Dublin take 2 and goodbye to Ireland

The ordinary arts we practice every day at home are of more importance to the soul than their simplicity might suggest. - Thomas Moore

Our best cup latte and hot chocolate since we have come here, came from a random cafe that mainly services an apartment complex. So perfect. :) 

I cooked this beautiful fish in butter and lemon. I was quite proud of it and it was delicious. (secretly I did look up how to cook it on youtube.) We had bought ourselves 2 fillet of Hake from Wrights in Howth and the fishmonger threw in a whole huge lemon for free. That was literally the first time in my life that I spoke to a fishmonger, he had super good advice!

Ruthiey made creamed cauliflower and lightly steamed snap peas for sides. 

 Howth was beautiful, again thanks Wendy for the advice to get out here! We went there for the day on the train.
Ruthiey said to me: "Look Jak, the ocean, trains, AND graffiti, how much better could it get?"

 Back in Dublin on Sunday we met up with Hannah B. and her friend Adrienne. (Adrienne is on the left and she is really cool, from Indiana, but she is living and working in Ireland for a couple years)
After church we went out for lunch to the Elephant & Castle Cafe.

 I got the Elephantburger which has curried sour cream poured all over it, sooooo delicious and unusual.

 We got to go on a free tour to Kilkenny and Glendalough because the hostel we were staying in had extra room in their tour bus. :D This was yesterday. This photo above is of the Wicklow mountains, it was a bit foggy but warmer and NO rain!

 By Glendalough, where Excalibur was filmed and lots of other films. It is a beautiful little lake. Me and Ruthiey said to each other that back home we never would travel just to see a little lake with 10,000 of them in a state there is no need to travel! It would be in your backyard. Though not with such an epic backdrop.

 We also found this sign. Some very clever person scratched in on the top of it: This is Jesus.

We went and saw Kilkenny Castle, which had massive beautiful ground and gardens for walking in. 

 Hard to believe how old all these castles are! And this one is modernized on the inside, which is even cooler.

So this is our journey so far in Ireland. We flew to Scotland today and said farewell to Dublin in the fog. Next post will be all about Glasgow and Edinburgh. :)

The Art of Life

The best things in life are free. 

Street art. 

Street artists. 

Both really cool. Both free. (tips are always nice for the street artists though) 

These guys were performing on St Patty's day in Derry - Londonderry. Awesome! 

Bagpipes are so cool!

 Sorta Picasso like graffiti.

 Why don't cities simply allow graffiti artists to compete for the privilege to paint various walls? Just give them a few guidelines. Maybe no one would do it if it was legal. :P 

 Nothing is more likely to get me distracted from where we are actually trying to go then this. Poor Ruthiey, we are never going to see all the free museums. :P 

 I think Ruthiey is beginning to appreciate graffiti art though... 

 ...as evidenced here. awwww. :) 

 That is simple but so cool. I bet that was commission by the city of Dublin though. :P

 I would like to live in this building, and have to climb those cool stairs everyday. 

 Yes, alleys are the best.  

 

 This creature is cool. It might be this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Elk

 There is a pedestrianized street in Dublin called Grafton Street. All kinds of musicians and artists come here to be seen and hopefully receive tips. These guys were playing psychedelic rock as far as I could tell. You can always see the ones that are going to continue successfully as street performers, they have a certain careless and unconscious attitude that is vital for this line of work.


On Good Friday, I was out watching the street performers, and at the end of Grafton Street, there was this guy named Oisin Charms - An Irish guy who is probably the most incredible street artist I've ever seen. Oisin's performance that I watched had him escaping from a straitjacket whilst on an 8 foot unicycle. He dislocated his shoulder on purpose to get out. 
I didn't have my camera that day but here is a video of him:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Vqik9mxTgM0
Anyways really cool, but the other day at the end of Grafton Street there was this other guy who was doing a show very similar and I thought that was kinda odd, but figured he must have seen Oisin's show and copied some of the successful elements.
After a while I realized that Oisin was standing behind the show and watching him like he was the teacher watching his student.

so this is the student. balancing on a ladder and juggling torches and machetes. 

(one of the lines: "Fire! Oh and nobody cares. Watch this! Free Beer! And everybody looks!")

This image fascinates me. I love the image of the expert watching the student. That is Oisin standing to the right of the photo.
Anyways, if any of you get to Dublin, walk on Grafton Street often in the hopes of catching Oisin Charms' incredible show. :D

Dingle and Cork

We went to the Dingle Peninsula for a few days. We were both pretty wiped from hiking the Cliffs of Moher so we took it easy in Dingle but we did see Fundie the Dolphin, a solitary dolphin who has been living in the bay for 29 years and really likes to swim with people and comes to say hi to them at all hours of day or evening apparently. :P 

We made sand art, it was cool. 

 We went to the beach and took pictures, but we didn't find the lighthouse we were half-heartedly searching for. instead we found this epic tower, below.

 It was in a field of cows. very impressive.

