine the least efficient/most dangerous aspects of other big cities: the roads are narrow and filled with dare-devil pedestrians, and the layout is far from a grid, and streets are seldom labled. Kind of makes me glad we'll be spending out time walking in sheep pastures.

On the way to Eniskerry

Eniskerry

We're laughing because we're not exhausted yet!

More photos from Saturday

Having returned from the Emerald Isle

I've made it safely home, if not entirely in the same condition I was in when I left. I working on getting photos uploaded to the computer and internet today (I've finally created a Flickr account--hello new internet addiction!), but starting tomorrow, I'm going to post once a day, covering a day of our trip at a time, from the notes I made in my journal while we were there, plus photos and my current reflections on the day and the trip. After I've gotten through the whole trip, I may do a final reflection post; we'll see.

Anyway, look forward to that starting tomorrow morning.

EDIT: If you just can't wait, I've uploaded the first couple days of photos.

Countdown to Ireland

On Friday, Andrew and I are heading eastwards to spend five days hiking across the Irish countryside with two of Andrew's college friends. We're following a trail called the Wicklow Way that stretches from south Dublin all the way to Clonegal. Over the course of five days, we'll be traveling by foot from Knockcree to Shillelagh--as you can see on the map below, that means we're doing almost the whole thing!

Andrew and his friend did a couple days of the trail during study abroad in college, and apparently it is a lot of walking through pastures and country backyards. We're staying at hostels, B&Bs and the odd cottage, and we'll be doing four-and-a-half to seven-and-a-half hours of hiking each day. At least the weather is going to be cool (it's also going to be wet).

I'm looking forward to it...I think. I've got my misgivings, mostly about what it's going to be like to spend seven hours walking, and right now I'm bogged down with figuring out what we still need to do before we leave on Friday. We've got a decently long to-do and to-buy list, and I didn't get to check anything off of it today; Andrew says this is just because I didn't put enough on it to begin with. Today we purchased reading material for the trip as well as small moleskin notebooks for travel journaling (I won't have internet access over there, but I will take detailed notes, a la beach trips in Mexico); I also started throwing some things into a pile to be packed Thursday night. Tomorrow I'll knock out most other things, hopefully: buying duffle covers for the plane trip, tiny shampoo bottles, a toothbrush, a bandana, socks, turkey jerky, calling the bank so they don't freak over over foreign credit card charges...hoo boy.

But, we've got the important stuff: books to read, notebooks for writing, camera for picture-taking (of course).

So, next week I'll be blogging even less than usual, but I'll presumably return with a flurry of posts about sheep and Guiness and things that come up when you spend a week with three people (two almost strangers) testing the limits of your physical endurance. Should be exciting.

What's a walk in woods without running into some cobwebs?

Andrew and I went for a hike today, in half-assed preparation for our week-long hike in Ireland coming up soon. It was something of a mistake...turns out August in Houston is hot--unbearably hot when it comes to hiking around outside for over an hour.

There were shady sections to our trip, but these had their own excitement...

(Picture courtesy of Wikipedia; my camera was unfortunatey malfunctioning today.)

Anywhere there was canopy, and trees lining the path, these spiders (golden silk orb-weavers, apparently) had strung their webs across the path. In most cases, a few golden-yellow strands of web were attached to branches on either side of the path, with an orb web in the middle and its creator--usually they were about three or four inches across including legs--sitting dead-center Luckily for us, most of the time the webs were high enough up that we didn't even need to duck; but it was still a rather unsettling walk, always being on the lookout for webs (and Andrew is hardly a fan of spiders). They're not poisonous, and we didn't walk into a single web, but it felt a little like walking into a cave filled with booby traps, seeing dozens of these webs and predators hovering just over (or way over) our heads.

EDIT: Also, we got hella bitten up. I've got almost 40 bites, and more keep showing up. When I went to bed last night, I had four. This is despite having used bug spray.

More food not fiction

I don't think this is going to turn into a full-time foodie blog, but I made some pretty photogenic dishes recently that I'd like to share.

First up, tonight I thought I'd try to recreate a pasta salad that I used to buy all the time from the cafeteria in the building where I work in Chicago:

I call it "Fiesta Pasta:" fresh tomatoes and cilantro, corn, black beans, and grated Asiago cheese, with a bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper. The kind I bought always penne pasta, but I had rigatoni, so there. It's really delicious, and but I made it for tomorrow...must resist...

Last week, I made a spinach quiche, using a recipe from a friend at work. It was purty!

It was really full and puffed up a lot in the oven; this is after it had already started to fall:


Also, on Sunday night I decided to be decadent and roasted a whole head of garlic. We smeared it on toast and ate it with steak and green beans. Thai curry later this week--red curry with peanut butter, chicken, and bell pepper.

Well, now I'm hungry again. I think there is some Ben & Jerry's in the freezer...