Ireland in 6 Days: Dublin, part 1

December 15, 2012:

Before take-off at 3pm in the afternoon, I packed my backpack and purse and headed over for a goodbye lunch with Flo (sob) and also said goodbye to Milica who gave me an amazing bag of snacks with things I had told her at the goodbye party the night before were my favourite. What a sweetheart! It was therefore with sadness AND excitement that I left for the airport.

While I was in the waiting room, I began reading Wild by Cheryl Strayed on my Kindle, a book that Danielle had recommended to me. It is autobiographical and the opening chapters deal with the loss of her mother when the narrator was about my age. It made me want to hug my mum and make sure I'm not taking this time for granted, which ended up making me very homesick. Not a great way to start a journey, so I put my Kindle away and instead focused on the fact that I would be seeing Talaira in a few hours!

When I got off the plane, I managed to find the bus taking me into the centre of town. The young man selling tickets was incredibly nice and helpful, but mostly I just wanted to stand there and listen to him talk. The Irish accent is so distinct. Once to O'Connell Street in Dublin, I realized I had no idea which direction to go in to get to Temple Bar where our hostel was located. I picked up a free map in the tourist office on the corner and spent the following few hours wandering in all the directions, while thinking that I had properly read the map. On my final attempt to find the hostel, I passed by a Tim Horton's in a convenience store and stopped in my tracks. It felt like a beacon guiding me to my destination.Sure enough, I made it to Barnacles shortly after and was welcomed by a lovely note from Talaira telling me I could find her in the common room.

We spent our first night in Dublin walking around enjoying all the people dressed in ugly Christmas sweaters and going to the bars, eating pizza, and meeting some people. The classic line in response to finding our we were from Canada was "Oh, my [brother/uncle/aunt/cousin/sister/friend] lives in Canada!". It's a start, I guess! Now that I think of it, this happens pretty frequently wherever I am. Anyway, we headed back to the common room for a bit of reading before bed and instead ended up chatting with two guys from Australia, Dave and Saul. I am 99% sure they were completely drunk at the time of this conversation, but Dave, who studies actuarial science, gave us psychology tests to find out what kind of people we are, and proved to Talaira and I that we are best friends.... Saul, who just finished studying film/entertainment and who currently coaches tennis, was just really friendly and seemed genuinely interested in talking to us, which was nice. They were travelling to Dublin on their own before the start of a Contiki Tour around Europe. We said goodnight and left the common room, only to find that they were staying in our hostel room as well.

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December 16, 2012:

In the morning, we had our free breakfast in the hostel kitchen right behind them in line, but they seemed to have forgotten that they'd met us. Twenty minutes later, the previous evening must have come back to them a bit because they invited us to spend the day with them and we agreed. None of us had any concrete plans, so we set out in any old direction and ended up trying to find our way to the Guinness Factory. We asked for directions three separate times and got three separate sets of instructions. Somehow, they all turned out to be the right directions, but we had to take them together in order to find our way. It was the scenic route, and we managed to see the Christchurch Cathedral and the Church of Ireland on our way. However, when we finally got there, Talaira and I remembered that the Guinness Factory was included as part of our 6 day tour package and we really didn't want to spend €13 to do something we'd be doing anyway. The boys decided to do it the next day after we left and to find other adventures.

 

It rained on us as we made our way instead to the Jameson Distillery. We got there just in time for the start of the drinking day (12:30pm) and had some hot chocolate with Irish whiskey to start. Mmmm. We chatted with the boys about all sorts of things and they showed us a video trailer for their previous travelling adventures together:

Later, I had some sort of whiskey drink with milk and honeycomb. It was so delicious. Honeycomb is something I associate with Australia since we tried honeycomb gelato this summer (strange, I know), and so it was funny that I was hanging out with Australians while I drank this delicious honeycomb-flavoured drink... or maybe you had to be there. (I'm thinking maybe I should go back and write about my Australian adventures on of these days!)

Eventually, some old ladies joined us, hit on Saul and Dave, and we high-tailed it out of there (even though they were sweet haha). It was a craic! This word is pronounced "crack", an Irish word for 'jolly good time'.

On our way back to the hostel, it rained again and there was a double rainbow!! I was half-tempted to chase it to the end to see if I could find a leprechaun. Just kidding. But really. When we got back to the hostel, our friends disappeared and left us to find dinner on our own. We had some luck anyway and found a delicious Lebanese restaurant and spent a few hours there catching up. Afterward, we explored the city a bit more and timed out the distance to the get to the pick-up location for our tour the next day. When we got back to the hostel, we made some new friends, Jon Floyd (Australian) and Hayley (Canadian from Toronto). Did you read or see Hunger Games? You know how the people of the Capitol had an "affected" accent... Hayley had one of those. She was definitely from the right side of the tracks in Toronto.

Saul and Dave walked in and invited everyone to come with to the Temple Bar to watch them achieve some of their lifelong dreams related to Ireland. At Temple Bar, they asked permission from the live band to sing a song. They sang that well-known classic Irish Scottish song "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" made famous by The Proclaimers. They were not bad at all, but the people in the bar seemed a bit confused. They joined in for the "da da da da"'s though, so it was all good.

We migrated to a bar called Sweeney's which also had live music, but it was Blues music (I totally love the Blues, lately, so this was awesome). Dave decided to challenge an Irish man to drink a pint of Guinness and to arm wrestle him. He found a lovely man named Brian who agreed to it and I was so grateful when Brian won (sorry, Dave!) for fear of what would have happened if he hadn't....

