(Ireland trip) Cliffs of Moher

The Cliffs of Moher - finally!

I guess, that's what my audience - if I happen to have such a thing as an audience - has been waiting for all the time: everyone already knows Dublin, and hardly anyone is incredibly interested in getting to know Ennis, I suppose. But, big but, the Cliffs of Moher are about the place to visit in Ireland.
Actually, they were a reason for me to return to Ireland, because I had not managed to go there during my Erasmus semester. Of course, this was not the only reason (and not the only place I hadn't managed to visit, either - shame on me), but at least one reason of several ones.
As I already mentioned in the overview post, the original plan was to go to the cliffs with Bus Éireann. That's why we went to Ennis in the first place: there is a bus to the cliffs. Or, let's say: there should be a bus. Since we happened to be in Ennis at one of the two days of the bus strike, there was no bus, actually. We only found out about that on the day when we came to Ireland, so we had already booked our tickets online. Like seriously, why is it even possible to book tickets for days where there are no buses? Was Bus Éireann technically incompetent and therefore unable to block the online booking for these two days? Or did they just have other problems than stupid Germans booking tickets for days of strike ...?
Anyway, we found a private bus tour company that still had spaces left for Saturday and even offered a pick-up from the Rowan Tree Hostel. Of course, they weren't on time (we were not exactly sure whether the bus was supposed to be at the hostel at 10:35 or 10:45, but it was late anyway), so we spent some time standing in the rain watching cars passing by ...
When the bus finally came and we got on it, we realised that it was a kind of small tour company. I mean, the bus itself wasn't even that small, but there were only 9 people in it - including the 3 of us and the bus driver / tour guide. The driver was obviously Irish. The 8 people going on this tour were 7 Germans - and Laetitia! When the driver let her know that she was highly outnumbered by Germans, Laetitia was like: "Yeah, I'm used to that ..." :-D

Since this was a guided bus tour, we didn't only drive to the cliffs and back, but also made some photo stops (and a lunch stop) on the way there. And the driver was complaining a bit about the seeming lack of excitement of the majority. The standard problem on bus tours with Germans, I guess ... :-P

First, we stopped at a castle. I couldn't remember the name, so I actually had to google it. Seems to be Leamaneh Castle (that's at least in the right county: Clare) or something like this.

As you can imagine, I was terribly excited by this ruin of a castle. But there we had at least the chance to get a proper group picture (i. e. no selfie!).

Afterwards, I turned my head away from the castle and to the way more interesting other side:

Oh, cows!

Oh, focused cow!

Later on, there was a stop at a coffee shop. I was more interested in the toilet than in coffee and cake ... Oh, and there were more cows in between the car/bus park and the shop:

They were cute baby cows!

I know, it's hard to see ... (btw, there's our bus in the background)

... but if you watch closely, you'll see ... 

... they are so fluffy! ^_^

We also passed a lot of cows on the bus drive. Unfortunately, our tour guide always mentioned stuff like, "And this is beef cattle." Good thing that I don't eat beef ...

The next stop was at Poulnabrone Portal Tomb. There are quite some tombs in Ireland, I already noticed last semester ...

Then, we finally saw the first cliffs. Not the cliffs (of Moher), but still cliffs. It was a really beautiful coastal line.

While I was busy taking pictures of the landscape, the others were busy taking pictures of me taking pictures and trying not to fall off the cliffs ...

Focus: do not struggle and fall on the way back!

Afterwards, we finally went on the the actual destination of this tour:

The Cliffs of Moher!

(Brace yourselves, plenty of landscape pictures are coming!)

Since the cliffs are such a touristy place, they are secured at the beginning. So there are walls or fences between you and the cliffs and lots of signs saying, "Do not climb the wall!". But what made it even more touristy was the fact that there was WiFi!

Wtf ...?

Seriously, why would you need WiFi there?

However, I found all of this a bit too touristy. The walls and the grass between me and the cliffs were a disaster for my pictures. Either you had a lot of grass in the pictures or you had to zoom and then had a narrowed view in the pics. I appreciated neither of the possibilities ...

Wall and grass. -.-

A lot of grass. -.-'

Narrowed view. -_-

The best I could make out of it under these conditions:

Afterwards, before I ultimately lost my head, we went to the less secured area. In order to do that, we had to pass a sign saying, "Attention! Farmland beginning here!"
So I was finally able to take pictures without having to avoid walls all the time ...