 Ruthiey made an incredible salad, with a hot topping of onions, peppers, brie cheese, and panchetta, and she fried up some flatbreads to go with it! YUMMY! :)

 Another shot for all the foodies out there. :P

 while on the subject of food, we also got ice cream from Murphy's in Dingle, they even make their own sea salt! I got Vanilla and Sea Salt ice creams and Ruthiey got Baileys Irish Cream and Keiran's Cookies ice creams. Very unusually and delicious.

We got to Cork, which was really a side thought, we were planning to go back to Dublin but then we decided to check out Cork. This is the best graffiti I have found yet, it makes me want to be in the wall, in the scene.

 This is the city of Cork

 It has a lot of canals running through it.

 St. Fin Barre's Church. Wow, the coolest church we'd seen so far. It is really gorgeous.

 We went to go see Blarney Castle. About 30 minutes by bus outside of Cork, so we packed a lunch and took the city bus there.

 It is a very impressive castle from the outside, but inside it is very dark and cold, like a prison. I would not like to live in a castle.

 Of course at the top of the castle a long line of smoochers were assembled. I didn't remember how gross I thought it would be to kiss a stone that hundreds maybe thousands of people before me had smooched and it probably hadn't been sanitized very often...

 This is Blarney House, which was way cooler looking than the castle, but unfortunately closed for remodeling or something. But anyways, not open to the public. The grounds around Blarney castle are nice and we took a stroll around for a while.

This rock is called Lion rock. I can actually see why they say that! Maybe my imagination is getting better. :P

 We went out for Indian food whilst in Cork. It was a fast food place, but sooooo yummy! We had enough leftover for the next day's lunch.
 

 We went about wandering at twilight on Maundy Thursday and photographed churches. All the old people were going off to church.

Cork

by Hannah Jak

Perfect twilight, all around.

Bright city, softly ignites.

A dream I'd lost, I've found.

Narrow lanes and street lights. 

The Awe Inspiring Cliffs of Moher

Ruthiey and I went to the little tiny town of Doolin in order to do a hike along the Cliffs of Moher by recommendation of Wendy Nachreiner. Thanks Wendy! It would have been awful to miss these cliffs. (Side note - these are the 'Cliffs of Insanity' in Princess Bride, they also appear in Harry Potter)

 Ruthiey had a bit of a wonked knee from previous hiking trips, but she didn't want to miss this hike and so we geared up, packed a lunch and headed out into the cloudy morning.

This is like nothing I ever saw in my life, even in pictures and just so ya all know, pictures don't even capture half of this. It needs to be seen, heard and felt in person.

 This is the short end of the cliffs, right before they end in a crazy good surfer beach. This is where we started our hike.

 Ruthiey sea gazing. It was very distracting and hard to keep a steady pace with so much beautiful scenery.

 Me. Oh btw, my hairdo did not survive this trip, after it started hailing/raining and then with the wind being so strong, I had a whole new do by the end. :)

 The cliffs started getting higher and higher and we had a few moments like this one where we suddenly realized just how far down it was! At one point I dropped a rock over one of the cliffs and it fell for a long time before soundlessly breaking into pieces at the bottom. That was scary. It gives you floaty feelings in your stomach.  

 They are really truly dangerous cliffs. But they are kinda funny signs... :P

 Ruthiey posing with warnings.

More Cliff shots. The hike we went on the first day was 16 km long. The next day I went again by myself because Ruthiey's knee really needed a rest. The second day I did the 24 km route. this photo above and all the ones below are from my solo trip. It was quite cloudy both days.

 Both the sound and the silence of the Cliffs is amazing. Waves and wind, and sudden quiet. Because most of the trail that I was taking was on non-tourist routes, I saw maybe 4 people on the second day. (besides when I was passing the tourist center, maybe a 1 km stretch that had 100+ people behind shoulder high walls.)

 

 That tiny tower that you see on the jutting out bit is the tourist cliff. This is after I passed it.

I reached Hag's Head, which apparently looks like an old women looking out to sea, but maybe my imagination is just not quite there, cuz I didn't see it at all, but I did see this cool Sea Arch that would have been fun to kayak through

Hag's Head has an old castle tower on it, mostly destroyed but the skeleton looks cool, especially from a distance. 

This is from inside the tower looking back (North) the way I came. 

 So on the way back, I found this little trail, that you can barely see in the center of this photo, it goes down - almost a sheer cliff - down to this beach. I had seen some surfers coming up the trail while I was going towards Hag's Head so I decided to try and get down it. If there wasn't grass growing on this trail, it would be almost impossible to get down.

 But maybe because it was so hard to get to, it was really cool and I was very happy to have gotten down to it. Getting back up was another story altogether...
At the top, two Aussie boys were waiting, they said: "How'd you go?"
"Good!" I said, out of breath and my heart beating about 200 bpm. What I felt like saying was: "I'm alive!"
I told them how to get down to the beach and went on my way. That was really fun! But I was kinda glad Ruthiey hadn't been there to see it, just cuz she might have been a bit freaked out. :)
Love ya, little sis!

The sun, an elusive beauty that day, finally appeared, way off in the ocean. A fitting end to an excellent and exciting hike. I am afraid I won't enjoy other hikes with this as a comparison! So absolutely awe inspiring and epic! If any of you ever get a change to get out to Ireland, don't miss these Cliffs.