One of Brian's friend took a liking to Talaira and told her she was "feckin' gorgeous" (more on the word "feck" later). Later he gave me a death-grip hug and said to me, simply, "Yes?". My answer was "No". And there was no more to it. We finished off the night with some excellent dancing and carrying on. It was a great craic! We headed back to the hostel, wished them happy travels and went to bed.

A Canadian Day in Lyon

It all started at 2pm, which everyone knows is 8am Canada Time (EST) when I donned my Canada sweater (it is a beaut!). I packed up my 2013 Canadian Olympic mittens and headed off with my Canadian pal, Danielle, in search of poutine.

Danielle had discovered a Québécois restaurant chain called Frites Alors! that serves POUTINE! We were overjoyed. Upon arrival at the restaurant, however, there was a handwritten sign on the door saying that they were closed until an undetermined time and that they we would be open again later that night, despite the sign on the door saying that they are open all day. This was a tough blow.

We went to our friend Jeremy's house and ordered pizza as a substitute dinner. He handed us Heineken and I was extremely concerned about this combination, but everything worked out for the best. After denying us poutine, the Universe couldn't really have done anything to upset us. We made to substitute bacon for ham on the pizza and it was almost a "Canadian" pizza and it was delicious.

We entertained ourselves by listening to Canadian country and watching videos like this one:

Genius, eh?

We were headed to a hockey game between the Lyonnais and a team from Annecy, so to get in the true hockey spirit, we looked up photos of Don Cherry's ridiculous suits and listened to the Hockey Night in Canada theme song as well as Stompin' Tom Connors:

I have to say this was the worst professional hockey I have ever seen. I was thrilled to be in an arena and to watch some hockey, but I felt as though I was watching Junior A... or maybe not even that good. I LOVE hockey (I used capital letters so you could tell, eh!) and it was just really bad.

There was a penalty shot in the first four minutes of the game because one of the players widely missed the net and tripped so that he crashed into the boards. He got a penalty shot for that. It was outrageous. I made a game out of it by yelling at the ref for a penalty shot everytime someone fell over (especially if they were nowhere near the net)... so I probably called for about thirty penalty shots. The players were falling down all over the place. And not in the good, they got hit into the boards way.

At half time, we were incredibly amused. They have doughnut sellers walking around the arena with just doughnuts. So I had one of those. Then the "cheerleaders" came out and danced for us. And then some children in sumo wrestling suits chased pucks around.

Danielle wittily said that this is how they play hockey in France. The zamboni was the best part of the game. Good old Canadian inventions! However, the zamboni driver missed sections of the ice so there were strips of ice that hadn't been cleaned up. I was embarassed to learn that there were four Canadian players on the Lyon team, and the captain of the other team was also Canadian. Upon reflection, I'm am no longer that embarassed. These are the players that weren't able to make it into any of the Canadian provincial leagues, the NHL, and none of the major hockey leagues in Europe. There were five of our worst professional players playing for France.... and they were some of the best players on these teams.

By the end of the game, it had become fun just to shout random things and to try to explain to the first-time hockey goers the way things should have played out. The group of French people behind us were enraptured and kept asking "what did she say?!" because I had lapsed into good ol' Canadian English (Canglish, as I sometimes call it). In the end, we left in high spirits because Lyon won (but we all acknowledged that the prettiest play of the night had come from the other team).

On our way out, I had to use the washroom (or toilet, as they call it in British English). On my way downstairs I saw a guy wearing a Sidney Crosby jersey and so I felt compelled to tell him that he was awesome, except I didn't know if he spoke French or English and I didn't know how to say "Nice jersey" in French. I sort of shouted it at him and then ran away. Once in the washroom, I realized that there was no toilet paper. This summer, I did a forty-minute bush-walking lesson with an Australian man in Byron Bay who taught us that if you have to use soft tree-bark or newspaper as toilet paper, you should crumple it. I put this to good use and used my hockey ticket...

We decided that the night shouldn't end there and did a pilgrimmage to a British bar... honouring our British heritage and that sort of thing. We learned important things such as British English is sometimes really dumb. They say things like "dressing gown" rather than "house coat" and half of their place names have superfluous letters. For exemple, Gloucester is pronounced Gloster; Worcestershire is pronounced Worstersha; and Leicester is pronounced Lester. If you didn't want to pronounce the "ces" in the middle, why did you put it in there? I feel for the children in those towns trying to learn to spell their addresses. Nonsensical. I was feeling so patriotic even my cheeks went red.

We carried on at an Irish pub where we sort of made our own dance floor (I am my mother's daughter). We were so happy when they started playing country music and Danielle taught me the two step. It was just excellent. I used all my good moves.

Before bed, we stopped at a convenience store and picked up some sliced kiri cheese (which will never rival Kraft Singles) and made grilled cheese. This was the best decision. There was even ketchup. Mmmmmm.

In the morning (technically still within a EST day), THERE WAS SNOW! And we went for brunch at Frites Alors! and had (faux)poutine!!!

They weren't real cheese curds, but it was delicious and deadly. While we were eating, we were approached by a friendly young woman who asked, in English, if we happened to be Canadian. I was still wearing my Canada sweater, but she said she could tell based on our Olympic Canada mittens. She was from Toronto. I kind of felt like Robin in this episode of How I Met Your Mother. Only I didn't feel tempted to push anyone (just incase they turned out to be French, you know?).

As a fabulous conclusion to the most Canadian day in Lyon, just as our server was approaching us to take our plates, Danielle exclaimed, "It takes like BACON!" and we all burst out laughing. I'm glad that some days I get to feel really Canadian, here in Lyon, especially since... surprise! surprise!... I have extended my exchange until April!