Well, and after we had already seen some cows today, we could also spot sheep on the farmland:

Oh, sheep!

Aren't they cute?

It seems as if I was performing the best stunts when taking pictures. So, again, the others did not only take pics of the landscape but also of me taking pictures of the landscape.

I didn't even notice Michael taking this one ...

When we had to go back to the established part and the visitor centre in order to not miss our bus back to Ennis, the sun finally came out and made the environment look mystically:

(Ireland trip) Ennis

Here comes separate post no. 2!

From Dublin (Heuston, to be precise), we went to Ennis. I already mentioned that nobody seems to know it. I didn't know it either before I started planning this trip. While the planning was in progress, I realised there were basically two places from which you were able to go to the Cliffs of Moher, Galway and Ennis. Since we had already been to Galway during the last semester, I decided on Ennis. Of course, that was when we didn't know about the bus strike ... But anyway, we managed to go to the cliffs (as I told you, wait for the separate post ;-)). And before we did so, we had time to explore a bit of the town of Ennis.
Now you still don't know about Ennis, do you? But don't worry, I have the obligatory map for you:

So Ennis is a town in the west of Ireland. Its population, which I finally looked up, is something around 20000. You might think that's not really big, but believe me, for Ireland it is kind of big ... It's for sure bigger than Maynooth (there's a reason why it is called university town).

If you look at the "urban" (ahem) area instead of the town only, Ennis has around 25000 inhabitants - which actually makes it the 11th biggest urban area of the Republic of Ireland, according to this Wikipedia article. Let me summarise: What the actual fuck?!

Whatever. The purpose of this post is not expressing wonder about the small number of people in Ireland - especially in comparison to the big number of cows & sheep. It's about the in fact not so small town Ennis.
First, we went from the train station to our hostel. This took some time, because we had to pass the town centre with O'Connell Street and O'Connell monument (maybe Ennis should better be called Little Dublin xD) while it was raining all the time. But then we finally spotted it - the nicest hostel ever seen!

I wasn't being ironic about the nice hostel. :-P

I basically booked it because it was the only hostel that showed up when I was searching for hostels in Ennis on Hostelworld, but it's actually top rated there. And it got even better: since we came to Ennis off-season, there were only few people in the hostel. So when we checked in, the receptionist offered us a private ensuite room instead of the 8 bed dorm I had booked. For the same price!
So I guess we had the best night of all there - especially Michael, since he got the kingsize bed! ;-)
In order to not make anyone go green with envy, I didn't take any pictures of the room with the kingsize bed,the kingsize bathroom, or the piece of cake we got together with a short letter of welcome. Only of the cute piece of art hanging on the wall:

Andy Warhol ducks ...?

After checking out this amazing place, we went to Aldi to get something to eat. Aldi in Ennis actually has better opening hours than Aldi in Maynooth - which is just next to the university! Then we had dinner in the hostel and left the hostel again to go to a pub called Cruises. And, of course, it was nicer than all four pubs in Maynooth ... and there was proper Irish live music at the beginning!

And now, all the pictures of Ennis town - I just didn't want to ruin the text above by inserting pictures between each half-sentence:

River Fergus just next to the hostel.

A local church (couldn't find out the name) on the way to Aldi.

The town centre in the rain.

In Cruises ...

... a really atmospheric pub ...

... with live music!

And a place we didn't go to, but I had to take pictures of it anyway, just because it was so impressing: YOLO, a bar or something with an interesting name and "cute" decoration.

Even more impressive at night.

Oh, and speaking of something being impressive: let me just post another picture of our hostel:

Also nice at night. :-)

And to end this post with: here's a picture I took during breakfast at the hostel. In the dining room, there was a wall full of expressions and sayings translated from English into Irish, including instructions how to pronounce it. I liked this one best:

(Ireland trip) Dublin

So this is the first individual post I had announced in the revival of this blog. Since we arrived in Dublin and also left Ireland from there, I thought it would make sense to start here. And sticking to the chronology of the events might help me not forget anything. After all, it was a quite "intense", event-packed extended weekend in Ireland.

