Christmas market & cinema (29.11.)

Yeah, so I'm done with my last essays for Maynooth and have already moved back to Mannheim. Now I can finally write another blog post. :-D

At the weekend of the first advent, we wanted to go to a Christmas market. The original plan was to go to Waterford because there was some fancy Christmas festival. It would have been cool to go there - but... when we checked out public transport, we found out that it would have taken us wayyy to long. Not that Waterford is so incredibly far away (in fact, nothing is very far away on this island), it's just the standard problem: public transport...
Anyway, then we decided to just go to Dublin again. Way easier, faster, cheaper - and there was a Christmas market as well.
But since this is Ireland, going to the Christmas market started a bit differently than we had expected. To go there, you first had to queue! xD The Christmas market was in a separated area, and there was actually security personnel telling you where to queue. Because the signs saying "queue this way" were not big enough or something like this... ^^

But at least there was a choir performing Christmas songs right next to the queue:

Waiting to be allowed to pass the guys in yellow to go into the restricted area. xD

I didn't really get at the beginning why they were making such a fuss about a Christmas market. In Germany, you just go there. The explanation was (again): Irish!! Okay, it was the first time that they had organised a Christmas market in this street, so it was so be expected that it wouldn't be the most structured and considered matter of all time. Furthermore, it was an Irish Christmas market, Doesn't make organisation any better... Yeah, and then there was the alcohol problem. Normally, it's not allowed to drink alcohol in public in Ireland. But this was a f...ing Christmas market, so - of course - there was mulled wine. Otherwise it wouldn't have been a proper Christmas market (cf. improper Christmas markets in Sweden, as I was told by a friend who spent her Erasmus semester there ^^). To make drinking on a Christmas market possible, they obviously had to limit the area where alcohol was consumed. There were even signs saying stuff like, "no consuming of alcohol behind this point". xD

Except for the alcohol business, it was pretty much a small normal Christmas market. Nice, but nothing special.

Needless to say: we didn't need the whole day to check out the Christmas market. So we strolled through the city for some time, got something to eat, ... Actually I didn't take any pictures of the noodle bar we went to. But of the Christmas decoration (decoration issues again...):

Not the best pictures ever though... The nice pictures of the Christmas decoration in Dublin (Petra took them, not me) can be found in the apology post, by the way.

Yeah, and somewhere in between all the decoration picture taking, we also went to the cinema to watch the most recent part of the Hunger Games, Mockingjay 1. Of course, we had to take a selfie first to properly document this event (no cinema in Maynooth, remember? ^^)

Selfie on a bridge.

And since it's not possible to spot either the bridge or anything of the Liffey, here is what the view looked like there:

Game of Thrones Tour (23.11.)

When I was writing the Glendalough & Kilkenny post, I realised that I actually was confusing trips. At some point, I wasn't sure anymore what was part of this trip and what was part of the Connemara tour in the study break. The reason for this confusion might be the number of trips I went on. I mean, only one day later, we attended a Game of Thrones Tour.

I'm not exactly sure how I came to join this tour, because I don't even watch the series and haven't read any of the books. But I happened to meet a few GoT fans on my semester abroad who definitely wanted to do this tour. And they suggested that non-fans could just join since the landscape was supposed to be beautiful. Just for your information: Game of Thrones is mainly shot in Northern Ireland. So I just took this tour as an opportunity to go to NI.
For the people who slept through their geography lessons: the island of Ireland consists of two countries, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. NI belongs to the United Kingdom (not Great Britain, just saying ^^).
Here the usual Google Maps map:

The tour started at 7 a.m. in Dublin. That already sounded like a nightmare to me. To make it worse, it was on a Sunday, which means there was no way of making it to Dublin with public transport. Public transport doesn't get up that early on Sundays. ^^ We decided to take a cab which was actually cheaper than staying at a hostel since we were a big group. Anyway, I had to get up at 5:15 or something like this because the taxi came to pick us up around six. Needless to say, some people almost fell asleep on the cab.
And something else that should be clear: no, you don't need an hour to get to Dublin with a taxi. You don't even need an hour with public transport (okay, admittedly, Dublin Bus might need an hour during the daytime - rush hour and stuff...). But even though the taxi driver had to pick up people in Leixlip and Lucan (it was a pretty big taxi), we were still early for the tour. And almost died outside in the cold. And, of course (conspiracy theory!), our bus was the last to arrive. The buses for the Cork Tour and for the Giant's Causeway Tour were there before. One can imagine how happy we all were when our bus finally came...
The organisation of the tour was... interesting. There was one bus driver, one tour guide (whom we picked up in Belfast, and one... other guy. Not exactly sure what his job was. Maybe telling the driver the where to go. And counting from time to time if we were complete. The problem was that he obviously wasn't able to count. So it happened more than once that he claimed we were complete, we were about to leave - and then another person turned up! Once he apologised with, "Oh, I counted my wife, sorry". Yeah, our theory was that if we had been missing more people he would just have counted his wife ten times or something like this. xD
Anyway, we learned from this to always be on time and to never walk around alone. Because if the first two rows are completely empty and seven people are missing it's less likely that the bus will just leave.
Since I still don't have a clue about Game of Thrones and couldn't tell from the pictures which locations we went to, I'll just post a screenshot from the tour company's website:

Oh, and let's just not talk about the free lunch. The good thing about it was that it was free. Full stop. But the tour guide was good. I mean, I have no idea about his expertise, but he was nice and entertaining. And he brought his tablet and fancy loudspeakers to show us scenes from GoT that were filmed at the very spots we visited.
Yeah, and now I'll just add looots of pictures because I have nothing else to say. xD

On the road...

Oh, there's the sea! *everybody takes camera out*

Trying to take pics out of the bus...

semi-successfully...

Oh, sheep!

Oh, sheep²!!

Oh, a goat - it wasn't wearing the jacket when we first passed it, I swear! xD

The Dark Hedges.

And to end this post with: group picture at the Dark Hedges. :-)

Just a short note: The original plan was to publish this post on New Year's Eve. This obviously didn't work out. Some fuzzy things happened. Mostly, it was a disgusting internet connection...