Fantastic Ireland

After having a quiet one and a half week in Sandane I decided to end my spring break with a little more action and travelling than I normally get. First I went to Bergen for a York reunion with fiskebollar and concert when John and Ryan came to visit Trine. We had a nice weekend, quite relaxing, and I got to see new parts of the city too.



From Bergen I left for Oslo where I again met Trine, Mari and Lisa and we together set off for a week in beautiful Ireland. We arrived in Dublin, a lovely city where we had a good time just walking the streets, looking at different monuments of well-known people and events. We also went to the writers museum and an Irish history museum which were both actually very good. The nights in Dublin were spent at the pub drinking Irish coffee and listening to Irish music. It was all really great!!






My new sweetheart! :-)

After two days we set off for Doolin and the Cliffs of Moher. On the way we stopped in Limerick, a place I had really been looking forward to see since I'm reading Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes" and writing a paper on it. However, I wasn't very impressed with the city. It was just another grey city with the same shops as everywhere else, and we didn't really have the time to experience the more interesting (?) parts of it. But at least I can say that I've been there!






The Cliffs of Moher was most definitely the highlight of our trip! Doolin was such a cozy small town and the hostel we stayed at was really nice. Even though we as Norwegians are quite experienced hikers we were a bit afraid that the walk from the hostel to the Cliffs would be too long (understanding the transition from miles to kilometers isn't always that easy...) so we took the bus to the visitor centre. We expected the walk back to take several hours and were therefore very much surprised when Doolin showed up behind a hill just after we had gone down from the "main road" to the cliffs and admired the view. It was a spectacular scenery, we were very impressed by the way the waves hit the cliffs and the shores and the weather was so good that day! The evening was spent in a local pub eating Irish stew (at least some did...), chocolate fudge cake (for some reason we always seem to end up with that dessert..), drinking Irish Coffee and listening to Irish music. In other words, a really Irish day!




We ended our trip in Belfast in an awful hostel. It was quite a big change from beautiful Doolin! I guess we didn't get the best impression since our first meeting with the locals ended with two of them throwing soda at a poor, drunk 15 year old girl that was trying to pick a fight in McDonald's... Belfast didn't really feel safe at all, and it was far from as nice as Dublin, it just felt like any other big city. So we ended up spending most of the two days in cafes or shopping. However, we went on a Black Taxi Tour to the areas were there has been a lot of trouble and this was really interesting as it gave us some insight into the conflicts that has been in Belfast for many years.


This guy points his gun at you whereever you turn! (Try watching the screen from different angles)

Going back to Leeds on the plane we were quite tired after a week of carrying quite heavy backpacks. It was therefore very nice to come "home" to York and get into "my own" bed. After a week in hostels the mattress actually didn't feel bad at all!! And it was so nice to see everybody again! "Borte bra,men "hjemme" best!?" Even so; "vi var alle einige om at det hadde vore ein flott tur!"