I don't think I took any pictures of Ashfield Hostel, the hostel where we stayed for the first and the last night of our trip. I mean, it doesn't look so incredibly interesting. It's just a normal, quite cheap hostel. But it had the best breakfast of all hostels we stayed in. And, big advantage, it's right in the city centre. Since I prefer taking pictures of landscapes anyway, I found it nice to have the Liffey nearby. So I took "a few" pictures of it, not only during daytime ...

... but also at night:

And of course, I couldn't help it but take a picture of one of the famous landmarks of Dublin: The Spire! If you have been to Dublin in the past but you're not sure whether you know this one: you probably passed it on a shopping trip on O'Connell Street. It's the needle monument:

Fun Fact: Seán Connolly, an Irish youtuber, mentions it in a video.

Speaking of shopping trips: we also ended up going to Penneys ...

And no, I didn't buy anything there. I actually only bought postcards in Dublin, I think. Well, and stamps for the postcards. In the fancy Irish post on O'Connell Street (close to Penneys ...).

Although the three of us had been to Dublin a couple of times, it looked a bit different this time.

On the one hand, the streets were emptier than usual, because there were no Dublin Buses running:

They were serious about the strike ...

On the other hand, the lampposts were a bit more crowded than usual. That's because there will be a referendum on same-sex marriage on May 22nd. The vast majority of the posters looked quite promising:

(blog revival) Back to Ireland! (30.4.-5.5.)

As you know, I declared this blog finished some time ago. As you might know as well, I have another blog now, but there is not really a lot going on at the moment, to be honest. So after my recent trip to Ireland, I wasn't really sure on which blog to post the obligatory article. But since the trip contained a few places that I would have liked to go to during my Erasmus semester, I thought it would make sense to post it here, just in case somebody comes to my blog to read about nice places to visit in Ireland.

Anyway, it was a 5 1/2 days trip to Ireland. The original plan was to go there for a weekend only but then we decided to extend it a bit in order to have more time for travelling there. I mean, who needs to study for university anyway? :-P And I have to use the vacation days of my internship somehow, so this was the perfect opportunity!

I'll try and keep the complaining part short. Michael and I had to get up f***ing early and take the bus to Frankfurt Hahn (definitely not Frankfurt, see map below!) at 5:45 a.m. to be on time for our flight at 10:25.

There's a reason why the locals call this airport "Hahn" only...

And that's not because HHN is so incredibly far away from Mannheim (we were there at 7:45 or so), but because there are only four "Hahn Express" buses a day... So we had a lot of time at the airport. The only problem about that: HHN is quite small in comparison to Frankfurt airport, or Dublin airport, or probably most airports you want to compare it to. I think it has 12 gates. But there is a McDonald's ...

But yeah, we somehow didn't die of boredom and managed to make it to Dublin with Ryanair. And we didn't even have to buy perfume (10% off!) or scratch cards on the plane!

At Dublin airport, we were lucky to catch an Airlink Dublin Bus to the city centre. Really lucky, because when we arrived at our hostel, we found at that there would be strike of Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann the two following days. That was something new then... I mean, delayed buses are standard in Ireland, waiting for the bus is probably considered a legitimate free time activity - but no buses running at all...?!

So Michael, Laetitia, and I had to spend part of our afternoon in Maynooth with redoing our planning. But MU library is a nice place to do so, I think, especially since it's close to Coffee Mill where we went afterwards. This time, I didn't take any pictures of the amazing all day veggie breakfast they have but it was as amazing as always, of course (see here for pics).

In the evening, we went to Brady's, one of the four pubs in Maynooth, to meet Ashnit and Alex, two others of the full year students, there.

Let me just insert the picture here that caught some attention when Ashnit posted it on Facebook:

I'm the one on the left. :-P

If you're wondering why: because I'm not drinking tea there, but actually something with alcohol. But it's not beer (I still think Guinness is disgusting), it's Cider Berry.

Afterwards, we went to Celbridge where Laetitia packed her stuff and joined us for the hostels (no buses the day after, so no way of making it to Dublin, remember?). But this way, I caught at least a glimpse of Celbridge, one of the neighbouring towns/villages of Maynooth - during my Erasmus semester, I had never been there, I have to admit...

And proudly presenting the planning results, this was our round trip through Ireland:

Friday

We spent some time in Dublin, got some postcards and stamps and had lunch at Govinda, an amazing vegetarian Indian restaurant I had found last semester.

And of course, I took some pictures of Dublin city centre, but I think I'll present them in a separate post, just in case anyone has had enough of Dublin ... (which is not likely, it's a really nice city - but adding all the pics here would also make this post even longer than it is already ...)

Later on, we went to Dublin Heuston, one of the at least four train stations of Dublin (Connolly, Tara Street, Pearse, Heuston). As far as I know, Heuston is where the long distance trains depart and arrive - if it's possible to have "long distance" trains in Ireland. Anyway, since there were no buses, we took the opportunity to go there with the LUAS, the tram. From Heuston, we took the train to Ennis. That's a town somewhere in the west of Ireland nobody seems to know of, but it's quite close to the Cliffs of Moher. There was no direct train to Ennis, so we had to change in Limerick. According to the reports of people who had visited it last semester, it's not really the nicest of the cities in Ireland. But I managed to find Limerick's nice spot:

At the entrance of the train station.

In Ennis, we had some time for walking through the town (which has an O'Connell Street including a monument, just like Dublin!), doing some grocery shopping, and having dinner at the nicest hostel I had ever seen before going to a pub in the evening - the standard activity in Ireland. ;-)

If you're waiting for pictures, there'll also be a post about Ennis, just wait for it.

Saturday

The Cliffs of Moher, finally! Since Bus Éireann was on strike, we had had to book a tour to the cliffs. But that wasn't too bad. Be patient and wait for the separate post with a looot of pictures. :-P

In the evening, we already had to leave the cute town of Ennis again, because we moved on to Killarney. Train connections in Ireland are interesting: we had to change the train three times. The first time was in Limerick (again!), where we had an hour before our connection train departed. So we decided to have dinner at an Asian (fast food) restaurant close to the train station. Another kind-of-nice place in Limerick. Oh, and the next change was in Limerick Junction. When we arrived there, the question was: "Is Limerick Junction like Frankfurt Hahn?" Answer: Yup, seems so.

Shortly after 10:30 p.m. and after another change in Mallow (no idea where that is), we finally arrived in Killarney. Where all hell was let loose. When we arrived at our hostel, we found out why: two girls in our dorm, who were about to go out, explained to us that there was some car rallye going on. The whole town was partying, so it seemed - while we only wanted to go to Killarney National Park...! You can imagine, our night wasn't exactly the most restful one ever since Irish guys returned from partying in the middle of the night - must have been 3 a.m. or something - turned on all the lights, had conversations that prevented you from falling asleep again, and then left the room again, leaving the lights on (that happened twice, I think). But I guess they weren't too happy about us either when we got up at 8 a.m. ...

Sunday

As I already mentioned, we only came to Killarney to go to the national park. And that's what we did! Wait for the green beauty to come in a separate post!

In the afternoon, between getting wet and getting wet again (Ireland - of course it was raining more than once), we went to a restaurant before moving on to Cork. And we didn't have to change trains thrice* this time, only once, I think.

In Cork, we went to our hostel, which was on top of one of the few hills of the country, left our stuff in the prison-like looking dorm and then went to the city centre, which was really nice at night. Well, and what do you think we did then? We went to a pub, for sure! (But in Cork, it's actually recommended to go to a pub, not only because that's what you do anywhere in Ireland, but also because of the atmosphere ...)

Monday

Since the hostel in Cork was the only of the four hostels of our trip where breakfast wasn't included and we didn't want to pay 3€ for "basic/light continental breakfast" (i. e. toast and cornflakes), we went out for breakfast. The place where we ended up after strolling through the city for some time - it wasn't the easiest task to find something with vegetarian options on a Bank Holiday - we ended up at a nice place, not sure where exactly. But the food looked okay:

Afterwards, we checked out the city a bit further and passed four churches, for example. You'll see the pictures ... in a separate post (what did you expect?)
Only one more picture here, because it's also related to food. When walking through the city, we spotted a nice cupcake shop, so we couldn't resist:

#foodporn xD

In the early afternoon, we had to go back to Dublin (direct train this time - jackpot!). That was because we had decided to go to the cinema with Alex in the evening. We watched Avengers 2, just in case anyone is interested. I hadn't even watched Avengers 1, but never mind. Going to the cinema was a nice end of our trip, because on Tuesday morning, Michael and I had take the bus to Dublin airport (fortunately, Dublin Bus was running again) and go back to Germany ...

* all credits to Laetitia for this Shakespeare-like expression.

Time to say goodbye...

If you're not already humming the melody, here is the link - to put you into the right mood... :-P

Since I have already written a post about the Carol Service in the last week of my semester abroad, you might have guessed it: the end is near! (dramatic music starting here)
Or at least the end of my time in Maynooth. I still had to write two essays after returning to Germany, so technically the semester was not over. But I won't bother you with my essay issues now - and emotionally it was definitely over by December 21st.

So next to writing essays and stuff (essays, it's always about essays) we had to make the most out of the few remaining days. For example, eating in Pugin Hall, the restaurant on South Campus, again. I had only been there the week before for the first time. It was more expensive than Phoenix, but well, it was way nicer as well. And it gave you the proper Hogwarts feeling, that's probably something worth paying for.

Oh, and speaking of Hogwarts: we finally managed to do the Hogwarts photo shooting on South Campus with all of us wearing our Penneys shirts/sweaters/hoodies. I mean, if you don't even have courses on the beautiful Hogwarts-like part of the campus, you have to make use of it in another way. :-D

And since we didn't expect to manage meeting for another shooting at another time, we just added the Tesco jumper shooting afterwards. So the instructions had been something like: "Bring your Hogwarts hoodie and your Tesco jumper, no matter what it takes you to fit them into your backpack!" It somehow worked, and we have a nice picture now:

And we also have some incredibly beautiful selfies that had to be taken before... :-P

Furthermore, we had at least two goodbye parties, one in the Roost (not to be commented on...) and one on the first floor of Brady's Clockhouse. I didn't even know this floor existed before we had to go there because there was no other pub that had enough free places for a group as big as ours. But after we had occupied a lot of space there, we had a really good evening with Secret Santa (German "Wichteln"), cake and water melon (part of Secret Santa xD). Later, some of us even entered the dance floor:

You can see my Secret Santa present in the pic. :-D

On the next day, we went to Dublin for the last time. Basically to do a lot of Christmas shopping. Which might not be the best timing on the day before the fourth of advent, the last Saturday before Christmas - but actually, it was the only possible date: after the essay deadlines and before going home. But, of course, it was nerve-racking and we had to treat ourselves with pancakes afterwards...

Well, and Sunday, December 21st, was the seriously surreal day when I went home. This time I had reached the 23 kg limit for my luggage and had to put on like 6 layers of clothing - but I managed to bring all my precious stuff, including my shiny rain boots, back to Germany. Since I went home in the evening and couldn't find my camera among my luggage any more due to overcrowding of my backback the pictures I took at the airport and on the plane are quite shitty. This for example:

So I decided to end this blog the same way I posted an ending post on Facebook: with the annoying field, in this way saying goodbye to Ireland.

Thanks for the memories!

Carol Service in the College Chapel (15.12.)

The beginning of the last week in Maynooth...

Since it was the middle of December already, the annual carol services took place in this week. Of course, as Erasmus students we didn't have a clue about stuff that happens every year. But Alena, our International Coordinator, was so nice as to tell us about the lottery a day before the deadline. No, I'm not kidding: you had to have tickets for the carol service, and in order to get them, you had to participate in a lottery. I can prove it:

(sorry for the stupid size of the screen shot)

So we had a funny time in the library trying to download the application form ("can't open file" and stuff like this) and properly completing it (what the hell is my university email address?) before going to the Music Department to hand it in.
Most of us won tickets and since winning meant getting two tickets, all of us (and some more people) were able to go to the Carol Sevice. The only problem was the day because there were tickets for Monday and Tuesday.

(Sirkka's finger nails, not mine.)

So some of us (me, for example) went there on Monday, some on Tuesday. I guess, the day didn't matter because it was amazing anyway. Firstly, the college chapel was really beautiful. Unfortunately, I hadn't brought my camera with me since I had come directly from the library (that's also where I went back afterwards - it was essay time...). But there are a lot of impressive pictures online. Due to copyright uncertainties I won't post any of them but you can just ask Google for help if you're interested. ;-)
Secondly, of course, the Carol Service itself was also amazing. There were four different choirs singing! And you can actually listen to them because the service was on the radio! The person who posted the link in one of the Erasmus groups on Facebook said it's for the people "who missed the angels sing". :-)